Grad brings mindfulness to BC Children’s Hospital
How do you measure compassion and connection? As the director of health promotion and projects at BC Children’s Hospital, Char Black uses evaluation to find answers.
Before joining SFU Continuing Studies’ program, she had very little experience with evaluation. She recalls taking one related course while completing her master of public health: “That was like reading a giant textbook. The learning felt very black or white, very cold.”
Despite this, her work requires evaluation. “Often, health promotion is unseen work,” she says. “If fewer people go to the hospital, it means we’re doing a good job, but no one knows we’re doing that. I find evaluation is so important because we can show outcomes and impact.”
After hearing about the Continuing Studies program from a friend, Char enrolled in one course that seemed practical. To her surprise, she liked it so much that she immediately tackled another one.
After that, she says, “I decided I couldn’t stop!” Even with two young kids and a full-time job, she felt the program’s flexibility was a perfect fit. Char enrolled in the Evaluation for Social Change and Transformational Learning Certificate program in 2021.
“I thought it would support me to become a stronger leader—one that would challenge the status quo and ask the hard questions,” she says. “This program made sense to me and fit within the model of my work in a way other evaluation approaches never did.”
Char also serves as co-director of the BC Children’s Hospital Centre for Mindfulness, which she helped found in 2019. The Centre’s vision is to create a culture of compassion for everyone at the hospital, including children, caregivers and health professionals. For example, the Centre released a mindfulness app called Breathr and cultivated mindful spaces around the hospital.
Despite the Centre’s progress, Char and her team have faced challenges demonstrating its impact: “What are your outcomes? How do you measure feelings of community?”
Before the certificate program, she assumed evaluation would oversimplify—that it couldn’t capture culture change within a hospital. She was surprised to find that evaluation could help make sense of complexity rather than flatten it.
For her capstone project in 2025, Char wanted to go beyond reporting clicks, downloads or enrollments. She set out to evaluate connection and community. To capture both individual and collective impact, she interviewed members of the Centre’s Mindfulness Council. Simply conducting these interviews proved powerful.
“I built stronger connections with the council members,” she says. “And the interviews brought both self-awareness and motivation to those members. The interviews were a way to reveal and honour the past, present and future.”
Char used the findings from these interviews to update the Centre’s Evaluation and Monitoring Framework, giving her team a clearer way to measure progress toward a more mindful hospital.
The program’s impact went beyond her capstone project. After each course, Char shared what she learned with her team (“an infusion of new knowledge,” she laughs). She also appreciated the instructors’ emphasis on Indigenous ways of knowing.
One of her biggest takeaways is that evaluation can benefit anyone in any workplace. Her courses brought together learners from a wide range of industries.
“The program was about much more than evaluation,” she says. “I learned about myself, leadership and how to view the world as a rainbow of colours rather than black and white.”
By Colleen Bryon