The Saskatoon Poverty Reduction Partnership (SPRP) recognizes poverty as a complex interconnected issue.
While all ideas from SPRP’s 12 Bold Ideas to Eliminate Poverty plan remained relevant throughout the pandemic, critical gaps emerged, particularly around the following areas:
Housing (e.g., systems discharging people into homelessness)
Public washrooms (e.g., vulnerable community members went more than 100 days mid-pandemic without access)
The digital divide (e.g., access to technology including devices and internet)
Provincial investment (e.g., the need for the provincial government to invest in the local-level response).
SPRP updated their plan to explicitly name these priorities.
The Partnership decided that they needed to be even more bold about the way they talked about the interface between poverty and the legacies and realities of racism.
Creating space to think outside the box, they collaborated with Saskatoon’s Anti-Racism Network (ARN), a small group of folks incredibly committed to embedding anti-racist and anti-oppressive education into systems.
Together, SPRP and the ARN explored how racism was rooted in each of the Bold Ideas. They recognized that, while anti-poverty efforts usually consider programmatic solutions, what is really needed is a fundamental shift in policy.
Based on a firm belief that poverty is created because of a lack of, or inappropriate, policies that are designed purposely to exclude people, they shifted their thinking from filling gaps to recognizing that service gaps shouldn’t exist in the first place. They also explored how new policies could be rooted in equity and inclusion.
Questions that SPRP and ARN reflected on included the following:
How do we make brave and bold decisions to stop doing the same things over and over?
How do we disrupt and dismantle systems?
How can policies be rewritten to ensure the implementation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Calls to Action – specifically Call to Action #47 (see call-out box)?
How can colonial policymakers design and implement effective policies when the realities and legacies of failed Treaties, The Indian Act and all associated structures exist?
Recognizing that equity- and inclusion-building requires all partners to understand privilege, power and constructs of race, SPRP will continue to shift mindsets by implementing mandatory training for all partners, and by gaining commitment from each partner that they will train their own agencies (including staff, decision makers, funders, boards of directors, and volunteers).
Next steps include adding youth coordinators and an Elder’s advisory committee, enhancing training modules and creating policy review toolkits and a targeted media campaign.
SPRP and APN plan to conduct a full review of the 12 Bold Ideas and associated policy recommendations from an anti-racist and equity-building lens. SPRP will then take the following actions:
Reframe all of its work with anti-racist and anti-oppressive language
See other posts in our blog post series on Centering Anti-Racist and Equity Frameworks in Anti-Poverty Work
Read more in the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion section of the Communities Ending Poverty Communities of Practice Coaching Library.