Introduction – Ending Working Poverty
If you work for a living, you shouldn’t live in poverty. Yet, working poverty is a reality for far too many people across Canada. Secure, full-time jobs are increasingly out of reach, and even full-time, full-year jobs don’t necessarily pay enough to cover the basics anymore. In 2018, the Broadbent Institute reported that nearly half of those living in poverty in Canada were working and that of this group, a third held full-time full-year jobs. This number has likely risen due to rapid cost of living increases outpacing wages. This has real, lasting impacts: people working multiple jobs without paid sick days face burnout; children miss out on the good food and support they need to do well in school; families are left needing to choose big box stores with low prices over supporting local businesses; and communities lose the vital contributions of people who no longer have time or capacity to volunteer or participate. Working poverty strains our communities, our economy, and our collective well-being. To address this trend, several communities are taking action to end working poverty locally. This roadmap and toolkit is meant to help other communities address this challenge as well.
How to use this roadmap & toolkit
This roadmap & toolkit is for anyone working to reduce or end working poverty in their community – whether you're a resident group, nonprofit, faith organization, local government, funder, academic, or a collaborative mix of all the above. It offers a snapshot of current trends in working poverty across medium and small/rural communities in Canada, along with a step-by-step guide for building a localized plan. You'll find practical tools, examples, and policy recommendations to help communities align efforts with provincial/territorial and federal governments. This roadmap and suggested tools were assembled based on our experience with several different collaboratives. However, the steps do not often happen in a perfectly linear way, and will likely need be adapted for each community’s context. Whether you're just starting out or refining an existing strategy, this guide is meant to support your local efforts while connecting them to bigger picture changes to systems and policies.
Background: What We Know About Working Poverty and How to End It
Over three years, the Tamarack Institute undertook a research and action project that supported five medium and small/rural communities across Canada to create and implement ending working poverty strategies. The participating communities were:
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Winnipeg, Manitoba – is a large prairie city of 834,000 people, known for its cultural diversity, deep Indigenous roots, and economy driven by manufacturing, transportation, and public sector employment. It is the economic powerhouse of Manitoba and a major transit artery for rail, trucking and air.
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Saskatoon, Saskatchewan – is a mid-sized prairie city of 370,000 people, recognized for its vibrant Indigenous cultures and a diverse economy rooted in agriculture, mining, and a growing tech sector. Since 2018, it has been one of Canada’s fastest growing cities, with immigration being a primary factor.
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Chatham-Kent, Ontario - is a larger rural community in southwestern Ontario with about 100,000 people. Known for its agricultural roots, close-knit communities, and a local economy centred on farming, manufacturing, and small business, this community produces over half of all of Ontario’s tomatoes.
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Trail, British Columbia - is a small, rural industrial community in southeastern B.C. with 7,700 people, known for its deep ties to mining and metallurgy, home to one of the world’s largest lead-zinc smelters. Its local economy is shaped by manufacturing, the natural resource sector, and cross-border metal and timber trade.
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Drumheller, Alberta - is a small rural town in southern Alberta with 7,900 people, known for its badlands landscape, strong tourism tied to rich dinosaur bonebeds, and a local economy rooted in agriculture, energy, and natural resource development.
Most research on working poverty in Canada focuses on big cities such as Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal, leading to strategies that don’t always translate to smaller or rural communities. Our data gathering and analysis of medium, small, and rural areas show differences in both labour market and poverty trends:
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Access to infrastructure and services: Urban areas often have essential amenities (e.g., child care, transit, libraries), but barriers like affordability, cultural fit, or availability remain. In rural communities, these amenities are often sparse or entirely absent, and solutions must reflect that gap.
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Gender dynamics: While working poverty often affects men more in cities, it's women who are most affected in smaller communities, where good jobs are concentrated in male-dominated sectors like mining and manufacturing.
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Race and language: In urban areas, racialized status and limited English/French fluency are strongly tied to poverty. In rural settings, this link weakens — though Indigenous identity features more prominently in some Prairie communities.
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Wages and job quality: Some provinces (e.g., Ontario, Alberta, B.C.) have minimum wages that can keep full-time, full-year workers above the poverty line. Others do not. Across all regions, precarious work—part-time, seasonal, without benefits—continues to push people below the poverty line despite employment.
What follows is a practical roadmap and toolkit, shaped by these insights, to help other communities develop their own working poverty reduction plans.
Creating a Working Poverty Strategy
Step 1: Create a Core Team
Start with a small, committed group of people who are ready to work hands-on and can open doors to a broader range of partners. This core team should be diverse enough to connect with different parts of the community, yet close enough to collaborate easily from the start. Their role is typically to co-create agendas, handle logistics, document the process, and identify who else to bring in. Having a shared history helps at this stage, but if it’s not there yet, building trust is the first priority. The team’s goal is to shape a half-baked vision: clear enough to ground the work and attract others, but open enough for the wider community to co-create the direction, strategy, and actions. The members of this group are likely also helping implement different actions as the strategy progresses.
Tools and resources for this step:
Tool | How to Develop a Common Agenda for Collective Impact
A step-by-step process to help your group assess whether a collective impact approach is the right fit for addressing working poverty in your community.
Sample | Core Team Common Agenda
A sample half-baked vision created by collaborative partners in Trail, BC to engage the community in creating an ending working poverty plan.
Step 2: Create A Data Profile
A data profile helps uncover who is experiencing working poverty and why in your local context. It gives communities a clearer picture of who’s affected, how deep that poverty is, and what local assets might support solutions. This foundation should guide decisions about which actions will have the most impact.
While it’s difficult to predict which data will be most useful until you start looking at data sets, the following data sets proved especially revealing for this group:
Gender identity
Racialized and Indigenous identity
Immigration status
Language barriers (no known French or English)
Age
Local labour market trends – (esp. sector trends, wages, and minimum wage rates)
Amenity density
Poverty rates (e.g., below living wage, LIM, MBM, and 75% of MBM), including comparing against employment rates and disaggregated
Benchmarking against other communities of similar size can also help make sense of your own data by providing useful points of comparison
Key data challenges to anticipate:
Data availability: Some small or remote communities may not be captured in national datasets. Consider supplementing with local surveys or post-secondary research partnerships.
Cost: Gathering quality data can be expensive - whether through custom data purchases, analyst support, community engagement, or staff time.
Choosing the right data: It’s hard to predict which indicators will be meaningful until after you dive in, which adds risk to investing in data.
Analysis and sensemaking: Raw data must be interpreted. This requires both technical skills (to visualize trends) and community knowledge (to explain them). Bring together analysts and community members to guide this step. People living in the community can speak to why these results may look the way they do, highlight surprises, and suggest next steps.
Data sovereignty: Some institutions and Indigenous communities may restrict access to sensitive data. Respect protocols and build trust when working with this information. Refer to OCAP (Ownership, Control, Access, Possession) principles and engage directly with First Nations in your community to ensure community-specific data protocols are followed.
Tools and resources for this step:
Sample Data Profiles
A compilation of data profiles from Ending Working Poverty members provides hints as to what disaggregated population-level data may be revealing about working poverty in different communities across Canada.
The Community Data Program
A non-profit organization that provides access to custom Statistics Canada data tables and supports the data analysis and sensemaking process.
Open Policy Ontario
A consultancy that can provide access to custom Statistics Canada data tables and support the data analysis and sensemaking process.
Research Impact Canada
Matches community-based organizations with a post-secondary research partner in this pan-Canadian network of universities, colleges and learning institutes that could support local research on working poverty.
Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives
A social policy think tank with offices in Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Ontario and Saskatchewan, which leads community-based data collection and makes policy recommendations - may be a source of data and analysis related to policy.
Maytree Foundation
A charitable foundation focused on systemic solutions to poverty through a human rights approach, Maytree produced reports on housing, income security and social assistance, including an annual report on social assistance throughout Canada.
Also consider in-kind human resources, such as: local government Measurement and Evaluation (M&E) staff, local Community Foundations’ Vital Signs staff, as well as other people in your community who have a data and evaluation skillset and may already be gathering related data.
Step 3: Expand into a Leadership Table
The Leadership Table is a broader version of the Core Team, designed to bring together people from across sectors who hold different types of power. This includes both formal decision-makers who can commit resources or influence systems, and community members with lived/living experience of working poverty who are essential to shaping real, grounded solutions. Together, they form a "meet-in-the-middle" structure that balances institutional influence with grassroots insight.
While not everyone at the table will handle day-to-day organizing, the group should collectively take on key roles, such as:
Championing the collaborative’s vision, amplifying the message, and bringing others to the table
Interpreting data, trends, stories, and evaluation findings
Making shared decisions and providing direction to any staff supporting the initiative
Asking for a one to two-year commitment from Leadership Table members can help ensure continuity and shared accountability as the work progresses.
Tools and resources for this step:
Sample point-in-time Leadership Table lists offer ideas as to whom you might invite to your community’s Ending Working Poverty Leadership Table.
TOOL | Top 100 Partners Exercise
An exercise to help identify a diverse mix of stakeholders. Scale down from 100 people to 8-12 people to build a balanced and effective Leadership Table.
TOOL | Community Reference System
Alternatively, identify trusted community members for the Leadership Table by using a referral process that highlights individuals repeatedly recommended by their peers.
Step 4: Build Your Plan (a.k.a. “Activities”, “Theory of Change”, or “Strategy”)
An Ending Working Poverty Plan is a written record of your community’s vision and partner agreements to work in an aligned way. It should lay out what was learned by hearing from the broader community, what needs to change, who will do what, and how the community will know if progress is being made. This plan is a starting point, not a final product, and should evolve as new partners join, new information emerges, and contexts shift.
The plan should be co-created by a wide range of stakeholders, invited and engaged by the Leadership Table. It should reflect current realities, collective hopes, and the unique contributions each person or group can bring. Broad engagement helps ensure the strategy isn’t owned by a few but is a record of shared commitments being made to each other.
Using a Theory of Change
Because poverty is complex, a Theory of Change helps map out the strategy’s logic and narrow down priorities. If we implement “A”, we anticipate seeing change “B”, which is a pillar necessary to achieve our long-term goal of “C”. This clarity supports better decision-making and the collaborative selection of evaluation indicators. While each community’s Theory of Change will differ, all four communities featured in this Guide grounded theirs in the Money In–Money Out Framework, created by the Saskatoon Poverty Reduction Partnership.
This framework starts with the premise that if core assets are in place (infrastructure, skills, health, social connections), then working poverty is fundamentally a math problem:
Income (employment, gig work, benefits, credits, gifts)
MINUS
Fixed and flexible expenses (tax deductions, rent, food, utilities, etc.)
EQUALS
Whether a household is above or below the poverty line.
Tools and resources for this step:
Sample Money In – Money Out Theories of Change
Sample community strategies, mapped against the Money In – Money Out Framework, offer insight on the variety of ways in which local communities can innovate and nudge policy and systems change to reduce working poverty.
TOOL | Community Engagement Canvas Planning Tool
Plan who, why, how, and when to engage, and any other considerations for hosting successful community engagements.
Plot a trajectory for your community to co-generate new ideas to old problems.
Devise a set of questions for the community to productively discuss in setting a shared vision and actions.
Brainstorm many ideas in a short amount of time to uncover new solutions to entrenched issues.
Prioritize ideas/solutions collaboratively.
Test your line-of-sight, working backwards from the community’s shared vision to proposed solutions, and narrow-down or adjust the proposed actions.
Step 5: Establish a Baseline
With a community plan in place, establishing a baseline is a good early step in fostering long-term sustainability and measuring progress. A baseline provides a point-in-time snapshot of the conditions the community aims to change, enabling future evaluation of outcomes. It allows collaborators to track what has changed and to what extent, supporting evidence-based decision-making and accountability.
What will we measure?
Indicators selected for baseline measurement should align with the goals outlined in the community’s Ending Working Poverty Plan. Ideally, they reflect three core considerations:
How will we (the community) know we’ve achieved our goal or have seen progress?
What information is used or needed by decision-makers to make new decisions?
What data can we (the community) feasibly collect, given our capacity and resources?
Consider indicators across four categories of action and “impact”:
Building community capacity and leadership
Raising awareness and people’s commitment to address working poverty
Implementing local innovations with direct benefits to people or the community
Advancing systems and policy change to influence broader conditions
Tools and Resources for this step (i.e., How will we measure, and who will do it?)
See examples from Ending Working Poverty communities that demonstrate reporting on collaborative short-term outcomes, in lieu of programmatic outputs.
Plan and share the work of collecting data by using this tracking sheet; decide who will collect data and record what data sources or collection methods will be used against each indicator.
Identify short, medium and long-term indicators your community cares about, tailored to your working poverty plan.
Step 6: Organizing and remaining sustainable
Now that the community knows what needs to be done, it’s time to confirm who will do what and how to resource the plan. Resources can be financial or in-kind, as both are critical.
Collaboratives are typically more sustainable when the administration is lean and when they are able to adapt quickly to changing circumstances. Having collaborative agreements with partners (e.g., Terms of Reference and/or Memoranda of Understanding) can support official agreements to collaborate without the burden of administering a formal organization.
A common and valuable in-kind contribution is when one or more partner organizations agree to hold and manage funds on behalf of the group. This includes handling administrative tasks and distributing funds according to decisions made by the partnership. The same goes for shared staff, such as a backbone coordinator. These roles should be accountable to the partnership as a whole, even if a single organization takes on the human resources responsibilities.
Shared leadership and shared resourcing are what keep the work moving and the collaborative strong.
Once the community has committed human resources and a plan, identify what financial resources are needed to fill in the gaps. Diversifying funding, for example: 30% self-generated revenue, 30% philanthropic grants, 30% government grants, and 10% donations, is a useful goal post to assess how sustainable your collaborative’s finances are, or how vulnerable they might be to sudden changes.
Tools and resources for this step:
Divide roles and responsibilities amongst partners in a way that encourages shared leadership and accountability to the collective.
How to use the DARCI framework in project management
Surface the common types of decisions your collaborative may make and agree on who should be informed, consulted, responsible or accountable for the task, and who has final decision-making authority.
10: A Guide for Building a Sustainable and Resilient Collaboration
Consider all four factors that can help your collaborative be sustainable: people, resources, processes, and impact - from the outset of the initiative.
Step 7: Implementation
There are many ways to take the leap from visioning and planning into implementing the plan. Some collaboratives host a kick-off event to launch the plan with everyone who was involved in informing it. Some have working groups create their detailed workplans and then slide into the work. Whatever is best for your community, once people know who is doing what, it’s important at some point to say… “GO!”
