As part of Communities Building Youth Future’s commitment to youth engagement, we aim to build meaningful opportunities to engage young people - we believe that we can learn a lot from youth. We believe that youth perspectives, beliefs, and visions for the future should shape our work and we want to share these with changemakers across the country. The following blog showcases the voice of youth with lived/living experience.
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Tamarack defines community innovation as “Change, for good, with and within a community. In other words, Community Innovation is a community-championed change with benefits that are meaningful to the community. What makes Community Innovation different from other forms of Social Innovation is the focus on community – placing community members as both the champions and as the arbiters of change.”
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Something we don’t discuss much is the importance of the ‘do no harm’ principle when engaging the community (especially relevant now with the COVID-19 pandemic). Anthony Boxshall and I identified ‘people feeling unsafe’ as one of the key challenges to co-design. We rely on bringing together a diverse community of interest, but what do you do if alternative views are not welcome, or indeed people fear the consequences of participating and expressing unpopular or inconvenient points of view? This can be even more challenging than just ensuring physical distancing at this time
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On September 8th, 2020, Statistics Canada updated the Dimensions of Poverty Hub, Canada’s official poverty dashboard for Opportunity for All, Canada’s first poverty reduction strategy.
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In September, Vibrant Hawai'i (a Cities Reducing Poverty member) launched its island-wide Resilience Hubs Initiative as a community response to the pandemic. With the basic principle to put power and resources into the hands of the community, these hubs are enhanced community spaces designed and managed by local residents.
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It’s not yet Winter in Canada, and yet many of us feel frozen. We are six months into the COVID pandemic and things have shifted. We have moved into remote work environments, shifted how we do business, are spending a great deal of time in zoom meetings. But now, as the pandemic moves into its second wave, and the future looks blurry, if not completely opaque - we are frozen.
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