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Living Wage In a Livable Economy

In Edmonton, approximately 140,000 workers are identified as low income earners (earning below $16.31 per hour), according to the Edmonton Social Planning Council. Four in five of these workers are over the age of 20 and 60% are women.

The Canadian Payroll Association’s annual survey of Canadian workers identifies that in any given year 45% to 50% of workers across our nation are living pay check to pay check and would face significant hardships, including the loss of their residence, if they went without their pay check for one or two pay periods.

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How Municipalities Can Support Affordable Housing Solutions

Housing affordability has become a critical issue across Canada, in cities such as New Westminster which is located in Metro Vancouver. New Westminster is home to 11,000 low-income individuals some of which are children and seniors. The high housing costs in the City relative to income and low vacancy rates are some of the reasons why many residents struggle to secure and maintain housing.

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Letting Communities Guide Change

What does it truly mean to be guided by community?

Last month I was lucky enough to speak with Diane Roussin, Director of the Winnipeg Boldness project. Diane shared stories of the work that the Winnipeg Boldness project is doing in the Point Douglas neighbourhood: how they gathered and shared community wisdom, how they have been working with residents and leaders to effect the changes that they feel are important, and how people across Point Douglas have guided their efforts at every step. There was so much to learn in what Diane shared, but two key points stood out to me for anyone interested in working with communities for change

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Scaling for Systems Change: Rethinking Planning and Evaluation

One of the most common pathways to systems change is to ‘scale’ a successful small-scale innovation.

The theory is simple. Social innovators develop and test a new model or practice that they think can make a positive difference (e.g., improve grade 3 reading rates, protect wetlands, reduce the racism some people encounter when trying to secure good housing). This is usually (but not always) organized as a pilot project. If the experiment is successful, they then work with funders and early adopters to expand the practice broadly enough that it can ‘change’ a system and generate widespread impact.

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Getting to Impact the Observational Way

A few years ago, I read a book called "Trying Hard is Not Good Enough" by Mark Friedman. The book talks about how initiatives can be complicated and complex, and therefore this makes it hard to reduce evaluating these initiatives to a set of numbers and equations. Mark suggests that we need to talk about the story behind the data. Look at the stories, anecdotes and accomplishments that explain what the data is saying.   

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Fitting Our Framework to our Place

This year both the Tamarack Institute and New Zealand-based Inspiring Communities celebrate milestones (15 and 10 years respectively) in our efforts to empower, grow, support, connect and learn from diverse community-led change efforts. Following on from our co-authored Reflections on Community Change paper released last month, the Inspiring Communities team shares more on the process involved in crafting community-led development principles for a New Zealand context.  

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