Municipal elections will take place across Ontario on October 22, 2018.
While voter awareness and education will be a key activity for many Cities Reducing Poverty partners this fall, the Grey Bruce Poverty Task Force is changing the focus and asking - how well are the 300+ candidates aware of and educated about local poverty issues?
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I’m coming around to the idea that you can, in fact, respond to a question with another question, and still find valuable answers buried within.
Hear me out.
At work, our Founder and Director of Vibrant Communities, Paul Born, encourages me to continually ask questions, even if it means creating version eight or nine of a document I’m working on! Sure, this often feels like an endless cascade of twisting, turning questions, but this technique gets at the heart of the messy, imperfect work of poverty reduction. It reminds us that there are multiple ‘right’ answers to the complex questions we’re tackling.
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Two words we most often hear together in the negative, “people are dying in our community from opioids” or we have a “community opioid crisis.”
But today, in the Globe and Mail, I, for the first time, heard the call that to fight the opioid crisis we need not a war on drugs but a reconstruction of community. In her column on September 24, Margaret Wente shares, “the writer Andrew Sullivan talks about pain and trauma too.
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At last week’s Cities Innovating to Reduce Poverty summit in Mississauga, I had the opportunity to learn from the City of Toronto's Lived Experience Advisory Group (LEAG). These group members shared some of their fantastic work in advancing the Toronto Poverty Reduction Strategy through advocacy, education, awareness, monitoring and evaluation of the Strategy, and it was a great reminder of the importance of making sure that those with lived experience can drive the change that they want to see.
Bridging the Community Engagement and Collective Impact divide created an unlikely partnership between Norman Walzer, Senior Research Scholar in the Center for Governmental Studies at Northern Illinois University and myself. We met at a 2011 Community Development Society conference which began a collaborative effort that has moved in many directions.
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The video System Thinking and Evaluation, by Kylie Hutchinson, Chris Lovato and Bev Parsons is an excellent introduction to evaluating systems change. It describes how an evaluation of a hypothetical initiative to improve nutrition in a community must both ‘zoom in’ to explore the programmatic effects of the effort (e.g., improved health of program participants) and ‘zoom out’ to assess influence and change on factors in the larger systems that affect their individual health (e.g., urban design which affects levels of physical activity, the quality of industrial food production, the culture of portion sizes). The video also reminds us that deep and durable progress on complex issues depends on our ability to reshape the deeper systems that contribute to those problems in the first place.
