Vibrant Communities - Cities Reducing Poverty (VC – CRP) is a national collective impact movement aimed at reducing poverty through the place-based efforts of multi-sector roundtables and the alignment of strategies at the municipal, provincial, territorial, and federal levels.
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In May 2017, Living SJ and the Province of New Brunswick announced a funding agreement of $10M over five years for Greater Saint John to test and implement innovative ways to end generational poverty. Saint John has a child poverty rate of 30%, the 2nd highest amongst urban centres in Canada. With a Collective Impact initiative involving more than 100 local partners, their goal is to identify successful strategies that can be scaled and replicated in an effort to put an end to children being born into poverty across New Brunswick.
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When I joined Tamarack in March, my first major project was to write a State of Cities Reducing Poverty paper. I don’t think I fully anticipated how challenging this would be. I thought I had a pretty good understanding of the Vibrant Communities – Cities Reducing Poverty (VC – CRP) network, having been a member for several years while I was director of the Windsor-Essex poverty reduction strategy. Well, it turns out there’s quite a big difference between having a general understanding of the network and trying to capture its overall impact on poverty reduction in Canada.
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Welcome to the July edition of the Cities Reducing Poverty Policy Digest, which aims to provide you with timely poverty-related policy updates and resources from across Canada.
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As a point of honesty, I admit that I was skeptical of the Smart Cities concept when I first learned of it. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the development of Smart Cities as an idea, and I worried that the concept was designed to sell products rather than make our communities better with the ultimate outcome being further division and isolation for citizens. Smart Cities and the technologies attached to them, at their best, have the capacity to improve citizen engagement, increase our capacity to collect data to inform decisions, reduce inequality, and lighten the impact of urban centres on the environment. Alternatively, poorly planned and implemented projects can further the digital divide and decrease the connection between citizens and their government.
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If you asked LeBron James, Hayley Wickenheiser or Serena Williams what helped them to develop mastery in their chosen sports they would undoubtedly give some of the credit to their coaches – the trusted mentors and inspiring role models who empowered them to achieve more than they could on their own.
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