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Cities Reducing Poverty: Bringing All Voices to the Table

Poverty is a complex issue. It’s an issue that cannot be approached in isolation or solved by a select few – it effects everyone, is experienced by people in different ways, and involves a significant number of interrelated elements and stakeholders. We know this. We know that when working on complex problems, such as poverty, finding comprehensive solutions requires communities to come together to leverage and better understand their assets – knowledge, experience, skills and resources – to truly see and act on the issue from all angles.

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It is a Total Team Effort

Vibrant Communities was pleased to recently present a webinar with Edmonton Mayor Don Iveson, host of our 2016 Cities Reducing Poverty summit, and Hamilton Mayor Fred Eisenberger, who will host this year’s summit from April 4-6. Their conversation was facilitated by Brock Carlton, President of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. If you didn’t get the chance to join that webinar, we’ve pulled out some excerpts from the conversation for you below. Time annotations are included so you can click through the webinar recording to hear more (full recording available below).

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More about the Game-Changer Approach to Poverty Reduction

As some of you know, I have written about and I am continuing to work on what I call a Game-Changer Approach to Poverty Reduction Strategy and Evaluation. You can read my initial paper HERE. And a recording of a webinar I did with Mark Cabaj is HERE.

I have been asked about the difference between Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) and this game-changer approach I am working on with my colleagues at Vibrant Communities Canada. The game-changers we have identified are: Housing, Transportation, Education, Health, Income and Jobs, Food Security, Financial Empowerment, and Early Childhood Development. All of these are aligned with SDoH, but there is, I suggest, more to what we are exploring than social determinants of health.

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Reducing Poverty: When Business is Engaged

This year marks the 20^th anniversary of the Business Community Anti-Poverty Initiative (BCAPI), a progressive movement of the Saint John business community to help the city end generational poverty.

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How Housing Policy Benefits from a Socioeconomic Perspective

On November 17, I delivered a webinar presentation for the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association titled “The Missing Piece: How Housing Policy Benefits from a Socioeconomic Perspective.”

The presentation focused on both macroeconomic factors and factors pertaining to Canada’s social welfare system in general; I argued that leaders in Canada’s non-profit housing sector should be mindful of such issues (and not just focus on housing and homelessness).  My PowerPoint presentation can be downloaded here; the entire webinar can be viewed here.

Here are 10 things to know:

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10 Things to Know About Canadian Attempts to Count Homelessness

This blog was originally posted on the Calgary Homelessness Foundation website on November 30, 2016 by Nick Falvo and is re-published here with permission.

Alberta’s seven largest municipalities recently released early results of a provincially-coordinated effort to enumerate and survey persons experiencing homelessness. Most of these communities reported reductions in homelessness, and reported a 19% reduction in province-wide homelessness compared to the first provincially-coordinated count conducted in 2014.

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