Saint John, New Brunswick is one of Vibrant Communities’ 13 original trail builder communities. They were among the first members to undertake the Vibrant Communities framework, establish a multi-sectoral collaboration, and work towards a set goal of poverty reduction.
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Over the past 15 years Canadian consumer debt has risen dramatically. Since 2000, the percentage of Canadian debt in relationship to disposable income has risen from 110% of income to about 165%. The change in debt to income ratio represents a 12 year increase of 50%.
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This article originally appeared in the Canadian Mennonite Journal on June 6, 2016, by Paul Born
I was a young child when my family and I came to Canada as Mennonite refugees from the Ukraine. We were displaced people seeking to create a new life for ourselves.
My personal experience of poverty has shaped my life’s work. It’s why I founded Tamarack, a non-profit organization that helps people collaborate to tackle the toughest social problems, including poverty. It’s why my long-held, deep hope is to end poverty in Canada.
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While non-profit organizations sometimes struggle with technical aspects of evaluation, their strengths often lie in non-technical areas, such as relationship building and communication.
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The Canada Learning Bond (CLB) is a federal grant of up to $2,000 available to children born 2004 or laterwho are living in families with lower incomes. As a kick start to education savings, the CLB can have a powerful transformative effect on families by motivating success in school, improving high-school completion rates and helping students choose a path to post-secondary education and training.
SmartSAVER works with family facing community agencies across Canada to help them teach thousands of families how they can access free money for their children’s future education.
More and more voices are speaking of a movement to end poverty. In Edmonton, where I sit on Mayor Iveson's Task Force to Eliminate Poverty in a Generation, the fostering of a movement is front and centre on the minds around the table. There are nearly 60 communities today that are members of Vibrant Communities Canada – an example of movement building. Last month, our Cities Reducing Poverty Summit was a testimony to this growing movement. It was not only a forum for our political and community leaders;over 20% of the 350 people who attended were either people living with poverty or leaders from grassroots organizations. These were attendees who could not have been there without the support of funders stepped up to ensure their seats at the summit were free.
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