The Latest

Cornwall Mayor, Bernadette Clement, Appointed to the Senate of Canada

Cornwall’s Vibrant Community Roundtable and Tamarack Institute would like to congratulate Bernadette Clement who has been appointed as an independent Senator by the Government of Canada.

As a lawyer, Executive Director of the Roy McMurtry Legal Clinic, former board member of Cornwall’s Social Development Council, and current Mayor of Cornwall, Mayor Clement has been a strong champion for poverty reduction in her own community and beyond.

Read More

Taking a human rights-based approach to housing in Toronto

Poverty is what happens when people cannot access their human right to an adequate standard of living. They lack equitable access to housing, health care and pharmacare, education and training opportunities, or decent work. They experience food insecurity, poor sanitation and undrinkable water, or lack of income. Poverty is created by systems that affect people differently; as a result, Indigenous, Black, and racialized communities, women, and people with disabilities, for example, experience poverty at disproportionately high rates.

Read More

Breaking Down Silos in Rural Communities: Employing A Whole Systems Approach

Breaking down silos and employing a whole systems approach that puts a person’s wellbeing at the centre is a critical practice for rural communities seeking to end poverty. Working in silos ignores the complexity of people’s lives and beneficial community assets remain under-utilized. While working out-of-sync with one another, very few organizations are likely to see their clients sustainably achieve their goals.

Read More

Guelph-Wellington Built for Zero reduces chronic youth homelessness by 76%

This success story was featured at Cities Reducing Poverty’s 2021 National Gathering: The End of Poverty as part of the workshop Built for Zero: A Model for Ending Chronic Homelessness.

In 2018, after becoming a Built for Zero Canada community, Guelph-Wellington conducted their second Point in Time Count/Registry Week which identified 203 people, including 62 youth, that were experiencing chronic homelessness. Through this survey, the community learned that almost half of all respondents had experienced their first instance of homelessness as a youth.

Read More

A Dignified Disability Supplement as a Pathway to Ending Poverty

According to Statistics Canada, 6.2 million Canadians are estimated to be living with a disability. People with disabilities are likely to be living in poverty – this figure is as high as 30% - due to societal barriers including discrimination, access to education and employment, and protective social programs. Stats Canada reports a mere 40-59% in employment, depending on the severity of the disability, as compared with 80% of the rest of the population.

Read More