Vibrant Communities Calgary ’s vision is a community where there is enough for all. They create opportunities to align and leverage the work of hundreds of organizations and thousands of Calgarians to reduce poverty in their city.
In addressing what we can do to fix poverty, Vibrant Communities Calgary incorporates a Blackfoot worldview, which includes having empathy and compassion, building mutual respect, learning from lived/living experiences, and providing opportunities to help people become independent and resilient.
Racialized people are overrepresented in poverty – particularly deep poverty – and are less likely to be employed and to be accessing benefits like the Canada Child Benefit (Poverty Snapshot in Calgary). They are also more likely to have poorer health outcomes and lack community belonging.
VCC recognizes the importance of ‘walking the talk,’ and that it is just as important for us to exemplify what we expect others to do. Anti-poverty initiatives cannot get external credibility if we are not doing the internal work ourselves.
Ways that VCC shifts mindsets and creates space to think outside the box with new partners include:
Next steps include assessing the strengths and gaps of Calgary’s Enough for All strategy from a GBA+ lens, developing principles of equity and diversity, and using these to create an EDI framework that can guide future strategy, planning, activities, implementation, and reporting. To improve coordinated municipal and provincial measurement and response, they also plan to work with the City of Calgary and the Government of Alberta on how its many municipal EDI strategies can connect, and how Enough for All can fit in and contribute.