Creating Vibrant Communities: How Individuals and Organizations from Diverse Sectors of Society Are Coming Together to Reduce Poverty in Canada

Creating

Vibrant

Communities

Creating

Vibrant

Communities

How Individuals and

Organizations from

Diverse Sectors of Society

Are Coming Together

to Reduce Poverty

in Canada

PAUL BORN, Editor

Copyright © 2008 by Tamarack - An Institute for Community Engagement

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any measure, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher, is an infringement of the copyright law.

Published in 2008 by

BPS Books

Toronto, Canada

www.bpsbooks.net

A division of Bastian Publishing Services Ltd.

In association with

Tamarack — An Institute

for Community Engagement

www.tamarackcommunity.ca

ISBN 978-0-9809231-6-2 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-926645-32-2 (ePDF)

ISBN 978-1-926645-33-9 (epub)

Cataloguing in Publication Data available from Library and Archives Canada.

Images used on the cover of this book

Vote Living Wage, background image from istockphoto.com (photographer Jorge Salcedo), composition by Laura Zikovic; Pierre Durocher speaking at the 3rd Rendez-Vous des Grands partenaires, courtesy of Vivre Saint-Michel en santé (photographer Josée Turgeon); Bill Gale at Teen Resource Center, courtesy of the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal (photographer Cindy Wilson): Make Tax Time Pay, courtesy of Vibrant Communities Edmonton; Fair Fares, courtesy of Vibrant Communities Calgary; Sunflower, string, and Polaroid images from istockphoto.com (photographers: emily2k, Roel Smart, Matjaz Boncina, and Christoph Weihs).

Lightning Source paper, as used in this book, does not come from endangered old growth forests or forests of exceptional conservation value. It is acid-free, lignin free, and meets al ANSI standards for archival-quality paper. The print-on-demand process used to produce this book protects the environment by printing only the number of copies that are purchased.

In memory of Katharine Pearson (1955–2008),

co-founder of Vibrant Communities Canada

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

Part I — THE VIBRANT COMMUNITIES WAY

Introduction to Part I

Bringing Vibrant Communities to Life: The Founding Years

Eric Leviten-Reid

Implementing and Evaluating Vibrant Communities

Mark Cabaj, Susan Eckerle Curwood, and Eric Leviten-Reid

Part II — VIBRANT COMMUNITIES STORIES

Introduction to Part II

A. Communities That Built the Trail

The Group of Six

Sherri Torjman

British Columbia’s Capital Region

Anne Makhoul and Eric Leviten-Reid

Quality of Life Challenge: Fostering Engagement, Collaboration, and Inclusion — Theory of Change

The Employer Challenge

The Mentorship Challenge

Victoria’s Regional Housing Trust Fund

Inviting Low-income Canadians to Speak for Themselves

Niagara Region, Ontario

Anne Makhoul and Eric Leviten-Reid

Opportunities Niagara: Untying the Knots, Connecting the Dots — Theory of Change

Pursuing a Living Wage in the Niagara Region

Niagara’s Inter-municipal Transportation Strategy

CAW 199 and Community Partners Build Affordable Homes and Community Spirit

Saint John, New Brunswick

Anne Makhoul, Eric Leviten-Reid, and Mike Bulthuis

Vibrant Communities Saint John: Dismantling the Poverty Traps — Theory of Change

Saint John Tackles Energy Poverty

Neighbourhood Development Initiatives

Housing Appointment Creates New Opportunities

Making a Difference in the Lives of Young People

Government Engagement in Saint John

Edmonton, Alberta

Anne Makhoul and Eric Leviten-Reid

Vibrant Communities Edmonton: Building Family Economic Success — Theory of Change

Community Investment in Edmonton

Financial Literacy Work in Edmonton

Edmonton’s Job Bus Preparations

The Make Tax Time Pay Campaign

Trail Builder Update: Make Tax Time Pay 2007

Saint-Michel, Quebec

Anne Makhoul, Eric Leviten-Reid, and Dal Brodhead

Le Chantier in Saint-Michel: Tackling Poverty and Social Inclusion — Theory of Change

Affordable Housing through Cooperative Development in Saint-Michel

Community Engagement Through Culture

Training for Employment

Calgary, Alberta

Anne Makhoul and Eric Leviten-Reid

Vibrant Communities Calgary: Awareness, Engagement, and Policy Change — Theory of Change

Defining and Increasing Civic Engagement

Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped Public Policy Initiative

Fair Fares Calgary Celebrates Reduced-fare Transit Passes

Update on the Living-Wage Campaign

Fair Fares 2008: Roadblocks and Opportunities

B. Emerging Trail Builders

Hamilton, Ontario

Anne Makhoul and Mike Bulthuis

The Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction

Hamilton’s Best Start Network

The Hamilton Spectator’s Focus on Poverty

Mohawk College Builds Its Community Partnerships

Shared Leadership and Collaborative Governance in Poverty Reduction

Surrey, British Columbia

Anne Makhoul

Vibrant Surrey: Bridging the Gaps and Consolidating Strengths — Theory of Change

Project Comeback: A Lifeline for Surrey’s Homeless Day Labourers

Waterloo Region, Ontario

Anne Makhoul

Waterloo Region’s Guaranteed Income Supplement Campaign

Opportunities 2000’s Year of Change

St. John’s, Newfoundland

Anne Makhoul, Eric Leviten-Reid, and Peggy Matchim

Vibrant Communities St. John’s: Engaging Citizens and Changing Systems

Conclusion: Toward 2011

Further Resources

Contributors

PREFACE

Creating Vibrant Communities attempts to capture the process and outcomes of a group of Canadian communities that have held many important community-building conversations, specifically about poverty reduction. People living in poverty and representatives from all sectors of these communities have come together for these conversations. The result has been inspiring work and community transformations right across the country. This work and body of practice are known as Vibrant Communities Canada.

Creating Vibrant Communities celebrates and documents this phenomenon. It is composed of (I) two papers on the Vibrant Communities way and (II) stories of the six communities that built the trail and four communities that followed.

I believe that this book will inspire and help three audiences. The first are those who have been following our work and who are interested in Vibrant Communities Canada. They will find in it a good overview of the history and developments of the formative years, known as phase one. The second are those interested in community-development methodologies. They can read this book as a case study in a method known as Comprehensive Community Initiatives. The book details and documents a particularly good example of a new approach to collaborative action. The third audience are those who are interested in poverty reduction. These readers will find descriptions here of many innovative approaches to poverty reduction adopted by the Vibrant Communities Network; and they will see how and why these methods have worked.

READING THIS BOOK

Vibrant Communities Canada as a whole is a relatively young national initiative. Launched in 2002, its learning during its formative years (2002–2006) was extensive. This book attempts to capture and share the knowledge generated during that time, in the hope that you will join in our conversation about community change and poverty reduction. Our desire is that it will inspire you to join in our work of creating vibrant communities in Canada.

In the Introduction, I share the story of the founding of Vibrant Communities and describe how Sherri Torjman’s monograph, Reclaiming Our Humanity, inspired and informed it.

Part I of the book focuses on the formative years. If you are looking for a quick overview of our work, the best place to start is with the first paper, Eric Leviten-Reid’s summary of the Vibrant Communities experience from 2002 to 2006. The other paper in this part of the book, by Mark Cabaj, Susan Eckerle Curwood, and Eric Leviten-Reid, analyses communities that have established community campaigns. We call these communities Trail Builders. This paper provides an overview of the results to December 2006 and a description of how we captured the outcomes described.

Part II is a collection of stories describing the various initiatives undertaken by individual Vibrant Communities in their attempts to eliminate poverty. It is divided into two sections; Communities That Built the Trail and Emerging Trail Builders.

The first section is devoted to the initial group of six communities that launched community-wide campaigns. These stories are organized chronologically according to when each community joined Vibrant Communities. They include an overview of each community’s work, a description of the local environment, and their theory of change, which describes their unique approach to poverty reduction. We have also included stories of their work and progress. Some of these stories go beyond the formative years with information as recent as 2008. They have been included primarily to give concrete examples of work being done at the community level.

The second section is devoted to emerging Trail Builders and their stories, some of which describe the various challenges faced in implementing multi-sector comprehensive community initiatives. AH have launched community-wide campaigns.

At the end of the book, you will find further resources related to this work. All of this material can also be found on the Vibrant Communities website.

IT TAKES A TEAM

Vibrant Communities Canada, as a national project to reduce poverty in Canada, involves the wisdom and efforts of many people. A wonderful team surrounds this work, most of whom have been active in the writing and editing of this book. They deserve acknowledgment.

First, I want to thank Louise Kearney for her fine eye to detail. She brought both her editing skills and a deep understanding of the history of Vibrant Communities to this project. As a historian, she has been a tremendous help to me. Rachel Veira Gainer provided stellar copy-editing support, and Laura Zikovic contributed her talent to the text and cover designs.

Clara Bird spent several months with me gathering documents, building consistent files and formats, and painstakingly deleting the redundancies of papers that were originally written to be read independently. Her patience, good nature, and skill contributed greatly to the initial concept of this book.

The authors of the papers in this book have been active in Vibrant Communities almost from the beginning and have written extensively about it. Mark Cabaj has co-led this work in our communities with me since the days of Opportunities 2000 (1996). He has been, and continues to be, the driving force and brains behind all we do. Eric Leviten-Reid, our key researcher, has led the Vibrant Communities evaluation process through the Caledon Institute of Social Policy almost from the beginning. His sharp mind and exceptional writing ability have shaped the documentation of our work.

Anne Makhoul has written most of the community stories in this book. She has a wonderful way of engaging the people she is writing about and then synthesizing their story into an information-rich and yet enjoyable read. She is a truly gifted writer and we are grateful for her commitment to our work. She is joined by Mike Bulthuis, who led a government learning circle and has contributed some exceptional stories.

Donald Bastian of BPS Books has once again helped us to understand our research and writings as a book. His skill as an editor and publisher is unprecedented.

So much is said in this book about the doers, those who work tirelessly at the community level to bring about change. But we must not overlook the funders, the investors in the Vibrant Communities experiment. Though they would not like to be called venture philanthropists, they were willing to invest great sums of money and energy into a new, untested method of reducing poverty in Canada.

We are forever indebted to our founding hinders. Alan Broadbent and Ratna Omidvar of the Maytree Foundation were there from the outset. They invested in building and funding both Tamarack and the Caledon Institute of Social Policy to support this work. Tim Brodhead and Katharine Pearson, on behalf of the J.W. McDonnell Family Foundation Board, were the lead investors in Vibrant Communities. From day one, they gave more than money, contributing their deep expertise and trust to this project. Without these two wonderful organizations, and the people behind them, nothing would have happened. This type of vision, combined with patience, is what makes good things great!

Stephen Voisin and his team at RBC Financial, Canada’s leading bank, have supported our efforts to create vibrant communities since 1997 when they came on as a sponsor of Opportunities 2000. We are very grateful to them — we could not have asked for a better, more patient private-sector partner. Bill Young, his family, and the Hamilton Community Foundation support us as if we are one of the family, believing in us to the point of now engaging the entire city of Hamilton in this way of working.

We have been blessed with the best partners in government. Human Resources and Social Development Canada (Susan Scotti, Allen Zeesman, Liz Huff, Donna Troop, and Jean Viel) invested in the learning community behind Vibrant Communities. Their support has made this book possible.

The Caledon Institute of Social Policy, led by Ken Battle and Sherri Torjman, has been a partner in both Opportunities 2000 and Vibrant Communities. Our organizations complement each other deeply, and our decade-long relationship has been forged into what can be best described as a sisterhood. Caledon is simply the best and most effective policy organization working on poverty and related social issues in Canada. We are humbled by Ken and Sherri’s commitment to, and relentless support of, the Vibrant Communities way, and for advancing these ideas far beyond our reach.

Finally, and most importantly, may we offer our thanks to those community leaders who have joined the Vibrant Communities Network, now comprising nearly fifteen hundred organizations in Canada. It started with a conversation in Guelph, Ontario, in 2002, where approximately fifty leaders from fifteen cities met to talk about the possibility of working together in a new way. Many if not most are still active six years later, and they have created the overall story told in this book. On behalf of the Tamarack and Vibrant Communities team, I thank you for your innovation, commitment to making great communities, and deep empathy for those who live in poverty.

Paul Born, Editor

INTRODUCTION

Good things start with a conversation. So do good communities.

Communities that work are places where people from different walks of life come together to discuss ideas that matter to them. Over time (sometimes long periods of time), trust and understanding emerge and individuals agree to work together. They discuss ideas and eventually develop plans to act. Once the foundation for action is set, people engage deeply and work together relentlessly to realize the dreams they share.

In what we call Vibrant Communities, these types of conversations happen frequently.

CONTEXT AND INSPIRATION

I am often cited as the founder of the Vibrant Communities movement, but in truth the movement found me. It is an idea that has radically changed me.

The idea emerged in 2001, when a founding group met over a period of six months to reflect on the experience of Opportunities 2000, a Millennium campaign that I initiated with Mark Cabaj and a team of volunteers and staff in Waterloo, Ontario, to reduce poverty in the Region of Waterloo to the lowest level in Canada. For more than a decade prior to that, I had worked with an amazing team to build a local economic development organization called the Community Opportunities Development Association. We helped over five thousand low-income people find work and twelve hundred more start small businesses.

Even though we were one of the most successful organizations of our type in the country, poverty continued to rise in our community. Opportunities 2000 was designed to correct this.

Rather than developing more programs, we decided to run a four-year Millennium campaign to mobilize the entire community to focus on poverty reduction. The goal was to initiate a collaborative process that would ask business, the voluntary sector, government, and people who had experienced poverty first-hand to form a partnership and a representative leadership round table, develop a community plan for poverty reduction, and then work together to implement the plan.

The result was remarkable. Not only did we impact seventeen hundred families in our community, we also created a new way of working together to effect community change. Opportunities 2000 was recognized with national and international awards.

The members of the Vibrant Communities founding group who reflected on the Opportunities 2000 experience never actually met face to face, though we all knew each other very well. I call it a group simply because that was what I considered them as I shuttled between them over a six-month period, going from one visit to the next and passing on the ideas of one to the other. It was a brilliant meeting that continued, at least for me, seemingly without pause. A conversation with one person would lead to a conversation with another, and it all flowed along as if we were together.

In this group was Alan Broadbent, of the Avana Capital Corporation and the Maytree Foundation, who had inspired me to co-found with him, in 2001, the Tamarack Institute for Community Engagement. Alan has a brilliant mind and is intensely passionate about cities. As a whole-systems thinker, he has an uncanny way of seeing everything in 3-D. His probing questions deepened my understanding of the value of our work in Waterloo and teased out potential applications for this work in a broader context.

Alan was particularly interested in our multi-sector work that brought together people from the private sector, government, the voluntary sector, and those affected by poverty to create a jointly owned community campaign. He believed that the power of government to effect change in cities was diminishing. He saw the importance, therefore, of an increase in citizen action and collaborative approaches, and compelled me to consider how we might help communities to harness this new power.

Alan co-founded and chairs Tamarack and the Caledon Institute of Social Policy. The Maytree Foundation, which he founded with Judy Broadbent, invests significant financial resources to fund the capacity of Tamarack and Caledon to provide leadership in Vibrant Communities.

Two other members of the founding group were Tim Brodhead, President and CEO of the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, and Katharine Pearson, who led many innovative learning approaches for McConnell. Tim brings a profound wisdom and insight to his work. His boyish optimism is tempered by the realism of one who has fought and almost won far too many battles for good. Katharine contributed to the team her unique ability to bring diverse people and ideas into unison, along with ever-encouraging words, absolute patience, and a warm smile.

Together, Tim, Katharine, and the team at McConnell had been working on an idea that they called applied dissemination, which focused on helping projects and organizations that were successful in one city to grow into national initiatives. The team sought to understand how such growth might occur and was willing to fund a couple of experiments. The McConnell Family Foundation was a key Opportunities 2000 donor, and Tim and Katharine felt that the campaign could be tested in other cities. The foundation’s board provided more than $2 million to launch Vibrant Communities and Tim and Katharine have been active in the work ever since. (We were deeply saddened when Katharine died, in May 2008. She will be sorely missed, both personally and professionally.) Without the support of the McConnell Foundation, our work would not have been possible. Inaddition to giving us funds to help us launch Vibrant Communities, the foundation’s board contributed $5 million to help us grow.

Frances Westley was also a member of the Vibrant Communities founding group. At the time, she was based at McGill University, where she led the McGill-McConnell program to advance the leadership capacity of national voluntary-sector organizations. Frances has a remarkable gift of turning confusion into action and sorting out understandable and actionable patterns from the ideas, feelings, and intents of individuals and groups. She had endless time for me as I met with the founding groups. She helped me identify not only the ideas that would shape Vibrant Communities, but also the feelings of inadequacy and fear that I was experiencing.

The final person in the founding group, and the one who would prove the most influential in shaping the ideas behind Vibrant Communities, was Sherri Torjman of the Caledon Institute of Social Policy. Sherri has been on the front lines of policy development in Canada for many years. She is one of the kindest, most generous people you could ever hope to meet. She cares deeply about the disadvantaged in our society and the issues that face them. She uses her sharp mind and remarkable writing skills to express with great clarity what needs to be done to create a caring and sustainable future in this country.

Sherri wrote a number of policy and reflection papers for Opportunities 2000. She lent credibility to the campaign, not only through her knowledge and persuasive writing, but also through her national reputation as one of Canada’s leading social policy thinkers. It was her contribution that, in no small part, made Opportunities 2000 an initiative of national interest from its very inception.

When I first spoke to Sherri about the possibility of forming Vibrant Communities Canada, she was working on a formative monograph with partners from the Coalition of National Voluntary Organizations, the Canadian Council on Social Development, and the United Way of Canada–Centraide Canada to establish key policy priorities that each organization could promote. Published as Reclaiming Our Humanity, it shaped the ideas that would become Vibrant Communities, grounding the ideas in a social policy context and making them the essential building blocks of our work.

There were, of course, other conversations during this time. In fact, there are many other people who may be considered co-founders of Vibrant Communities, including Mark Cabaj, Louise Kearney, and Eric Leviten-Reid. As the leading staff of the project, their sharp thinking and ability to test and explore ideas in building the Vibrant Communities Network have been critical to our success.

Anne Kubisch provided immeasurable understanding and a language for our work at the Aspen Roundtable on Community Change. Senator Landon Pearson, our honorary chair, inspired us with her campaign to save the children of this world. These two contributed to our development in those early days and, in turn, helped us to create and found Vibrant Communities.

But it was in Sherri’s work that we found the inspiration for our national initiative. It was when about fifty people from fourteen cities met in April 2002 agreeing to work together to reduce poverty across Canada, that we decided to name ourselves Vibrant Communities, a concept inspired by Sherri.

RECLAIMING OUR HUMANITY

Though the words and ideas expressed in Reclaiming Our Humanity are Sherri’s, the monograph also reflects many of the themes of the conversations within the founding group. There was a synergy of ideas in the public ethos of that time, which Sherri captures beautifully. Rather than restate the ideas expressed in the founding group conversations, I will share a few key quotes from her monograph and describe how the ideas behind them influenced our work.

Vibrant Communities Can Do a Lot

Vibrant communities ensure that basic needs are met. There is no family without a roof over its head. No child goes to school hungry. No person suffers from abuse or violence without having a safe place to go. No family lives as an island without help and support when needed. Everyone has access to clean air and water.

Vibrant communities recognize the wide range of ingredients necessary for social development. They take steps to harness these resources in new and creative ways. They bring together the players who can effect change.

Early in the work of the VC Network, we recognized that if communities were to significantly reduce poverty, they would need to go beyond starting more employment programs, food banks, and social security schemes. To truly reduce poverty, we would need to engage leaders and citizens in a larger discussion about the kind of community they wanted. The concept of vibrant communities, as Sherri described it, was exactly what we needed to inspire these types of discussion.

Sherri’s monograph also provided a clear picture of the conditions to address in creating the kind of communities that we envisioned. Though some might see her vision as bordering on the Utopian, those of us who had spent decades on the front lines of social change saw it as an expression of what was necessary if we were ever going to make progress. We were tired of incremental changes that focused on specific solutions. We recognized in Sherri’s description of vibrant communities a call to look beyond single-issue solutions to embrace community or system change. Housing, food security, safety, belonging, and a clean environment were best seen as a package, with each element as important as the other.

Sherri also called for communities to think and work differently. They would harness local resources (assets) in new and innovative ways to improve the conditions of their communities. For years, community developers were encouraged to take a deficit view of communities; to identify those things that were not working and fix them. An asset-based approach takes a positive view of communities, asking practitioners to harness the community’s talent and resources to facilitate change.

In her description of vibrant communities, Sherri also captured the methodology for implementing the vision. She writes, Bring together the players who can effect change. This multi-sector approach is at the heart of Vibrant Communities Canada.

Reducing Poverty Is the Crucial First Step

A vision of social development must begin with meeting the needs of the most vulnerable citizens. Being poor means poor food, poor housing and poor health. Its effects are devastating not only for individuals. Nations are at risk when such a large slice of their population is excluded from participating and contributing to the fullest of its ability.

There was never any doubt that the VC Network would focus our work on poverty reduction. However, wanting to go beyond seeing things through an anti-poverty lens, we also used a community-development lens, acknowledging the devastating effect of poverty on individuals and communities. For the founders of Vibrant Communities, reducing poverty was about raising the overall quality of life in a community.

In fact, an oft-repeated phrase in the VC Network is, "We want less poor, not better poor." The statement challenges much of the anti-poverty work in our communities, work that results in human-services supports that make living more tolerable. We give people food, housing, income support, and employment training. All of these supports are critical, but no one of them alone is adequate.

The VC approach was developed to consider the conditions that would create a community in which poverty could not exist. Sherri helped us to define the approach when she linked poverty to issues of security and contribution.

Reclaiming Our Humanity recognizes the importance of every citizen living in a community to the community’s overall quality of life. Sherri’s vision is of all people participating and contributing to the fullest of (their) ability. The VC Network has embraced this vision and sees it as inherent in all of our work, especially in bringing people who are living in poverty into full participation in the life of their community.

Vibrant Communities insure Support, Inclusion, and Learning

This is a vision of vibrant communities. They provide support to all members. They include all members. And they promote opportunities for learning at all ages and stages.

Vibrant communities provide support that meets bask needs. Vibrant communities promote inclusion to enable all members to participate actively in social, economic, cultural and political life. And vibrant communities afford opportunities for the lifelong acquisition of knowledge and skills. In the real world, these dimensions are intrinsically linked. Social development is both rich and multifaceted; any framework or vision must embody this complexity.

Fractured responses result in fractured solutions. The VC Network has embraced the use of a comprehensive lens for developing poverty-reduction initiatives. We recognize that no one solution offered in isolation will suffice: A full range of supports is what is required.

In order to achieve these linked up solutions, VC members work across sectors and take a whole-systems approach to their planning and work. This is best exemplified in their community plans. Communities try to understand what is happening within their bounds and to work across sectors to network the organizations working on the issues that matter — organizations that will make the biggest difference.

Social Capital Embodies Networks That Enable Collective Action

Social capital is not an end in itself; it is the means to an end. It provides the foundation for human capital development. And it is an essential ingredient in enabling communities to make things happen collectively. It is through the process of bringing people together and forming relations and networks that social, economic and environmental challenges can be most effectively tackled.

Building relationships is at the heart of the Vibrant Communities approach. Connecting people, developing new ideas for community improvement, and then working together to realize these ideas is at the core of the work. The network’s multi-sector approach has helped us to realize that the process of identifying solutions is as important as implementing them. The goal is always to include those who have the power to make change happen.

In building social capital by forming social networks and advancing collective action, Vibrant Communities partners have been able to both implement innovative approaches to poverty reduction and effect local policy decisions. These policy decisions may result in changes to transportation costs and/or access, and to employment policies or planning approaches leading to more refined and specific local approaches. By connecting people, opening new conversations, and building trust and a deeper sense of community, Vibrant Communities partners are reducing poverty in significant and sustainable ways.

An Environment for Change

This vision for reclaiming our humanity seeks three ends: First, we seek to ensure that the environment and social well-being are on the table as issues equally important and intrinsic to economic growth. Second, we want to be at the table. We want to be a full partner in discussions and in work undertaken to pursue a social development agenda. Third, we wish to turn the tables to ensure that communities can lead from a position of strength. They must be at the forefront of ensuring support, inclusion and learning.

Vibrant communities stress the importance of influencing government policy and wider community-systems change. Though members of the VC Network are interested in federal and provincial policies to reduce poverty, they recognize that their voice is best heard through changes undertaken at the local level. The network has no specific policy statement for poverty reduction. Instead, it has an approach. The approach begins with the premise that communities must speak from a place of strength on the issues that are facing them. This strength comes from forming a consensus across sectors on what needs to change. Communities can accomplish a lot, even without provincial or federal support. Communities do not need to wait for permission to change policies to help the poor.

Thank you for joining the Vibrant Communities conversation. In sharing our story with you and a broader constituency interested in place-based solutions, as well as with policy makers in Canada and around the world, we hope to deepen the understanding of the importance of this work and to open the door to a mutual conversation about what works. We know, when we employ national or provincial policies to affect poverty, that significant room must be given for place-based approaches to implementing these policy changes. We believe that poverty must be eradicated one community at a time.

When we bring our communities into a new conversation, much can happen. Vibrant Communities is evidence of this.

REFERENCE

Torjman, S. (2001) Reclaiming Our Humanity. Ottawa: Caledon Institute of Social Policy. Dec.

INTRODUCTION TO PART I

The purpose of this part of the book is to familiarize you with the work of Vibrant Communities in its early development. The first paper, by Eric Leviten-Reid, is an excellent overview of the philosophy, structures, goals, and work of Vibrant Communities, 2002–2006. The second paper, by Mark Cabaj, Susan Curwood Eckerle, and Eric Leviten-Reid, is a more in-depth analysis of the experience of the Trail Builders. It also gives a compelling description of the evaluation methodology used by Vibrant Communities and the results of this first phase.

Together, these two papers provide the context and thinking behind Vibrant Communities and complement the more specific descriptions of the work found in part II of this book.

BRINGING VIBRANT COMMUNITIES TO LIFE; THE FOUNDING YEARS

Eric Leviten-Reid, January 2007

Vibrant Communities was launched in the spring of 2002. It was formulated around a core set of ideas — abstract concepts that have gradually come to life through the efforts of hundreds of people from diverse backgrounds who are working together to reduce poverty in their communities. In the words of one participant: In the past, ‘multi-sector’ was just a word; now it is people in the same room.

What is Vibrant Communities? How did it come to be? And what difference is it making? The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the Vibrant Communities experience to date: where we’ve been, where we are, and where we may go from here.

The first part of this paper reviews the origins and actions of the initiative, including its goals and design and major facets of the work undertaken from 2002 to 2006. The second part offers broad reflections on the experience of Trail Builder communities and the initiative overall. The third part casts an eye ahead to the future development of Vibrant Communities.

ORIGINS AND ACTION

Vibrant Communities is a pan-Canadian action–learning initiative that explores promising local solutions for poverty reduction. It was established through a partnership involving three national sponsors (the Tamarack Institute for Community Engagement, the Caledon Institute of Social Policy, and the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation) and fourteen local communities across the country. It has already grown to enjoy the participation of several additional communities as well as other funding partners, including the Maytree Foundation, Young Foundation, and RBC Financial Group. In addition, Human Resources and Social Development Canada is providing both financial and staff support for the initiative.

The Context; A Need for Change

The impetus behind Vibrant Communities was a general recognition that, despite the undeniable prosperity enjoyed by so many in this country, efforts to reduce poverty in Canada had stalled.

Between 1961 and 1977, the percentage of Canadians living on low incomes fell from 29 percent to 13 percent. Since then, the poverty rate has not moved below this level, remaining between 14 and 19 percent throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and into the current decade. While the rate of poverty has gone up and down with the economy, there has been no substantial decrease in poverty for nearly thirty years. What is evident in the national statistics has been all the more evident on the ground in communities. Food banks, once considered an emergency response to a passing problem, have become a permanent part of the social landscape. Homeless shelters, once used almost exclusively by single adults, are now frequently needed by families with children. Workers who formerly would have been free of poverty by virtue of employment now all too often fall within the ranks of the working poor. Not only is poverty entrenched, but it is also now touching a wider array of Canadians.

By the late 1990s, it was clear that broad shifts had occurred in the structure of opportunities and supports available to Canadians. A precarious labour market offered few good jobs (paying high wages but requiring high skills) and many bad ones (low-wage, part-time employment offering few, if any, benefits); public spending on social programs had been reduced; and responsibilities, though not resources, were being downloaded from one level of government to another, and from government in general to individuals and communities.

For human-services and community agencies of various kinds, the result was an impossible combination: an increase in demand for assistance coupled with fewer resources to do the job. Many found that they were running faster just to stay in place, and often falling behind. Clearly something needed to change. In various ways, in different settings, community groups began searching for new solutions.

Seeds of Hope

One such effort was Opportunities 2000 in Waterloo Region, Ontario. Recognizing that it had reached a plateau in its ability to assist the unemployed, a local community organization set out to expand the scale and impact of its work. Running from 1996 to 2000, Opportunities 2000 engaged a diverse group of community leaders, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and local businesses in the vision of reducing the region’s poverty rate to the lowest in Canada. Ultimately, it mobilized eighty-six organizations in support of forty-seven diverse poverty-reduction initiatives, ranging from the creation of community enterprises and workforce development initiatives to employer-driven changes in workplace practices.

While the initiative did not achieve its target to help two thousand families exit poverty by the year 2000, it did help sixteen hundred households take significant steps in their journey out of poverty, make poverty reduction a public priority, and create a network of leaders and organizations committed to renewing and sustaining their collaborative work, under the new name of Opportunities Waterloo Region.

In late 2001, representatives from three organizations that played major roles in Opportunities 2000 — the J.W McConnell Family Foundation, the Caledon Institute, and Opportunities 2000 (several members of which had since formed the Tamarack Institute for Community Engagement) — came together to reflect on the lessons learned. They concluded that although Opportunities 2000’s results were