Place-based approaches are increasingly being applied to complex community issues such as poverty. In towns and cities across Canada, organizations, businesses, local government and residents are working to build a better quality of life and provide real opportunities for their community. They are applying local solutions to address complex community issues in an effort to build healthy, caring and vibrant communities. 

Sherri Torjman, Vice-President of the Caledon Institute of Social Policy, has written a wide range of papers and reports on community-based work in Canada and has an inimitable sense of the importance of place-based approaches to poverty reduction. On this page you’ll find a summary of Sherri’s recent conversation with Paul Born about community-based poverty reduction, the recording of that session and some relevant links and resources on the topic.

All communities, whether large or small, are working to improve the quality of life of local residents. All define quality of life in different ways and some have explicitly undertaken this challenge through the development of formal sustainability plans. Examples of this work are 20/20 visions or the Quality of Life CHALLENGE in the BC Capital Region.

Communities are recognizing increasingly that things take shape at the local level and that they are the key players when it comes to determining the major strategies to improve their economic, social and environmental well-being. They may not have all the levers or funds to do everything on their own or to do it all (which creates all sorts of challenges). But it is now generally accepted that they must take the lead when it comes to setting out desired goals and determining the best ways to get there, taking into account local history, assets and concerns.

The communities agenda represents the new ways we are going about this work, and the agenda is beginning to push or drive change in other areas or systems, such as government. 

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A focus on place is crucial for social and economic reasons. Quality of place directly affects the well-being and success of individuals and families. Quality of place also influences local economic health and competitiveness - factors that have a direct impact upon the availability and quality of employment, which in turn are major determinants of poverty.

Additionally, in neighbourhoods and communities across the country we increasingly see pockets of poverty, or concentrations of vulnerability. It’s evident in those situations that a focus on place is required to deal with the specific issues the community faces.

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Poverty reduction work focuses on the reduction, rather than simply the alleviation, of poverty. Recognizing that service approaches are critical, new place-based efforts to reduce poverty look at the deeper causes of poverty and apply new approaches to the issue. 

Communities have become increasingly articulate about the different pathways out of poverty. These include:

Enhance individual employability

Create employment opportunities

Ensure a reasonable stock of decent affordable housing 

These pathways are discrete approaches, also intrinsically linked. 

Two other routes to poverty reduction include:

Encourage employers in the private, government and voluntary sectors to pay decent wages. 

Make certain income security programs deliver appropriate benefits and that Canadians eligible for these programs are aware of their existence.

We know that when people come together in shared purpose they create relationships and networks that build social capital. Individuals in communities and societies with high social capital tend to be more prosperous, healthier and experience less crime. We can foster the networks that create and expand social capital by investing in place. 

Collaborative community-based poverty reduction recognizes the value of contributions from diverse backgrounds, networks and areas of expertise. Collaborative relationships create new value by bringing additional resources, insights and expertise to the table. 

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Comprehensive community initiatives are characterized by several key features. They are long term. They involve more than one sector. They seek to formulate a wide-ranging plan even though they must prioritize and select the areas in which the community actually will work. They devise novel solutions and interventions by virtue of fresh combinations of ideas and resources.

These efforts are broad in scope and address a range of issues rather than a single concern. They typically select an overarching theme or population as their focus (e.g. poverty reduction, community safety). Each locality determines, in collaboration with key players in the community, the set of interconnected actions and projects which fall within that domain.

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Vibrant Communities, a pan-Canadian effort to reduce poverty in Canada, seeks to create the opportunities typically absent in the lives of people living in poverty. Vibrant Communities is characterized:

Rooted in place - predicated on the assumption that the quality of place has a significant influence upon well-being. 

Employs a range of interventions in its efforts to tackle poverty 

Complements and supplements traditional government approaches to poverty reduction that focus upon the delivery of benefits and services to individuals and households. 

Each community selects its own preferred routes in recognition of the reality that there is no single bullet or correct response. There are, in fact, many pathways out of poverty.

A new approach to community development that is more comprehensive and attempts to be more coherent than earlier methods. No one initiative can do everything, but CCIs understand the community and where their efforts and attempts to lever change can be best used.

Testing a distinctive model of local governance (how decisions are made at the local level). Vibrant Communities employs a multisectoral, collaborative approach that engages diverse sectors as well as people living in poverty in a sustained discussion of strategic options for poverty reduction.

Strong foundation of learning and the intentional application of good practice.

Active policy dimension seeks to scale up to a broader national picture the issues raised in local efforts.

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GOING DEEPER

Check out the Caledon Institute’s Policy Dialogue series of papers for Vibrant Communities, including:

Engaging Businesses in Local Efforts to Reduce Poverty - The “Engaging Business to Reduce Poverty” Learning Initiative is designed to support local networks associated with Vibrant Communities learn how they can engage businesses – from small to large -- to assist a large number of low income residents in their journey out of poverty. Learn more here! 

From September 2004 to June 2005 local and national funders and contributors to Vibrant Communities came together to learn and discuss best practice funding. They took part in a tele-learning series to learn about effective funding practices in order to grow the impact of poverty reduction work in local communities across Canada. 

Throughout the learning initiative funders and contributors heard from, and learned with, Joseph A. “Jay” Connor, author of Community Visions, Community Solutions: Grantmaking for Comprehensive Impact. 

Jay provided valuable insight as to why it has been difficult for communities to find comprehensive solutions before now, how funders need to be open to supporting bigger issues and systems change, and how support services can be set up to foster better relationships between funders and communities. Learn more here! 

Can This Collaboration Be Saved? - Paul Mattessich, Executive Director at the Wilder Research Center, presents twenty factors that can make or break any group effort. With the caveat that there’s no foolproof way to predict the outcome of any undertaking that involves people and organizations working together, this article highlights a few basic checkpoints that can be quite revealing. The content of the article is adapted from the book Collaboration: What Makes It Work. Read more here.

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Sherri Torjman - Sherri Torjman is Vice-President of the Caledon Institute of Social Policy. She is the author of many Caledon reports including Reclaiming Our Humanity, The Social Dimension of Sustainable Development, Strategies for a Caring Society, Survival-of-the-Fittest Employment Policy, Innovation and Community Economic Development, The Key to Kyoto, Are Outcomes the Best Outcome?, and Proposal for a National Personal Supports Fund. 

Each paper is available on the Caledon website.

Ms. Torjman wrote the welfare series of reports for the National Council of Welfare and has authored four books on disability policy. She has worked for the House of Commons Committee on the Disabled, the House of Commons Committee on Child Care and the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies.

Ms. Torjman was co-Chair of the Technical Advisory Committee on Tax Measures for Persons with Disabilities. The Committee reported to the Minister of Finance and the Minister of National Revenue in December 2004. (See www.disabilitytax.ca for the final report).

Ms. Torjman taught a course in social policy at McGill University and is a former Board Member of The Trillium Foundation.

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