 When you dream alone, it remains just a dream; when you dream together it is the beginning of a new reality.
~ Brazilian Proverb
|
When you register for Reducing Poverty in Ontario: A Place-Based Approach, you are becoming part of a learning community whose journey will continue even after our three days together have ended. Read below to learn more about:
This gathering will provide you with inspiration, information and tools to join others in generating a shared vision for poverty reduction that’s unique to the realities where you live. Together, we will consider:
Innovation In Poverty Reduction
- The difference between reducing and alleviating poverty
- Innovative strategies and real examples from across Canada
- The stories behind the 100,000 people who are already less poor
- How communities are working across sectors to meet this challenge
A Place-Based Community Approach
- Why have millions been invested in this approach over the past 5 years?
- How reducing poverty builds resilient communities
- What makes each community unique and how to use those assets
- Why government is a good partner - but needs community leadership
Collaborative Leadership
- How to form collaborative teams –and good strategies to engage them
- How to raise local funds in difficult times
- When and how to best engage different stakeholders
- Working with diverse perspectives
- How to effectively engage citizens living the experience of poverty
- How to work with competitors and identify collaborators
- Designing and facilitating collaborative interventions
Back to top.
To help you to prepare for your participation at the June event, registered participants will receive relevant articles to read and may also be invited to participate in a pre-event learning call. We are suggesting three resources as pre-reading for our event:
Ontario’s Poverty Reduction Strategy - This is Ontario’s long-term poverty reduction plan. It focuses first on giving children and their families the support they need to achieve their full potential and sets aggressive targets – reducing the number of children living in poverty by 25 per cent over 5 years. You can read the full report here. It is particularly important that you read Chapter 2: Stronger, Healthier Communities, so you are able to fully participate in the dialogue with Deb Matthews on Day 2. Download chapter 2 of the report here.
Shared Space: The Communities Agenda - In this paper, Sherri Torjman explores the goal of the Communities Agenda – how to promote resilience – in order to build strong and vibrant communities. Learn more about the substance and process of this work here.
Poverty Reduction Frameworks and Strategies - Garry Loewen has beautifully synthesized the essence of Vibrant Communities’ work over the past seven years in this aide that provides a rich resource to assist people and communities in developing more comprehensive approaches to reducing poverty. Read the report here.
Back to top.
A Place based approach is about collaboration which is more than coordination or partnership. It is a way of working that builds the will of a community to work together to bring about a desired future for sustainable poverty reduction.
Our gathering is targeted to individuals like you who come from a cross section of organizations that use collaborative processes to find new solutions to complex issues, like poverty, that face our communities. Learn more about how we plan to form the learning community here.
Back to top.
Ontario’s poverty-reduction strategy offers communities an invitation to embrace a new comprehensive way of working together at the community level to eradicate poverty. Being a leader of this work in your community can be challenging – particularly when the work requires that you simultaneously invent new processes and also solve the existing problems of poverty.
Being part of an ongoing learning community is one important way that we can support you in meeting these challenges. As part of this community, you can exchange ideas and share tools and experiences with other vibrant communities across Canada who are working to reduce poverty. Research has shown that such learning communities become important “incubators” for new knowledge, skills, and competencies to develop. They also provide individual leaders with support to overcome their isolation by offering a community of peers.
As a participant at this gathering, you will have the opportunity to become an affiliate in an effort to test the most effective ways to reduce poverty at the community level. As an affiliate, you will strengthen your own professional networks by becoming eligible to:
In exchange, you will be asked to share your own learning, insights and reflections with this broader community.
Back to top. |
