Blog Action Day: Poverty in Peace River?

October 15 is Blog Action Day and the topic for 2008 is poverty. Some people might wonder whether poverty actually exists in Peace River. There are, of course, a few street people who are the more visible face of poverty, but people working with families see another side and understand that yes, we do have poverty and we have far too many children growing up in poverty.

What IS poverty anyway? Vibrant Calgary has defined it as “the condition of a human being who does not have sufficient economic and other resources to live with the dignity, choices and power which support full participation in society.”

And why is full participation in society important? We all need to feel that we belong, and unfortunately, when a person is poor, that sense of belonging may be harder to achieve. Most seriously, for disaffected youth, joining a gang may seem like a good way to gain a sense of belonging.

The recent spate of violence in Peace River is largely gang-related, according to the RCMP. Our community needs to find ways to address the problem by looking beyond criminal activity to the root causes, and one of those is poverty.

When I attended the Tamarack Collaborating Communities Institute in Kitchener in September, I was hugely impressed with what a number of communities are doing to reduce poverty. For example, as I've written in a previous article, in Hamilton, where in 2005 20% of the population lived in poverty, the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction was convened and has mobilized the whole city to work on poverty reduction.

Could Peace River do something similar on a much smaller scale? I once belonged to the Poverty Action Committee in Peace River, but we needed a much larger body of people, including businesses, if we were going to make much difference. That group runs the Peace River Soup Kitchen, which is important, but clearly only one piece of the whole.

When the Town does its community visioning activities (stay tuned for details), I hope that residents will participate fully and will bring their best thinking and creativity to the complex issues, like poverty, that are facing us.

How do we ensure that everyone feels a part of the community? How do we help people move beyond poverty into good jobs? How we do ensure that people have safe and affordable housing in which to live and raise their families? How do we accommodate all ages and stages of life? Lots of questions--let's see if we can work together to find solutions.

Tamarack & Six Thinking Hats

No, I didn't fall off the face of the earth! After just two blog entries about the fabulous Tamarack Communities Collaborating Institute, it seemed like every moment was taken up and there was little time for writing. Sleep became more important.

It was a great week in Kitchener and I'm so grateful that I was able to attend. There were so many connections made with people who are working for change in their communities.

Learning about the work that Hamilton's Roundtable on Poverty Reduction is doing was a particularly inspiring, but there were so many community movers and shakers from a wide variety of organizations, including United Way and community foundations, a credit union, immigrant organizations, Vibrant Communities (including Vibrant Edmonton and Vibrant Calgary), and many more.

Of the 80 participants, I think I was the only elected official, but the new executive director of Vibrant Edmonton is a former City of Edmonton Councillor, so we had lots to talk about.

A number of Albertans met at the end of the Institute to figure out how we can keep the momentum going in our province for creating change through community collaboration. More on that as we have a chance to process all we learned and to get back in touch with each other.

Following the week in Kitchener, I travelled to Ottawa for a 2-day workshop on Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats tool. De Bono coined the concept of "lateral thinking" and has written dozens of books on thinking and decision-making. The workshop was an excellent opportunity to build on things I learned at Tamarack;

del.icio.us Tags: collaboration,change,workshops,poverty

and the idea of parallel thinking using the six hats, along with the creativity activities, will be of much use in many areas of my professional, public, and personal life.

Next week, Mayor and Council are in Edmonton attending the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association (AUMA) convention. If I get a chance, I'll post updates.

Vibrant Communities/Poverty

This morning I visited the Tamarack: An Institute for Community Engagement website (http://tamarackcommunity.ca/g2.php) for information on Stand Up Against Poverty events around the world on October 17, which has been recognized since 1992 by the United Nations as the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty . You can see the list of Canadian events at: http://www.standagainstpoverty.org/events/ca

Also on the Tamarack website is information about the Vibrant Communities initiative. Although there are no small towns involved, I wonder if we couldn't learn from the work being done in large urban centres? Edmonton and Calgary are involved as "Trail Blazer" communities so we have role models close by.

Vibrant Communities is described as "a community-driven effort to reduce poverty in Canada by creating partnerships that make use of our most valuable assets – people, organizations, businesses and governments. It’s a unique approach to poverty reduction that allows communities to learn from — and help — each other."

If you want to learn more, here's the URL: http://tamarackcommunity.ca/g2s1.html

The Poverty Action Committee is a small group of people in Peace River working on the issue , but they can't do it alone. What else could we be doing, as a community, to tackle poverty in our midst? Is there a role for Town Council?