[Canada] We're declaring war on poverty

from The Hamilton Spectator

The Poverty Project
By Bill Dunphy
The Hamilton Spectator

A small group of community leaders and activists take the first step this morning in enlisting the entire city in a four- year war on poverty.

"Poverty issues need to be part of the conversation around the dinner table, around the lunch table and around the board room table," said Paul Johnson of the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction.

The Roundtable, a joint effort of the Hamilton Community Foundation and the city, was formed a little over a year ago to bring leaders from industry, business, education, media, and social services together to build a community plan for the reduction or elimination of poverty in a city that holds some of the deepest urban concentrations of poverty in the country.

It unveils that plan today.

Nearly one-fifth of the city, about 95,000 people, is living in poverty, while for some segments of society (women, children, natives, recent immigrants and visible minorities) the poverty rates run even higher.

Among the hardest hit are children -- census data shows that 22,525 Hamilton children, one in four, are living in poverty.

Roundtable members, like many working in the social service sector, believe frankly that our "system" isn't working.

They believe that agencies and departments and governments and foundations are so swamped trying to meet the daily needs of the city's poor that they are focused on alleviating poverty, not eliminating or preventing it.

The Roundtable wants to change that, to find a different way of doing things.

Supported by the Hamilton Community Foundation, the city's community services department and the Social Planning Research Council, the Roundtable set about building its plan. Following the advice of an American Jay Connor, founder of The Collaboratory for Community Support, the group set about choosing an aspiration, a goal to try and rally the whole community behind.

After months of research, consultation and discussions, the Roundtable settled on a deceptively simple aspiration: Make Hamilton the Best Place to Raise a Child.

"We have a great opportunity to reduce poverty in our city by focusing on ways we as a community can ensure the development of children and youth," Johnson said.

Fellow roundtable member Carl Turkstra put his motivation a little more plainly -- "25 per cent of our children are living in poverty? That's just barbaric!"

The 200 people gathered at the Hamilton Convention Centre this morning will be asked to adopt this aspiration and begin planning how to turn it into a reality.

"This is not about short-term report generation or short-term activity -- this was about thinking long-term," Johnson explained. And it's also about thinking differently.

And this morning they'll be signing people up for that task.

bdunphy@thespec.com

905-526-3262

(For a copy of the Roundtable report visit thespec.com)