Poverty report delayed

from The Hamilton Spectator

Staff are asked to retool long-awaited community action plan

Bill Dunphy

Hamiltonians are going to have to wait a bit longer to get their hands on a new community anti-poverty plan that had been scheduled for release this month.

At a meeting yesterday morning, members of the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction asked staff to re-tool the draft community action plan, a long-awaited critical next step in their work.

"We've got it now, we've read it and discussed it," poverty roundtable chair Mark Chamberlain said yesterday following the meeting.

"It's being rewritten over the next few weeks," he added, and said he hopes the roundtable will release a "core" report in February with perhaps other related reports to follow.

"It's taking us a bit longer than we hoped."

The roundtable -- an unprecedented gathering of businesses (including The Spectator), educators, social agencies, governments and grassroots activists -- has spent 18 months researching, educating themselves and consulting on the best ways to reduce poverty in a city where, by most statistical measures, one in five are viewed as poor.

Earlier this year, the roundtable released a "framework" report and announced what they hoped the entire city would adopt as a common aspiration: making Hamilton the best place to raise a child.

The community plan is expected to map ways for existing social programs and agencies to re-align their work, to think differently, while also offering the entire city ways to plug into that aspiration.

The plan is about culture change, attitude change, Chamberlain said, and part of that involves a lot of communication and education.

"There lies the hard part -- when you actually describe it, in a way that's complete -- it can read like a textbook, which can be frustrating," he said, offering an analogy. "I'm describing the second, third and fourth laws of Newtonian physics and you're saying, I just want to know how to build a chair."

Peter Hutton, a roundtable member who is also part of the grassroots Income Security Working Group that has expressed reservations about the roundtable's budget and timetable in the past, said he understands the need for the delay and is "generally happy with the results (so far).

"But I know there's that sense of urgency coming from people with low income, I know that there's still going to be a high level of frustration" with the delays and the roundtable's approach.

Hutton's group met with the roundtable yesterday, explained their work and their focus and spoke of their concerns.

Chamberlain said the roundtable was listening.

"This is a process, it takes time -- not to say they shouldn't be frustrated with the time, they should be. But it takes time."