City's poverty report ready next month

from The Hamilton Spectator

By Bill Dunphy

A month from now, Hamilton will finally get a look at the city's first real community action plan on poverty.

The twice delayed action plan, authored by staff and members of the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction, will set out what they're calling the "starting point strategies," action they hope will put the city on the road to becoming the "best place to raise a child."

The initial draft of the report -- due December 2006 -- was sent back for rewriting by the roundtable and was supposed to be unveiled as early as last week. Instead, invitations for a March 7 community meeting were sent out to about 250 poverty activists, agency members and civil servants who are involved in the daily battle on poverty.

"The report's in the final stages of writing or editing. It's complex, and there are so many people we have to consult," explained roundtable executive director Liz Weaver.

Weaver said some of the reworking of the document involved recognizing the critical work already being done in the anti-poverty field and finding the appropriate way for the roundtable to support that work and integrate it into the city-wide effort.

"You've got to consult, talk to a lot of people," she said.

Weaver wasn't worried that the action plan was being released well past the deadline for initiatives to be included in the 2007 city budget. The roundtable was a joint initiative of the city and the Hamilton Community Foundation.

"Just because the city budget will be well along by then doesn't mean that we haven't used other strategies to talk with the city. We've met with the new mayor, met with the corporate management team, we're going to be sending a delegation to (make a presentation to) the city's budget committee," Weaver said.

"Just because we haven't printed out the report and taken it out to the community yet doesn't mean we haven't been doing anything."

She said the roundtable also intends to weigh-in as the city embarks on strategic planning in the spring.

In fact, Weaver says, there has been a lot of community work on poverty since the roundtable was launched in 2005, and their community meeting March 7 will celebrate a sampling of that work.

"There have been so many community-led initiatives," says Weaver, citing The Spectator's Kids Unlimited project and Mohawk College's partnership with the Robert Land Community Centre.

"There have been 25-30 of those kinds of initiatives and we want to celebrate those early successes, show the energy with which the community has been responding."

It is, she said, "very typical of Hamilton, that we think of so many creative ways to respond to a challenge."