County’s poverty problem has no easy fix

from the Minden Times

No further than our own backyard
Posted By JENN WATT

This is the final article in a series on poverty in the Highlands.

Poverty is not yet a solvable dilemma. Because it is the consequence of so many factors – family income, social services, available employment, education, housing, support networks – there is no one way to fix Haliburton County’s poverty.

A large piece comes from being rural. There isn’t the available infrastructure to entice new families to move here, and there aren’t resources to keep professionals from leaving. There is also no transportation system to help people to and from work, or the store, or to school. There is a dire need for affordable housing.

For those who stay, the employment landscape is a challenge. Jobs for those with postsecondary degrees are scarce. There are well-paying jobs for skilled labour, but mostly in the summer. Resorts are also big employers, but again, only seasonally.

But it is not all gloomy in the Highlands. There are examples of how anti-poverty strategies can work, right in our own community. There are also inspirational stories from nearby.

Our neighbours

Although no two places are totally the same, there are lesson to be learned from how our neighbours are addressing some of the obstacles to ending poverty.

In Renfrew County, Lyn Smith co-ordinates the Renfrew County Child Poverty Action Network, founded in 2000 after the release of a report on the state of child welfare. The network is composed of community organizations that have a stake in improving the lives of children living in poverty.

Like Haliburton, seasonal, low-paying employment is prevalent in the geographically vast and rural Renfrew County, located between Ottawa and Haliburton.

Smith says that while her group works to educate on the large issues that create poverty like poor wages and education, it tries to minimize the impact that poverty has on children.

“We do practical assistance programs. We actually help people that need it now, but we also spend a great deal of time educating people about what poverty is and what it feels like to live in poverty,” she says.

CPAN runs a backpack program that supplies children with all of the essentials for school and at least one pair of new shoes. This year they gave out over 1,000. It also does a snowsuit program and gives money to families for children’s extracurricular activities. It runs training programs on poverty reduction and advocates for better social assistance at the provincial level. A large part of its work is educational.

“Some people have this idea that you wake up in the morning and say, ‘I’m going to have six kids and not do a thing to support myself, and I’m going worry about food for my kids, and my house being repossessed, and the heat being cut off, and people knocking on my door, and creditors phoning me up and having my kids be looked down upon.’ I don’t know why anybody wants to go through all that crap day after day, you know what I mean?” she says.

CPAN runs purely on grant funding and donations.

A similar effort is happening in Peterborough where, 30 years ago, concerned community groups and citizens came together to form the Peterborough Social Planning Council.

“To have a truly healthy community we must remove the barriers to full inclusion and involvement in our society,” says its website.

The council does non-partisan research into social issues including affordable housing, poverty and violence for the city of Peterborough.

It has a small staff and is funded by the United Way, the city of Peterborough, the county and Human Resource Skills Development Canada.

“We create a Peterborough profile every four years. The next will be at the end of this year. In addition to that, we’re involved with the United Way Peterborough social plan,” says co-ordinator Brenda Dales.

The social planning website is packed with reports and community groups the council has participated in over the years.

“When the mayor’s taskforce was established on poverty reduction … we provided the documentation. We came up with the recommendations for the action committee,” she says.

The council, over the years, helped to organized over 10 new programs for the community, including a food-share, an affordable housing committee, and a youth council, among others and continues to facilitate community action like open forums, debates and research on social issues.

Our own backyard

A little known program called the Rural Victims Transportation Network has been running in Kawartha Lakes and Haliburton for a year and a half. Its mandate is to provide transportation for victims of abuse and violence – for youth, men, women and seniors – to counselling sessions, legal appointments, trips to look for housing, to hospitals in Orillia and Peterborough.

“This is actually a pilot project. Haliburton and Kawartha Lakes are the only two areas in all of Ontario,” says program co-ordinator Liza Hancock.

Hancock says that after a survey of agencies and women who had been through violence, it was decided that transportation was the biggest gap to getting help.

For those living in poverty, or without access to a vehicle for another reason, getting out of dangerous situations is even harder than for those with cars. The usage of the transportation network signals just how important it is.

Between July 1, 2007 and February 1, 2008, the network, made up of just 15 volunteers, made 180 trips over 22,000 kilometres. “It’s amazing because that’s when the program wasn’t very well-known and it just keeps getting busier and busier,” she says of the numbers.

“If you’re in a bad relationship and you live in Haliburton County, it’s the only county without a shelter in all of Ontario,” Hancock says.

In addition, if you’ve been sexually assaulted and need a forensic test, you also can’t get it done in the county so the transportation network will drive you to Orillia or Peterborough.

Funding from the Ontario Victims Services Secretariat for the transportation network runs out at the end of June and Hancock is hoping to find a government or corporate sponsor to keep the program functional.

“Transportation is an issue for everybody. Getting youth to job interviews in Lindsay or Peterborough or to get to sports or leisure events. For seniors to get to shopping and to doctors’ appointments. Transportation is a huge issue for everyone, especially everyone who is poor and working class,” Hancock says. “Specifically for survivors [of abuse] it can be the difference between life or death.”

As long as the program is running, those who are dealing with abuse can arrange for rides from trained volunteers in Haliburton County and Kawartha Lakes by calling Liza Hancock at 705-328-4843.

Our community

The senate committee interim report that has been referenced throughout this series, called Understanding Freefall, identified some potential tools in the fight against poverty. One that was praised by nearly all who reported to the committee was the Community Futures Development Corporation network, of which the Haliburton County Development Corporation is one. (The senate committee on rural poverty will be delivering its final report later this year.)

Jim Blake, community economic development co-ordinator, describes HCDC as a group that assists both the community and the economy develop at the same time.

“For the community to thrive, to be able to attract people, be a place where people want to stay, where people want to live, where people want to retire, it has to have good infrastructure, it has to have good social services, it needs to have the opportunities for healthy active living, it needs engaged citizens and volunteer leadership. It needs a whole variety of things for it to be a healthy community,” Blake says. “It’s really working with the different organizations in the community and really helping to and working at building a vibrant community.”

HCDC was created by the federal government to stir up rural economies, but unlike most top-heavy government programs, this one placed all of the power (and money) at the local level. That’s what Blake says makes it successful.

“One of the reasons the program works so well is that instead of the program being run from an office in the federal government, or by federal staff, each [one] is a separate organization with a local board of directors and staff,” he says.

Because it is run by local people, it can respond to local needs, Blake says.

HCDC funds small businesses with loans as well as funding community projects. The loan portion came from an initial grant 20 years ago from the federal government for $2 million. Interest from the loans feeds that pot of money, which has grown to about $10 million. The money they give to businesses go to a wide range of things.

“It could be to help someone buy a vehicle, to help with a mortgage, to help with cash flow or to help with consolidating credit,” he says.

On the other side, HCDC funds projects like Riverwalk that promote healthy, active communities.

“One of the things is if you have people who are active and who are healthy then you’re going to have a better workforce, you’re not using the health system, people feel better about themselves. The more that you make those opportunities accessible to people the healthier people will be,” Blake says.

Following a similar train of logic, Fay Martin spearheaded a Haliburton County branch of the successful Orillia group Places for People in December 2006.

Inspired by the holistic approach of the not-for-profit corporation, Martin and a handful of concerned residents began piecing together a local version.

The concept is simple: buy a rundown house, fix it up and rent it for cheap to those who need it most. Throw in an investment fund for the tenants fed by a small part of the rent they pay, insert support systems to help them get through their other issues and you have the makings of a promising anti-poverty project.

“As the problem gets bigger everyone says there’s so much to do I just don’t know where to start,” says Martin of poverty in Haliburton.

“So we decided well, let’s just start, damn it. … We won’t solve the problem, but hopefully we’ll demonstrate that it can be solved, because that’s leading to optimism that it can be solved … It will benefit people one at a time,” she said at the Minden community forum on Wednesday night.

And there’s good reason to think she’s right. Places for People Orillia started up only six years ago and is already looking to buy a second house. It has had more than $77,000 in donations and has made $105,000 worth of improvements to its first house.

“There are three reasons we thought this was a really good model. One was that it served the underserviced in our community. Second, it strengthened the community by allowing the community a chance to help those who are most vulnerable among us. Third, it improves our streetscape. And if you look around, we could stand some sprucing up. There are parts of our community that look pretty bedraggled and there are buildings that people live in that are not the quality that they should be. They don’t look good and they don’t live well,” says Martin.

Like CPAN in Renfrew County, Places for People takes a multi-faceted approach that both deals with the immediate needs of housing, while addressing the longer-term issues such as savings, employment and social services.

“[In Orillia,] they are now financially able to buy their next house. They can afford to do it just by leveraging the increase in the value of the house. So that’s one reason why I’m very optimistic it can happen here,” says Martin.

“Although we aren’t as rich a community as Orillia, we do have a very, very generous community. We have a community that would love nothing better than to roll up its sleeves,” she says.

Concerned with the fact that most poor people don’t own cars and transportation, Places for People is looking for a house in one of the more urban centres – Minden, Haliburton or Wilberforce – so tenants can walk to schools, stores and medical facilities. Since real estate is cheaper in Minden, Martin guesses that is where the first house will be.

Putting it together

The anti-poverty movement could learn a lot from the environmentalists, says Renfrew’s Lyn Smith. Creating a powerful, loud voice to pressure politicians to fund more affordable housing, better assistance programs and a livable wage would get a lot done.

“I’m hoping that one day everyone says, ‘Wow, we could have so much power here. We could be the biggest squeaky wheel, like the environmentalists,’” she says.

“A lot of us poverty organizations are like little cogs working independently: some are bigger than others, some work more efficiently and some don’t, but you know if we all connected up, imagine the machine we could make. It’s just a matter of organization,” she says.

Already Haliburton is stirring with the same sentiment. Anti-poverty groups gathered at a U-Links breakfast about a month ago and determined that some sort of planning council – perhaps not as elaborate as the one in Peterborough – would be perfect for uniting the voices across the county.