Strategic plan will help adapt to change
Notre-Dame-de- Grâce is evolving faster than ever, and a local nonprofit organization is paving the way into the future with a strategic plan that addresses the many social issues residents face every day.
“The portrait of the neighbourhood is changing so fast, and we need to cope with that,” said Halah Al-Ubaidi, executive director of the N.D.G. Community Council, which is now in its 75th year of operations.
“There are big changes in N.D.G.” Just in the last few years, she explained, the umbrella health organization was merged to form the CIUSSS West-Central Montreal and electoral boundary lines have changed.
Schools in N.D.G are overflowing as more immigrants and refugees settle in the area, she said. While those new immigrants need local services, children are being bused out of the neighbourhood to attend school in places like St-Henri.
“Four years ago, I didn’t have that problem,” she said, and this is why the strategic plan needs to be reworked every three years, putting issues in the spotlight so community groups and city officials can see which social services need attention.
Al-Ubaidi noted a strategic plan had been established every decade or so, with the more recent being 1997, 2004 and 2013. In 2013, it was established as a three-year plan for the first time. There are 30 community tables across the island of Montreal, which all establish plans of their own, Al-Ubaidi said.
The council’s website states: “The N.D.G. Strategic Plan is a framework to help the community sectors of N.D.G. work together and harmonize the wide range of activities and services they deliver, to enhance the impact of their efforts.”
It takes about a year to put together a strategic plan, said AlUbaidi, with the most recent study getting underway in January.
As previously, she said a Quality of Life conference, set for May 13, will be held.
It is open to the public and will bring N.D.G. stakeholders and citizens together to review statistical mapping and discuss such issues as food security, housing and the influx of refugees. The plan will then be written over the summer.
“This is an opportunity to bring the citizens and stakeholders together to talk about the themes that matter most to us and to organize around them,” said Marlo Turner Ritchie, who has been hired as a consultant for the planning process.
“I think it’s really exciting because people working in community development tend to get overwhelmed with the amount of needs that exist in the neighbourhood.”
Community groups and institutions tend to get stuck in “silos” where, for example, schools might only work with schools on issues like N.D.G.’s high drop-out rates, explained Turner Ritchie. It’s more effective, she said, to take a well-rounded approach with all the community services working as a team to improve the situation.
“We really need to bust out of those silos and work together.”
The first phase will be to collect statistical research on N.D.G. to produce a quantitative and qualitative map of “the realities of the neighbourhood,” Turner Ritchie said. Then there is community consultation as well. This will include, she said, focus groups and an inter-generational lunch where teens and seniors will come together to discuss the past, present and future of N.D.G.
She launched the Plan N.D.G. Facebook page to encourage community involvement online, giving people an opportunity to contribute text or video on different themes.
In N.D.G., she said about 25 per cent of households fall below the poverty line while both the rental housing stock and population is aging. There are a lot of single-parent families, she noted, especially single moms.
“These are just some of the complex issues we’re tackling on a regular basis and it’s important to stop and take inventory of whose doing what and what the best courses of action are,” she said.
“We need to lift our heads up collectively, look to the horizon and ask, ‘Where do we want to be in the future?’”