Valuing authentic voices can be a key to success
Real-world feedback from those experiencing poverty, guiding the city’s strategy
If you want to create programs to alleviate poverty, it makes sense to find out from those who actually live in poverty what their needs are. But typically that doesn’t happen.
“People go to school, they do public policy courses, then they go into government and they write policies,” says Leila Sarangi, manager of community programs at Women’s Habitat of Etobicoke, a women’s shelter and resources centre. “There’s not necessarily a lot of on-the-ground experience there.”
The result is policies and programs that don’t always meet the needs of those for whom they are designed.
But that picture is changing now, thanks to the formation of the Lived Experiences Advisory Group. A group of Torontonians who have lived in poverty will play a key role in the city’s Poverty Reduction Strategy. This newly formed group is the result of years of community-based consultations conducted across the city by Toronto’s Community-based Advisory Committee for Poverty Reduction Strategy — a committee Sarangi has been part of for 18 months.
Because of her work with women who are struggling, Sarangi brings a grassroots perspective and hands-on knowledge of what women need to work their way out of poverty.
“For women specifically, they need access to affordable, quality, safe housing,” says Sarangi. “They also need access to decent jobs, and they need access to quality, local child care. And those three things can’t be in isolation — they have to be overlapping and interlocking and embedded within each other.”
In taking that message to the city, Sarangi stresses that if those three elements are not together as a cohesive unit, women cannot break the poverty cycle. She has seen women who are leaving the shelter and may have found a daycare space, but it’s so far from their affordable housing unit that they can’t drop their child off and get to work on time.
“We’ve seen people turn down affordable housing units because it’s too far away,” she says, “or turn down daycare, or they turn down job offers. So that’s what we’ve been pushing for the city to address.”
It is the United Way that has helped get voices like Sarangi’s to the table. “They recognized the importance of that grassroots work for linking those experiences, ideas and solutions to policy-makers for facilitating that great connection,” she says. “The UW played a great role in us being at that table.”
That wasn’t the only role the charitable organization played. For the second round of women-only consultations, for instance, the United Way provided honorariums for women to be able to afford to attend and participate.
It also provided child care, tokens to cover transportation and food for the meetings.
“They were directly involved in supporting us and our grassroots organizing,” says Sarangi.
Such support is crucial for getting the kind of real-life input necessary for truly addressing poverty in Toronto, says Deputy Mayor Pamela McConnell, responsible for poverty reduction. “People with lived experiences are the experts on this. So we need to give them a forum and a table where we can bring their voice forward, and then we can put it into the immediate future and a longer path to prosperity.”
Partnering with the charity, McConnell says, has made all the difference.
“The United Way has been such a strong partner in this, both because of what their business is about and what they’re trying to do in neighbourhoods,” she says, “but also their ability to understand the importance of people with lived experience as the experts.”
The United Way also trained those who have lived in poverty to be the conversation facilitators at the meetings, so that the discussions cover the most relevant issues and that participants felt comfortable talking and contributing.
“That also gained us a whole lot of other people who can do future or further training on how to move this forward,” adds McConnell.
“They began to own the dialogue and own the solutions, which is terribly important as we try to move these pieces forward.”
McConnell says the city will continue to work with the United Way.
“It’s been a great marriage,” she says. “When a city government and a charity like the United Way work together, it can only mean good results in our neighbourhoods.”