$1M fund for social cohesion in Regent Park Priorities include safety, access to community spaces and employment opportunities
“I’ve been living in Regent Park for 22 years now,” Saquib Hassan says. “I saw the different stages of the revitalization process and learned what community development really is, and what gaps need to be filled.”
When most people think of the massive Regent Park revitalization, they picture the new buildings, but less visible is the upheaval residents experience. However, just as those buildings had architectural blueprints to guide their construction, a social development plan, created by residents themselves, aimed to ensure social cohesion during and after the revitalization. To ensure it succeeds, the United Way is helping create a new $1-million Social Impact Fund to fill some of the gaps Hassan speaks of.
“This community impact investment fund asks how can we continue to activate some of the recommendations in the social development plan,” says Ruth Crammond, vice-president of community investment and development at the United Way. “You can change the built form of the community, but it’s really important to look at the social fabric and how all the people interact together.”
Some of the community-identified priorities the fund will contribute to are neighbourhood safety, access to space for meetings and group activities, improved communication and employment opportunities, as well as other projects residents will propose.
The United Way was approached by a coalition that included local residents; the Daniels Corporation, which has been building the new Regent Park; the City of Toronto; the Toronto Community Housing Corporation; and other community service agencies in the area. They were tasked with helping these partners create and manage the fund, and to figure out who is eligible to apply for it. That last part is important; the fund is being designed to be open to as wide a variety of applicants as possible.
“The plan is still coming together, but there will be four tiers of groups and
Region chapter of the United Way last year, Zanotti became head of the biggest United Way in the world. It was, he admits, as much a challenge as an opportunity.
“Our research has shown we need to be more intentional in the places we invest in, the priorities and the people. The merger was really grounded in our research — the income inequality doesn’t know borders. The mergers have allowed us to get really big but stay small in local solutions.”
Zanotti recalls the landmark 2004 United Way study, Poverty by Postal Code, which laid out how social problems once considered explicitly urban had been migrating outside the downtown to the suburbs, driven by sprawl and housing prices and the revival of the urban core. It was the motivation for so many of the decisions the agency would end up making in the next decade and a half.
“When we put out Poverty by Postal Code in 2004, two-thirds of our money was in the downtown core,” Zanotti says. “Today we’ve flipped that completely so a third is in the core.”
Of course, when you talk about funding you talk about fundraising, and that’s a huge part of Zanotti’s job. The United Way has just launched its “Unignorable” campaign, built around a colour — an orange coral designed for it by the Pantone Color Institute, and meant to help evoke the campaign’s core issues, such as poverty, homelessness and domestic violence. It’s a new way of fundraising for a social service agency that needs to innovate.
Zanotti describes the old way of fundraising as “transactional — come September we roll out the United Way thermometer, they do a couple of bake sales, they make some money, and someone gives us one of those big cheques.”
Besides having to compete with so many other appeals for charity dollars and the resultant fundraising fatigue, he says there’s also been a change in corporate culture, one he welcomes.
“We’ve always been really blessed to be the charitable partner of choice for so many companies across Canada,” he says. “But somewhere in there we started talking to them about deep issues with research. And they as corporate partners started thinking about their corporate social responsibility — how do they engage with community?
“Of course, for so many of our corporate partners, its purpose helps them attract talent. It helps them retain talent. It helps them build employee engagement. So the act of doing good for companies helps their bottom line.”
This led to major commitments by the Bank of Montreal and law firm McCarthy Tétrault to help tackle issues such as neighbourhood development and economic opportunities for marginalized groups such as youth, the disabled, LGBTQ, women and Indigenous communities.
“The days of running a United Way fundraising campaign with the thermometer are pretty much over.”
These sorts of commitments — long term, and based on building relationships that are focused on specific targets — are the ones Zanotti thinks need to happen, since results will only come with years and years of effort.
“For me, personally, having been in this for quite a long time, you get to a moment when you realize we’re not going fundraise or social service or charity our way out of this … Care is something we give to each other freely, and you cannot download it to let the charitable sector deal with it, let businesses raise money for it. It actually means you’ve got to roll up your sleeves and sit at a table and volunteer in your local community.
“You get to a moment when you realize we’re not going fundraise or social service or charity our way out of this.” DANIELE ZANOTTI UNITED WAY
“The only way we’re going to solve it is with slow care, because all the research says it takes decades to build communities and resilience and infrastructure. Communities that know each other, that are connected, that volunteer together also have the highest GDP growth, lower crime rates, lower ER visits, better employment. So the correlation is not new, the solutions aren’t new, but you’ve got to do some freaking work, and care about your community.”