Creating Learning Opportunities

Everyone pays a high price for poverty. Taxpayers pay for increased social services, health care and policing. The region loses its economic vibrancy when affordability and social instability are prevalent. Society suffers as income gaps widen and social cohesion is weakened. The Quality of Life CHALLENGE’s vision is for a vibrant and sustainable region where everyone lives in a safe and decent home, able to care for themselves, their families and their community.

The Quality of Life CHALLENGE is one of 15 designated Vibrant Communities across Canada. Vibrant Communities is a community-driven effort to reduce poverty in Canada by creating partnerships that make use of our most valuable assets – people, organizations, businesses and governments. It’s a unique approach to poverty reduction that allows communities to learn from — and help — each other. Vibrant Communities links communities across Canada, from British Columbia to Newfoundland, in a collective effort to test the most effective ways to reduce poverty at the grassroots level. Recently Vibrant Communities in British Columbia (BC’s Capital Region, Surrey and Abbotsford) began to explore shared community priorities and opportunities to collaborate at a provincial level.

All Vibrant Communities are committed to reducing poverty, not just alleviating its effects. We want fewer poor, not a higher standard of poverty. Poverty reduction activities are interventions that reduce the number of people in poverty and/or the depth of people’s poverty by ensuring that they have access to political, social or economic resources that provide them with the ability to make measurable progress out of poverty. Poverty reduction is increasingly proposed as a complement - and at times even an alternative - to poverty alleviation which focuses on making the conditions of poverty less severe (e.g. food hampers, homeless shelters).

The Quality of Life CHALLENGE is established as a non-partisan mechanism to enable community collaboration toward the prevention and reduction of poverty in the Capital Region. It is intended to bring our community together around a common concern to co-create solutions to poverty in this region. By working collaboratively, it is hoped that our community can leverage system change and resources required, and align with economic development, homelessness, housing and other strategies currently moving forward in our community. By transcending the barriers and silos that prevent our community from achieving progress, the Quality of Life CHALLENGE seeks to establish a strong, unified community voice that can build and advance a community agenda for change and achieve measurable outcomes in this national effort to bring an end to poverty.

CREATE LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES about:

• POVERTY: Deepen public understanding of the local realities of living in poverty through the actions of people who live on low or limited income.
• HOW TO MOVE OUT OF POVERTY: Research and develop tips and tools to enhance the knowledge of individuals and families to cope with daily challenges, advance up the ladder of opportunity and out of the cycle of poverty.
• HOW TO TAKE ACTION: Disseminate information and create dialogue about the actions that citizens could take to prevent and reduce poverty.

Key Activities:

• “Poverty Experience” learning workshops
• Tips and Tools for Family Economic Success