SECTION 3: Three Case Studies in Toronto

In this section:

 

Introduction

To broaden our perspective on the role of community infrastructure in strengthening neighbourhoods, we identified three community organizations that have played an important role in the evolution of the community services sector in Toronto : Davenport Perth Neighbourhood Centre (DPNC), Family Service Association of Toronto (FSA) and Tropicana Community Services (TCS). These were selected in order to reflect some of the range of issues and challenges that this sector faces.

DPNC has built on its core mission of community development as a key strategy to strengthen its west-end central city catchment area and has benefited from the stability of its community health centre.

FSA is a city-wide agency serving families and communities that has developed innovative strategies to meet the needs of specific populations while also moving toward a de-centralized model of service with locations in North York and Scarborough .

TCS has broadened its original mandate to serve people, especially youth, from the Carib b ean to include the broader black community, all youth and newcomers in Scarborough .

The executive directors of each organization were interviewed and background materials including annual reports, financial statements and program evaluations were reviewed.

Back to top

Davenport Perth Neighbourhood Centre

For nearly 20 years, Davenport Perth Neighbourhood Centre (DPNC) has established new programs and services through investigation of emerging community needs and development of innovative responses. Serving a catchment area spanning several neighbourhoods, including approximately 60,000 people most of whom have come to Canada within the past 30 years, the Davenport-Perth neighbourhood is in many ways an invisible community that has not attracted significant media attention, neither positive nor negative.

It is rarely identified as a “high risk” area. Nestled in the west end, the DPNC community is bounded by St. Clair West on the North, Ossington and Alberta avenues to the East, Bloor Street to the South, and CN/CP tracks (Keele and Old Weston Road) to the West. The rate of poverty (25.7%) is higher in this area and higher than the City-wide average despite the fact that poverty in the former City of Toronto is not rising as fast as it is in the suburbs.

Community Health Centre fosters holistic programming and sustainability

DPNC is exceptional in that it is both a neighbourhood centre and a community health centre (CHC). The neighbourhood centre is a non-profit multi-service organization that is very much a community anchor that fosters social participation and promotes awareness and active celebration of people’s diversities though programs such as Arts for All, a multi-year project involving residents and artists in dramatic productions and University in the Community which offers university level liberal arts courses to adults who would not normally consider attending university.

DPNC strives to ensure that all community members, especially the most vulnerable, have access to adequate income, education and the network of social relationships that enable civic participation and assist community members to help each other and together address shared concerns.

The Community Health Centre operates with a multi-disciplinary team of doctors, nurse practitioners, dieticians, health promoters and counsellors to provide primary health and social support services.

DPNC is home to a range of services including:

DPNC adapts to community needs over time:

The community development model which engages staff; board members who are also service-users; and community partners, has kept DPNC in touch with emerging needs and facilitated innovative responses to those needs. For example, the Youth Program was developed in response to community concern about an increase in youth gang activity and the Employment Resource Centre was established following a strategic planning process that identified unemployment as a community priority.

The stability of the provincially-funded community health centre (CHC) has provided key support to the infrastructure of DPNC and enabled it to provide a wide range of preventive and primary care health services that have improved the well-being of community residents.

As an example, DPNC has developed skills and services to work with people with no formal legal status in Canada who may have lived in Canada for years. These needs were first identified by clinical staff at the community health centre when, at one point, nearly half of health-centre users had no status.

DPNC firmly contends that the community infrastructure needs to be recognized as an essential service. If this recognition is explicit, then resources would be more predictable, as they are for roads and sewers, for example, than they are now. With predictability and stability, DPNC would be able to dedicate some resources to identify emerging community needs at an early stage.

Back to top

Family Service Association of Toronto

Family Service Association (FSA) celebrates 90 years of service to Toronto. FSA delivers a wide range of programs to help achieve it s mission of “strengthened families and individuals in just and supportive communities.” With a mandate to serve vulnerable people across the City, FSA has intentionally moved to focus service in three main locations (Scarborough, North York and central Toronto) across the City in addition to co-locating staff with other service providers in neighbourhoods across the city including Rexdale, Lakeshore and Flemingdon Park.

In responding to the changing demographic in Toronto, FSA has broadened its language capacity to provide services, now more than 20 languages.

In the 90s, its work has become more specialized; for example, generic counselling has broadened to include additional, more specific services to the lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, trans-gendered population.

In the area of services to those with intellectual disabilities, FSA has pioneered a community development model which works to empower disabled individuals to make choices and determine his/her life direction using the resources of individualized funding and circles of support in the community.

In partnership with two neighbourhood centres, St. Christopher House and St. Stephen’s Community House, and the Y.W.C.A., FSA is the Toronto administrative lead of Learn Save, a national research and demonstration project led by Social Enterprise Development Initiatives in Toronto.Learn Save provides matched savings accounts to eligible low income working people to build their personal assets by getting training or starting a small business.

FSA responds to changing community needs over time:

Key factors that have enabled FSA to adapt to changing needs over time include a tradition of strong staff at all levels and a pattern of consistent staff and board leadership. Its scale as a large organization allows some capacity for innovation and risk-taking. The unique structure of FSA’s Employee Assistance Program which generates earned income is a significant factor in the agency’s sustainability.

FSA has consistently worked to adapt its services to meet the changing needs of Toronto ’s families. In the past 15 years, FSA has diligently worked with the ethno-cultural, ethno-racial groups in Toronto to adapt its services to meet emerging needs.

In its counselling, family violence program for both women and men, services for intellectually disabled, and support for seniors and caregivers, FSA wrestled with the need for change and has made important progress. For example, the Portuguese Inclusion Project resulted in increased participation in community programs and employment of young adults with intellectual disabilities.

Working with the Iranian community, FSA is developing a model to support Iranian families going through separation and divorce. At the same time, FSA has maintained strong commitment to press for systemic change through its decade-long leadership and support to Campaign 2000, a cross-Canada coalition aiming to raise awareness and influence decision-making on child and family poverty.

A key decision in the mid 90s led to the creation of the Community Action Team that leads the agency’s community development work in partnership with newcomer communities.

Back to top

Tropicana Community Services

Founded in 1980 to serve disadvantaged youth and their families from the Caribbean, Tropicana Community Services (TCS) now serves a catchment area bounded by Yonge Street on the West, Steeles on the North, Lake Ontario on the South and extends to the City boundary on the East. As community needs changed and fewer Caribbean immigrants came to Toronto, TCS broadened its mandate to include all youth and newcomers. Increasingly, newcomers from continental Africa and South Asia are coming to TCS which maintains its original mission to provide culturally appropriate social services which help to build a healthier community. In the past five years, TCS is working with more Canadian-born children of immigrant parents.

Currently TCS provides counselling to victims of domestic violence, settlement services, youth programs including the Scarborough Youth Resource Centre, a one-stop shop for youth issues , and the Alternative Youth Centre for Employment.

TCS operates from five locations in Scarborough office and also provides additional programming in schools. An extensive tutoring program run by volunteers is complemented by summer camp and arts programs.

Children of Tomorrow Child Care Centres offer infants through school age children an enriching and educational environment.

As Poverty by Postal Code identified, Scarborough includes five of the 23 neighbourhoods with very high poverty rates, including Oakridge with a poverty rate of 57.8% and Morningside with more than 50%. Importantly, children and youth are overrepresented in the neighbourhoods with higher poverty rates as are immigrant and visible minority families.

TCS responds to community needs over time:

TCS points to United Way support and their own philosophy of cultural appropriateness as key factors that enabled the organization to sustain and adapt over time. United Way membership has provided some necessary flexibility in funding that enables TCS to respond to the emerging needs of youth and to develop educational programs that do not fit into other rigid funding categories.

TCS's philosophy of cultural appropriateness is central to its mission as an ethno-specific agency. As TCS's Executive Director Sharon Shelton explained, the staff group reflects the diversity of service users and thus are highly attuned to the issues of their clients. They can draw on their lived experiences and provide service in a variety of languages and dialects. Recently, responding to the spate of youth violence in several neighbourhoods where many black communities are located, TCS initiated ART – Aggression Replacement Training.

ART is a U.S. program that TCS adapted for Canada. ART uses a three-pronged approach to teach strategies to avoid confrontation – Skills Streaming, Anger Control and Moral Reasoning. Initial results indicate that participants have successfully used these new skills to successfully avoid confrontation and violence, particularly in encounters with the family courts. TCS is seeking resources to complete a formal evaluation of ART which will identify the impact of the program in a more formal way.

Back to top

Summary of lessons learned

Learnings from the experience of three selected community infrastructure organizations are instructive. Each organization has successfully served clusters of neighbourhoods over time, adjusting to changing needs and seeking to build community leadership. Indeed, there is some sense that a successful community infrastructure organization needs a sufficiently large critical mass to adapt to changing needs of neighbourhoods and to survive through changes in funding and service patterns.

DPNC, for example, is a front line agency that often learns about new community needs from users of its community health centre. Over time, it has used this knowledge of the community to tailor programs to the needs of seniors who are isolated, people without status and unemployed youth.

TCS, through its summer camp and after school programs, learned of the need for academic help for many children in its area. TCS developed a tutoring program that now is run by 300 volunteers who each donate 60 hours per school term assisting children to improve their academic skills. Anecdotal evidence from parents and teachers indicates that the tutoring program is having a positive impact. TPS would like to conduct a more formal evaluation in conjunction with the schools but lacks the resources.

Community infrastructure organizations also face several challenges with regard to engaging community members in issues that affect them. There is firm agreement that community development work which seeks to enhance civic participation, develop and sustain social cohesion and may also pursue advocacy toward systemic change, is critically important.

The process of involving community members provides critical hands-on learning about civil society such as how boards of directors operate, the importance of volunteerism in building social networks, how school councils work and the procedures of local government. These concrete experiences assist newcomers and marginalized groups to understand the dynamics of how to work together to solve a local problem or develop a strategy to meet their own needs.

Community engagement also helps to build community leadership. For many immigrants, the opportunity for involvement in community infrastructure is new and requires explanation and outreach. The experience of DPNC and FSA in particular tells us that these initiatives require long-term commitment and support which can be difficult to sustain.

Demonstrating impact is also a challenge. Organizations committed to engaging community members must use a variety of creative strategies to support staff and volunteers to continue this work. At the same time, engaging the community often requires outreach and supports to community members such as assistance with child care and transportation.

Back to top

Previous Page | Table of Contents | Next Page

Close window