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Prevention is the solution

Roundtable for Poverty Reduction focuses on improving the lives of youth, kids

By Bill Dunphy
The Hamilton Spectator (Feb 11, 2006)

Hamilton's Roundtable for Poverty Reduction has revealed that its action plan will focus not on attacking the symptoms of poverty -- but instead, on preventing it.

The plan will try and meet this ambitious goal by intervening in the lives of youth and children, the group announced at a city council committee of the whole meeting yesterday morning. The roundtable expects to deliver their community action plan in early spring, about one year after the multi-sector group began its work.

"We need a cultural shift ... we need to be moving away from a culture that promotes quick fixes," roundtable chair Mark Chamberlain said as he presented council with a progress report during an extraordinary session that lasted nearly four hours.

Council received a progress report, hearing from everyone from bank vice-presidents to university professors to people living in poverty, and together they presented a sometimes moving blend of hope, pride and anger.

Citing the broad range of groups gathered at the roundtable (i.e. people from business, media, social services, the city, healthcare, education and social activists) many said they felt that something special was happening here in Hamilton.

"There is a groundswell of support, interest and commitment that has never been tapped before in this community and now there is no turning back," an enthusiastic Carolyn Milne, CEO of the Hamilton Community Foundation, said.

The woman regarded as most responsible for wrestling the roundtable to the top of the city agenda, community services general manager Jo-Anne Priel, stood at the lectern. "One of my dreams," she said, "is that there would be more people in here talking about poverty than about increasing golfing fees."

"It has happened. I'm confident that one day the prime minister of Canada will be asking us, how did we do it?" Priel said.

"This is the most caring, gutsy community in this country and that's why I know the prime minister is going to be calling us."

Councillors heard about many anti-poverty initiatives already under way, programs that are making a difference to many lives without attracting a lot of attention -- or even a lot of government funding.

Mike Rehill, principal of Sir John A. Macdonald secondary school, talked about the challenges facing his nearly 1,400 downtown students -- and the school's response.

The school community raises about $100,000 a year to give students bursaries for bus fares, run nutrition programs and walk-in closets where students can get gently used clothing.

"I've driven students home," Rehill recounted, "and I struggle with what I've seen."

David Bish of the Stoney Creek United Church told council about Wrap Around Stoney Creek, a growing social service movement that takes social responsibility to a new and personal level.

Using volunteers , the program "wraps" a needy person with members of the community who offer the whole range of assistance a community can pull together and promises that once someone is in the program, the program will never abandon them.

"We simply don't let go," he explained.

But council did not merely hear a succession of happy outlooks.

Some activists warned against ignoring the needs of the elderly and disabled, saying the roundtable should not set up any constructs that judges one sector as more "worthy" of help than another. Others provided councillors with glimpses into poverty in the city.

"A dog is more important than a poor person in this city," a bitter-sounding Janet Chafe told council as she recounted her decades of working with the poor for a social service agency.

"You don't know poverty until you've lived it, until you've experienced it." Councillors, she said, don't live it.

Valerie Sturrock silenced all chatter and side talk in the council chambers as she outlined her struggles to survive and thrive on social assistance while battling everything from a rare learning disability to a bedbug invasion in her public housing unit.

"I wasn't sure why I came here but now I know -- I'm here to put a face on poverty," she opened, her voice quavering at first but growing stronger as she talked.

"I've been in and out of the Hamilton Psychiatric Hospital seven times," she said.

"I feel like I'm covered in bandages."