The most recent in a series of provincial poverty reduction initiatives was announced on April 7 – this time focusing on local community responses. The government will invest $50 million to support local community organizations address poverty.

First the backdrop: You won’t find politicians of any political stripe making the claim that poverty is easy to fix. It’s a big, tough and, paradoxically, expensive problem affecting a large part of our population. But there are different approaches to how this should be tackled – from calls for a national minimum wage to the more conservative argument that welfare entitlements are too much of an incentive to stay home and play video games and eat chips.

Poverty is a whole lot more complex than this and people on all sides of the issue concede that the challenge, which is often cross-generational, requires a multifaceted response.

In 2008, Deb Matthews was tasked by former premier Dalton McGuinty to develop a provincial poverty reduction strategy. It will now be apparent that this was no flash-in-the-pan, feed-the-media and “cover-our-flanks” political strategy. Seven years later, Matthews remains in charge of the file in her current job as deputy premier and president of the Treasury Board and a lot has been accomplished. It’s worth taking a look at the 2014 report on Ontario’s poverty reduction strategy, “Realizing our Potential.”

Matthews says she is proud of the progress made since 2008, which includes improvements to the Ontario child benefit program, full-time kindergarten and a youth jobs strategy, as well as recent increases to the minimum wage and indexation to inflation rates. Moving forward, Matthews wants to see “more integration of government programs and services that matter to people, and interventions that are grounded in evidence and known to work.” She says the government’s strategy “will continue to break the cycle of poverty for children and youth, focus on employment and income security and move forward on our bold goal to end homelessness.”

The Local Poverty Reduction Fund will focus on programs that encourage community partnerships dedicated to help groups disproportionately affected by poverty, including women, single parents, people with disabilities, youth, newcomers, visible minorities, seniors and aboriginal people both on- and off-reserve.

The $50 million will be invested over six years and the initiative includes a third-party evaluation component.

“The … fund will help community organizations demonstrate progress, evaluate their programs and build evidence on poverty reduction initiatives that work," a government news release said. "There are many local, grassroots and innovative programs in communities that are making a difference in the lives of people living in poverty. Using the evidence gathered from these programs, the government will work to apply best practices across the province and focus on funding programs that are proven to work and that can expand over time.”

The overall strategy has many of the hallmarks of successful policy initiatives in the field of human services:

The government has developed a long-term and multifaceted approach led by a high-ranking political leader with longevity in the portfolio;
Metrics and evaluative tools have been developed to measure progress, which is in turn being translated into annual reports on outcomes;
Local initiatives along the lines of the Local Poverty Reduction Fund are adaptive to demographics, cultural characteristics and place-based drivers of poverty and tend to work better than top down one-size-fits-all programs designed within ministries;
The fund gets top marks for spurring collaboration and integration at the local level and supporting multiprofessional approaches to program design and delivery. It also encourages show-casing of successful projects, making them available for others to adopt, or to adapt to the characteristics of their own communities. There are lots of smart and successful practices around the province but too many of them stay quietly below the radar.

So, all told, the provincial government is doing some good stuff in an extremely hard-to-influence sphere of social policy.

Dean: In fight against poverty, province acts locally

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