Celebrating 10 years of community-based research: the 2014 State of the Inner City Report launch
Tuesday December 16, 2014
Circle of Life Thunderbird House
715 Main Street
Lunch 11:30 am
Program – 12-1:15 pm
Poverty in Winnipeg’s inner city is often a topic of public and media attention, but neighbourhood-level successes are seldom reported. For ten years now, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has published a State of the Inner City Report to highlight the untold struggles and achievements of community-based development.
“Winnipeggers don’t often hear about the amazing things happening in the inner city. This report series documents the positive stories of change”, says Molly McCracken, Manitoba director for the Canadian Centre of Policy Alternatives.
The report documents the strengths of the inner city while building local research capacity. It also identifies service gaps and policy shortcomings and provides policy alternatives identified by inner city leaders.
Another purpose of the series is to educate people about the challenges of living in poverty, “It Takes All Day to be Poor” a term coined by a community partner to describe the complex life for people living in poverty is also the name of a previous State of the Inner City Report. Community organizations use this research to help their work and make the case to governments to address poverty.
This year’s report highlights these accomplishments in the paper “Its More than a Collection of Stories” about the impact of decades of public investment in the inner city, by the report founder Shauna MacKinnon, now a professor in Urban and Inner City Studies at the University of Winnipeg.
The second paper, “It Takes a Community to Support a Family” is about the role of community-based organizations in supporting families involved in the child welfare system and struggling with poverty. The number of children in care in Manitoba continues to rise, and Aboriginal children are severely over-represented. The root causes are complex – families struggle with inter-generational trauma caused by the impact of colonization along with the retreat of the social welfare state, lack of social housing and low income.
The launch will be followed by a panel presentation and discussion with several community-based organizations who work with families and the child welfare system.
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