The Social Planning Council's ‘Kids and Community Project’ held its first Visioning Day today at Algonquin High School. The Social Planning Council is currently in a rebuilding stage and the Kids and Community project has their full attention.
The Social Planning Council's ‘Kids and Community Project’ held its first Visioning Day today at Algonquin High School.
The Social Planning Council is currently in a rebuilding stage and the Kids and Community project has their full attention.
Kids and Community is a project addressing gaps and issues in low-income families.
The day was designed to discuss and strategize and implement action plans for issues that parents identified through round table discussions earlier in the year.
David Hasbury, a resource person for the Social Planning Network of Ontario, facilitated the day and said the aim was to engage parents in a way they could see themselves participating in making a change in their lives and in the lives of their children by making a commitment to stay involved.
“I think that we accomplished that with this group. They are very engaged, and they have a great desire to stay engaged. They have a lot of great ideas, their problem wasn't having ideas, the problem was going to be figuring out which ones can we do something about,” he says.
The key areas of the next steps, Hasbury went on to say, was for the group to make a commitment to actually stay together and continue the work. They must stay together to be a supportive network for each other, a network which includes parents and people who provide services.
Hasbury says in order for the group to survive and stay informed they need to look beyond traditional communication tools, such as the standard media or news flyer and become a word-of-mouth network.
“One way to get the word out on the ground level about issues is to become a peer support network. The fact is many of them do face very difficult issues, such as facing housing tribunal's, CAS and those kinds of things, so not going alone, having a peer to join them,” he explains.
“When they identify some very clear issues that they all share, the need to find a way to articulate and think about those issues, and then find out who else in the community is available that they could connect with a about those issues. So that's where they are going to go.”
Maxine Brodie, a parent participant, said that she definitely sees the group progressing and that the work she puts in will benefit parents such as herself in the long run.
“What I'm getting out of this is for my son. My son is the main focus out of life and I believe that the children of tomorrow are what we are raising today,” she says.
Brodie joined the ‘Kids and Community Project’ after she was approached at the Family Enrichment program, and says she didn’t hesitate to become involved as she saw the merit of project.
“Nicole had come around there and I liked the idea, She cared about the fact that parents had something to say.”
Brodie contends that it is parents that are in her situation, the ones who fight to stay afloat financially and socially, that suffer when governments make decisions that alienate the vulnerable family.
“When budgets are cut, and all that, the first place they go is child-care. Like the parents when they feel is not needed, and I feel it is needed, and they need to see that we do care about where our children go. We do care about the money that they give us, that it is not just given to us and we don't feel that we don't see we don't appreciate it, because we do. We appreciate it and we’re out to let them know that we appreciate that and we will give our time. We don't have to sit at home and we will give our day. We will give our time to come and do what we can, if they continue to help.”
“So if we want a good community, that means in the environment, in the way that other children are raised and ithe behaviour of the children, the way children eat the health of them, and it start like this.”
