In a timely piece of research, given the current budget debates at the municipal level, St. Michael’s Centre for Research on Inner City Health (CRICH) released a report titled Community Service System in Toronto neighbourhoods: What should the City pay attention to?
The report concluded “Torontonians want the Community Service System to offer programs that are accessible, available and well funded.”
The CRICH research centre asked Torontonians to respond to the question
“If the City of Toronto wants to know if the Community Service System is working well in a neighbourhood, one thing it should pay attention to is…”
Eight key areas were identified as important to take into consideration when measuring if community services were working well at a local level:
- Accessibility & Availability (9 ideas)
- Supporting Civic & Social Engagement (9 ideas)
- Collaboration & Evaluation (9 ideas)
- Funding (6 ideas)
- Meeting Residents’ Needs (5 ideas)
- Improving Social Outcomes (5 ideas)
- Resident Involvement (4 ideas)
- Staff and Volunteers (4 ideas)
Sessions were held across the city. Funders and non-profits were also asked to provide input in separate sessions from city residents. Groups for additional languages and youth were also set up.
In follow-up sessions, the researchers asked participants to rank the importance of the identified areas.
Locally available services came out on top (only being beaten out by funding when community organizations responded).
However, depending on one’s connection to community agencies, some interesting differences emerged when identifying what’s important to measuring the health of the community service system. So while residents, community organizations, and funders each identified the same issues as priorities, they placed them in different orders.
City residents identified the most important ideas as Accessibility & Availability, Funding, and Resident Involvement (almost tied to Collaboration and Evaluation); The top three ideas identified by community organizations were Funding, Accessibility & Availability, and Collaboration & Evaluation (almost tied with Resident Involvement; Funders identified Accessibility & Availability, Resident Involvement and Collaboration & Evaluation as their top three areas.
Still the cohesion and strength of the research results affirm the importance Torontonians attach to community services that are available and stable.
Now that the CRICH report has been done, city staff will use it to build a strong neighbourhood-level measurement system.
(Disclaimer: I participated on the advisory committee for this workgroup, doing training in the methodology used.)
Belonging Community 
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