Thank you very much. I appreciate being here.
I appreciate everything Robert said. Hopefully I can provide some specific examples from the United Way perspective on what we are trying to do to alleviate poverty and on a number of issues in our communities.
In particular, I want to talk about two initiatives: place-based initiatives, which are geographic neighbourhood initiatives, and informational services initiatives, such as 211.
Most people are familiar with the United Way's name. We're in the business of trying to build stronger communities. We've been doing it for 80 years. We currently fund 55 agencies in Halifax Regional Municipality, and we invest $5.8 million annually into this economy.
We realize, like you, that issues such as poverty are tremendously complex, so much so that we refer to them as wicked problems. They're wicked problems in the sense that a lot of the symptoms are interconnected, people are interconnected, and no one solution, in our mind, is going to be the silver bullet. It has to be a collage or mosaic of opportunities to try to address the issues of poverty.
You may be pleased to know--I'm not sure if someone else has raised it today, but maybe Tanis will--that by some measures, poverty has been decreasing a little bit in Halifax. In the last 10 years, there are 20% fewer households living in poverty. However, we also know that there are serious issues pertaining to living in Halifax.
For example, in 1960 only 2% of the population here lived alone. As of the last census period, that's upwards of 40% in our neighbourhoods. We also know that the gap between the lowest income percentiles and the upper income percentiles is increasing. This income disparity is becoming worse in communities where poverty is concentrated. Back in the sixties, we would have had one area in Halifax as the central core that would have been considered poverty. Now we have four or five cores. I think this is very similar to what's going on in other communities across Canada.
So how are we to deal with income disparity, isolation, and poverty? The United Way has taken on a type of leadership lens that looks at working through place-based communities. It's new language, but it's probably familiar language for most of you. We call it Action for Neighbourhood Change. It was a federal initiative that was started actually quite a while ago and is now carried on by several United Ways. The reason I raise it is that it's having some traction here as a specific project that's trying to alleviate disparity in the communities.
What is place-based work? You work intensely with residents. You work in a specific locale for at least three to five years. You get neighbour to know neighbour in such a way that when people get to know each other, their neighbourhoods get safer. People are more active. They are places that people actually want to live in. It's really about working with residents, inspiring change they want to see, and then providing support for those changes. You have to repeat this often, and you have to keep moving on to another neighbourhood.
As I mentioned, it's also long term. The United Way has made a commitment to every single neighbourhood that we work in that it's three to five years. The time commitment is a challenge, especially when it comes to funding or government support. Typically a project like place-based work is done in one to three years. We know that's not enough. You've got to go longer term.
Place-based work is also not new. We call it grassroots initiatives, neighbourhood community building, comprehensive community initiatives; CCIs is another language out there. They're all very similar. But I think in Canada there's a bit of a national movement now for place-based work because it seems to be working. Vancouver, Regina, Winnipeg, Toronto, Thunder Bay, and Montreal are all great case examples, and Halifax as well.
What's working is that by getting residents to come out and empowering them to take control over what's going on in their communities, we're actually getting a lot more community leaders. We're actually getting residents who live in communities wanting to start addressing their own issues, such as isolation, or income disparity, or the seniors issue. With the increasing population of seniors in Nova Scotia, many are starting to look to their own communities for these solutions, and it's working.
I can give you some examples from Spryfield and Dartmouth North a bit later.
Given that we have five minutes, I'll move on to the second topic, which we think has some good traction in dealing with poverty. That's a very different service from place-based work. It's an informational service and it's called 211, which is single-point access for people to dial up when they need help.
We know that issues are complex, they're overwhelming, and they're typically intertwined. Simple calls for help typically get bogged down in a mosaic of different phone lines and different agencies. The United Way believes that 211, a one-dial service with a voice on the end, can actually help break down a lot of these barriers. The 211 line is currently active in British Columbia, and I believe it's active in Ontario and Quebec. They seem to be having great success at linking those people who need service with the services very quickly. United Way is advocating for 211 in Nova Scotia. We don't have it yet, but we hope to have it soon.
What are we asking of you? Please think about place-based work as a real chance to address some of the issues related to poverty at the neighbourhood level. A lot of the work was started by the federal government many years ago and can be carried on again.
We also ask that you support the 211 initiative. We think this is a great opportunity to start linking people provincially with a lot of the services that are available.
Thank you very much.