Thank you.
Good afternoon, everyone. I'm a doctoral student at the University of New Brunswick. I work with young women who are marginalized for social and economic reasons. I want to try to talk a little about something that I think is of parallel importance to this.
My work is funded by the Trudeau Foundation and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, so because of that I spend a lot of time thinking about the connection between policy and practice and who leads and drives those decisions. I'm going to offer three suggestions for what I think the federal government can do to support poverty reduction, and they all live at the site where policy, practice, and research meet each other.
First, I think we need to focus on creating an entirely new generation of leaders who understand the importance of social justice. That's a federal responsibility and it creates a great opportunity to align in an inter-jurisdictional way with education. I understand that there's not a direct mechanism into education from the federal level, but with an emphasis on leadership development, I think the federal government can play a strong role in supporting all sorts of initiatives that help young people to become active in their communities around important justice issues.
I'm going to give you a couple of examples of how we can do that, particularly with young people who might not identify themselves as being leaders.
There are programs in place, for example, in Saint John, where, as part of supporting housing initiatives, youth are building the residences that they will then become tenants in. Not only are they learning specific skills for construction, but they're also taking ownership for the next steps in their lives.
Also, I'm a member of an organization here called 21inc, which is about leadership development with young people. We have a very specific program called the golden ticket program in which we ask people to go out and identify young people who wouldn't normally call themselves leaders but who we see behaving as leaders.
I think there are hundreds of clever and creative ways that the federal government can implement ideas--for example, inside granting programs--that would ask the question: what is it that you can do as a part of this initiative that will inspire leadership development in young people?
So that's the first suggestion.
Then, we need a dedicated response inside policy-making processes to engage young people so that they don't get called apathetic but, rather, do get invited to the table to be a part of collective decision-making. The poverty reduction initiative is something that I've been involved in studying.
We're learning in New Brunswick that young people are willing to be engaged if you ask them, but it requires a different strategy and a different approach. Sometimes it's far more time-consuming than we give people credit for. We engaged with young women who have been living in transitional housing for upwards of two years, but it took six weeks and multiple visits, with us returning over and over again, to build a relationship in order for them to feel as though they were being invited to the table.
So when we're thinking about the way we design political processes and policy-making at the federal level, we need to think about shifting some of these exceptional models into what is normative for the way that policy gets created, so that young people start to re-engage in democracy. If we don't have an effective democracy, we will have much bigger problems on our hands than poverty reduction.
Finally, I think we need to start thinking about ways in which researchers, policy-makers, and the public can come together at tables so that we know what best practice is; in health research we call it “closing the know-do gap”. That gap is even bigger in the social sciences.
We need federal leadership to help roll over what we know in the theory of knowledge translation in health; we need help moving that into social sciences so that we can bring together researchers, the public, and policy-makers and close the gap between all of the things that we know that we need to do about poverty reduction but are not currently doing.
Thank you.