Good morning, and again, thank you for coming to Saint John.
My name is Donna Gates, and I am the executive director of Living SJ. I'm joined here today by Penni Eisenhauer, our community organizer and an incredible neighbourhood leader.
I'd also like to acknowledge and thank our MP, Wayne Long. He is personally championing the issue of poverty in Saint John, and we are very grateful, as Randy suggested.
Living SJ is Saint John's poverty reduction strategy and we have one goal: to end generational poverty. As I suspect you'll hear many times today, Saint John, sadly, is home to a deeper level of complexity: multi-generational poverty.
What is Living SJ? We are a network and a part of Vibrant Communities Canada. Our mission is owned by 36 local senior leaders, and I'd like to point out here that having senior decision-makers at the table has been key to our success. Our partners include all three levels of government, post-secondary institutions, low-income neighbourhoods, businesses, and non-profits. It was no small feat to get representatives from many organizations, who usually do not sit at the same table, to agree to four areas of focus. We used the principles of collective impact—and it is just that—to identify the following targets.
First is education and closing the education achievement gap: every child succeeds, from early learning to post-secondary. This includes improving literacy and high school completion outcomes.
On health, it's a neighbourhood-based model of care, with individuals at its centre.
For employment, it's about connecting residents to employment through education and training. The Learning Exchange, which you'll see in action later today, shows a path to transition from social assistance to employment. Your lunch is being prepared by one of their amazing social enterprises. This is a true Saint John success story and I look forward to you finding out more about it.
Neighbourhood revitalization with a goal of mixed-income attraction is our fourth pillar. Penni will speak to this a bit more, but a fundamental defining value that we have at our centre is the inclusion of the voice of lived experience. The Land Bank has been named as a priority of our Living SJ housing working group. Jody Kliffer will speak to this later this morning.
I want to share with you that we are currently helping colleagues in Halifax as they begin to prepare their process of collective impact to address poverty. This is all about sharing and learning from one another. Their community says this: “Nothing about us without us”. That speaks to the voice of lived experience always being at our table.
We've developed a common agenda, and it took some editing. We deliberately had to consider what was out, at this stage anyway, and what was in. Also critical to our success is shared measurement. Our partners are measuring their activities in the same way. For example, the health authority discovered that the cost for three individuals using the emergency department over a three-year period for non-emergency reasons was $100,000, so our team looked at how to reach people where they lived, and a wellness centre within one of our five priority neighbourhoods was established.
What do we need? We recognize that government cannot do this alone. We're asking you to use Saint John as a lab. We want to keep learning and experimenting to get it right. This involves sustainable and more bendable multi-year funding with community input and accountability built in. Let's put decision-making back in the hands of the community. We're doing it here, and it's working.
Thank you for coming to Saint John.
Now I'd like to turn it over to Penni.