Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for coming to Saint John, and welcome.
I serve two rural communities as well as Saint John. Our United Way has undergone pretty significant change over the last four years. We've gone from being a typical funder, basically a writer of cheques. That was good, and we did that really well, but when we looked back at our 60 years of history, we saw that social conditions really hadn't improved despite the fact we invested $50 million over that time. We decided that something really needed to change and said, “Let's start with ourselves.”
We decided instead to be a catalyst. We're still writing cheques—don't worry—but we're doing it very differently. We're doing it with a new sense of responsibility. We are much more focused on outcomes than on transactions, than the number of kids sitting at a desk. We're much more interested in whether those children graduate. We're much more interested in whether a woman does not return to an abusive situation for the rest of her children's lives, rather than whether we just saved her life one night. That's important, and we can't lose those things, but we will continue on this treadmill if we continue to invest in the same way.
We saw our role change and we believe the role of all funders needs to change. We need to leverage each other. We need to create new expectations in our community. We are driven by performance, as humans, as systems, and as organizations, and if we have greater expectations of our community organizations, they'll do it. They'll perform. We've seen it happen over and over again. If as funders we drive the measurement of transactions, that is what they have the capacity to do, and that is what they will do because we've asked them to.
As funders, we need to create a greater discipline and a responsibility. Without innovation and discipline by funders and service providers, children will continue to go hungry and the fragile will continue to suffer indignities. We have to look at breaking the cycle. We have to stop driving projects that are independent of each other. We do not have the luxury to continue as though we are all on our own as funding partners. We must be interdependent if we are going to make any of these substantive changes. We have to align our efforts and our resources. We can leverage each other. We can leverage our money. We can leverage our expertise.
What you have at this table are people who are very grounded in their respective organizations and the realities that we serve.
There are deeply imbedded cycles, particularly in Saint John but also in many other communities throughout the country. We can make a big difference if we stop making decisions in isolation of each other and being preoccupied with our own territory and our own mandate.
As funders, we also—and this is not popular—drive duplication. When our provincial government, our federal government, and our local United Way make decisions in isolation, and when we fund different organizations to do similar things and don't ask each other what we're doing, we are driving this insanity. The community cannot respond in any other way than we are demanding of them.
We also must have the courage to say no to the things that can't demonstrate that they work. That's so we can say yes to the stuff that does. You've heard multiple examples of projects that work but are vastly underfunded because we are trying to spread our resources too thin. We can make an impact, but not the way we've been going.
We also have to free up the human resources of the local organizations. They are chasing their tails in trying to meet our reporting requirements. We all ask for different timetables, different fiscal years, and different budget templates. This is insanity. They are spending so much of their precious resources on accounting, measuring, and reporting—and often measuring things that actually don't matter—to keep us satisfied. That is wrong.
We could easily free up 25% of that capacity. For those of you who have some business background, imagine that. Just like that: another 25%. Imagine a world where Erin's organization has to write only one report a year that goes to all funders. These things are completely within our control.
Both Randy and Donna spoke about what makes Saint John unique. We have deep generational poverty, we have single-parent families, and we also have a tremendous history of collaboration. There are certainly federal actions that can go a long way in redistributing wealth, but in a community that has created a subculture of poverty, much more than money is needed to resolve generations of no workforce attachment, untreated mental health issues, and, frankly, hopelessness. These issues can only be resolved locally.
Our community is one that has self-organized for over 15 years to tackle this complex issue. What we need from the federal government is a flexible and willing partner. We know that standardization and systematizing things is the way of big bureaucracy, but we desperately need to innovate. We need to experiment, just as Erin said.
We are the best game in town—in the country—when it comes to innovation and experimentation. We are committed to breaking the cycle of poverty. We want to go from being the city in Canada with the highest rate of poverty to being the one that figured out how to fix it. That's something to be proud of. That's something to tell our children about.
We'll do this by measuring whether our initiatives work and by directing our funds to what works, to rewarding innovation and risk-taking, balanced with bringing in the best practices from away. Again, we need the federal government as a partner in our local strategy. As has been mentioned, MP Long and his staff have been deeply engaged in the work of our community, but there are limits to what one MP can do.
Sorry, Wayne.
We don't fit neatly into any one provincial or federal department. Issues happen here in Saint John and, frankly, our failure or our success will be determined here in Saint John. We have demonstrated as a community the courage to make tough and sometimes unpopular decisions in order to achieve greater outcomes.
As a local funder, having a strategy in place provided my organization with the support we needed to say no so that we could say yes. We need to create a local innovation fund with flexibility and pooled resources, so that federal government resources, provincial government resources, community resources, and business community resources can be deployed in strategic ways with significant accountability. Again, we can do these things.
We know that big systems struggle to innovate. We know governments cannot risk public failure. A local fund is an arm's-length means of contributing to local innovation without assuming the risk of failure. As a community, we're willing to assume the risk, the collective impact. This would be ideal for ideas that do not fall within any one government department, jurisdiction, or mandate, so we invite you to become partners with us in some crazy new ways.
I'll leave you with one last thought. Living SJ was invited to go to Australia to talk to the Australians about how to engage business in philanthropy. As often happens, the conversation revolved around money, such as, how do we get those corporations to give the community money? Sure, that's important, and there is a cheque-writing function that is very important in this work, but there is so much more that the business community can bring to the work we do: the business discipline, the entrepreneurial spirit, the drive to metrics, and the focus on performance. Those are things that drive us in this community.
I again welcome you to consider a broader role for the business community in engaging and participating. Bell's Let's Talk program is a wonderful illustration of a company going further than just writing the cheque by creating a conversation that none of us locally can do.
Merci.
Thank you for coming.