Sure. I think I'll add something about system planning because it has come up a lot, and I think it speaks to what you're getting at as well.
In the context of system planning and locally driven strategy and what Jaime was also alluding to, there needs to be a quarterback who mans the game, who has the strategy, who tells the players where to go. Sometimes we think that's the funder, the person giving out the dollars.
The problem is that there are so many funders. There are sometimes as many funding pots in a community as there are services, and sometimes there are as many services as there are clients. We have this mess of a patchwork approach to all of these integrated issues.
What I think needs to happen is that there be a designated poverty reduction quarterback at the community level whose sole responsibility is to make sure that players are doing what they're supposed to be doing. That includes funders. Sometimes, believe it or not, the funders are the ones who get in the way of good work, because they change mandates halfway through.
This happens with the United Way often. They say, “We have $40 million in the community, and government has $40 million as well. We think the government should do that, so we're just going to de-fund it”, but they haven't talked to government. Who suffers? The clients do, because the money has moved, and now there's a service gap.
There needs to be somebody who implements the strategy and these common objectives at the community level and who has some accountability and power to dictate how this funding is doled out and to what purpose.
The key piece that worked really well here is that literally, here it's Jaime. Jaime's the quarterback. In other communities, we don't have a quarterback at all, and that's where you see things go pretty astray. There's no measurement system, the funders are arguing, the service providers are going behind each other's backs to the various funders, and nothing ever becomes implemented because the politics get in the way.
In a community in which there is buy-in to this quarterback function and in which the person manning it has legitimacy in the community, when the funders say, “I'm sorry, I'm moving this money; this is not where the community need is”, they have the backup of the community.
What I think tells you that story the best here is agencies in Medicine Hat going to Jaime and saying, “We have too much money; we want you to cut our budget, because we think you should invest in prevention in another area.” That tells you that a level of community planning is now bought into throughout the system of care, that they're moving forward along the same path, and that they trust that system planning is happening with that quarterback organization.