Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I appreciate the opportunity to be here and to present in person. It's been an interesting experience so far.
My name is Kevin McNichol. I'm the executive director of HomeFront. HomeFront is Calgary’s coordinated community justice response to domestic violence. We bring together law enforcement, prosecution, defence, child and family services, shelter, treatment, probation, and victim services. We create a seamless response to break the cycle of domestic violence.
HomeFront began in May of 2000 as a national demonstration project supported by a federal grant from the National Crime Prevention Centre. Over the last 14 years, independent evaluations have shown two-thirds and one-half reductions in criminal reoffence rates for domestic violence. Additional evaluations of our prevention programming have found a 75% reduction in calls for police services, a 70% reduction in child and family service investigations, and a social return on investment of approximately $6.31 for every dollar invested, or about $16 million in value added back to the Government of Alberta, during the course of our pilot projects.
For the past several years, HomeFront has recognized a significant shift in the social discourse about the size of government, its role in providing services, and the ability to continue using tax dollars alone to support increasing demands. This shift has freed up space to explore new conversations about alternate ways to finance our social safety net.
HomeFront has been exploring those ways over the last number of years. We believe new social financing models must be explored, tested, and then permanently introduced to ensure an ongoing, large-scale, high-impact, and most importantly, more robust and sustainable social safety net. We believe there are a number of financial models. One such model might be social impact bonds, which we're talking about today. They hold a great deal of promise.
HomeFront believes itself to be a leading social serving agency able to participate in any pilot program for such an initiative. HomeFront represents a strong cross-sector collaborative model, has strong evaluation systems already in place, and has the ability to tangibly quantify and measure its social impact across a range of justice and social serving systems. Plus we have a history built upon innovation, and exist within a strongly networked, socially innovative community in Calgary and Alberta. All of these are elements that are critical to the success of these types of initiatives. I think we heard that from Dr. Shaw earlier today.
I want to share a few thoughts with you around what we've been pondering at HomeFront in our discussions around social innovation bonds. I have to say that I'm not an expert on that as a financial vehicle, but these are some of our thoughts in terms of how we would position ourselves and be able to make use of them as an agency.
Thought number one is that if we are going to embark on this journey, we need to change the conversation from one of cost savings to one of value added. In reality what happens is not a cost saving but a reallocation of existing resources to address previously unaddressed issues and areas, and/or to better address those already identified issues. For example, our prevention programs pair a police officer and a social worker who respond to non-charge domestic violence calls in the city of Calgary. What we found through our social return on investment analysis was that we saved about $100,000 per year in officers' time per district we worked in.
I can tell you, having worked in those districts, that there isn't an officer sitting in there for a year twiddling their thumbs. What they were able to do was reinvest that time to do better investigations with the cases they already had, provide better intervention, and/or reassign themselves to do other police work that was either under-supported or was unserved at the time prior to our coming in there to support them. So it's value added, not a cost savings.
The second thought is that we need to take a risk and try. In Alberta and Calgary proper, at least, I believe we are ready to take the chance and explore using alternate funding models to support our safety net. An example of this is the success of the unfortunately discontinued safe communities initiative that the Government of Alberta initiated across the province. It invested a great deal of resources and tilled the ground to already have in place a social return on investment evaluation methodology, which many of us as agencies have taken to heart and are using on a regular and routine basis.
It further challenged us to work in a cross-sector, multidisciplinary way. It challenged government ministries to also work in new and coordinated fashions—to stop considering problems from their specific ministry perspective and to start recognizing that when an individual comes before one of our services, often they will touch every one of the ministries that has that outward-facing client service focus. It's the same for agencies on the ground, and that's where the safe communities innovation initiative really challenged and brought us together to create that happening.
But we have to try.
We also need to accept that this type of funding will not be a panacea and relieve government of its obligation to support the social safety net. Instead, it might allow government to redirect its limited resources to more under-supported areas of the safety net, or enhance current initiatives that are already in place.
I think this is the critical piece to sustainability. Business knows this, that you want diversity of revenues in order to maintain a business model, and I think this gives an opportunity for us, as a society, to diversify the sources of revenue we have available to us.
Further, we must accept that not all areas will benefit from this type of funding. Social issues that might benefit will have clear and high public costs associated with intervention, interventions with proven or significant potential to produce net social value, the ability to collect and analyze data that demonstrates social impact, and are nested in strong, robust, collaborative relationships that span multiple sector stakeholders.
Care will also be needed to ensure that success doesn't breed success at the cost of other critical areas. I've heard some questions today around this, and I think it's good thinking. The example would be breast cancer, which has an overwhelming public awareness and fundraising effort that overwhelms and dwarfs many of the other common and lethal cancers that are out there and receive little public funding or awareness, but they are just as critical. I think this is a critical place where government needs to turn its attention, and I think it is the role of government to oversee to make sure that the cuddly bears don't get all of the resources. But I think that's always been the role that government has played in our society, to ensure equitable distribution of resources to support the social safety net.
For these initiatives to achieve their potential, they must fund the spectrum of services required to make meaningful change for the clients involved. Their strength will be found in the collaborative cross-service teams supported by this type of model. The data at HomeFront is clear. A client will be only as successful as the community that surrounds them. One service dosage from one service provider is rarely enough to address most multi-need, complex clients we deal with every day. Our research shows a clear cumulative effect of what we're doing.
To sum up, we know that coordinated, integrated, multidisciplinary service programs, embedded in a supportive community, create large-scale social change. What we need is the support, oversight, and authority of government endorsing the use of these models, encouraging the development of financial agents who provide the oversight and finance vehicles, and a desire by government to fiscally backstop and underwrite these efforts.
Thank you.