Wheat City ideas to be sought for new strategy on poverty

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This article was published 21/09/2024 (486 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Brandon is one of six rural Manitoba communities invited to contribute ideas and suggestions to the NDP’s new poverty reduction strategy — which is great news, says Shannon Saltarelli, the city’s housing and wellness co-ordinator.

“I love that they are doing a lot of engagement,” Saltarelli said.

“The province is doing what it can to get into our communities and say, ‘We need to build a strategy that’s based on what you need as someone who’s impacted by poverty.’”

The NDP government will host numerous in-person interactive workshops in October and November to gather feedback as it develops its new five-year poverty reduction strategy, visiting the Wheat City, Thompson, The Pas, Dauphin, Morden and Arborg.

There will be three engagement sessions held in Brandon on Oct. 21 at the Riverbank Discovery Centre and the Brandon Friendship Centre.

The first session, scheduled from 9-11:30 a.m., is for stakeholders, such as social workers and caretakers, who work directly with the vulnerable population.

The second meeting, scheduled from 1-4:30 p.m., will engage with Indigenous communities, including individuals, elders, and knowledge keepers.

The last meeting of the day, scheduled from 6-8 p.m., is for the public to ask questions and share their thoughts on what the government’s poverty reduction strategy should look like.

Under Manitoba’s Poverty Reduction Strategy Act, the province is required to review and update its strategy at least once every five years. The previous plan was released in 2019 under Brian Pallister’s Progressive Conservative government.

Plans outlining how the new strategy will involve rural Manitobans were announced in a news release Friday from Housing, Addictions and Homelessness Minister Bernadette Smith and Families Minister Nahanni Fontaine.

“Rural Manitobans make up about 40 per cent of our provincial population. Poverty does not discriminate by location,” Fontaine said in the release.

“Hearing directly from people in in rural communities will help us develop a more effective, people-centred strategy that reflects the real needs of Manitobans across the province,” she said.

Poverty has a significant impact on the lives of Manitobans, said Smith, adding: “Systemic barriers continue to be one of the biggest drivers of poverty, and we need to focus on removing the obstacles facing those most vulnerable.”

Saltarelli has already registered on the Manitoba government’s website to attend Brandon’s stakeholder session and said she hopes the strategy will “peel back the layers to go all the way to the root causes of poverty and address those.”

The root causes of poverty include the lack of access to basic services, education and employment opportunities, according to World Vision Canada.

“I really hope that food security is a big topic of conversation at these engagement sessions,” Saltarelli said. “Because so many of the issues that we see are the outcome of poor food security, especially with children and youth.

“The cost of food and access to food has become so difficult that our numbers at the food banks and our soup kitchens are through the roof right now, and those programs are very poorly subsidized,” she said.

Additionally, Saltarelli said she would like to see changes that make it easier for people to navigate the social service system, so that clients who have challenges with transportation or mental health don’t have to go to different locations to fill out different applications.

“You can have great strategies, you can have great plans, but we also need to staff our organizations,” said Saltarelli, “and we need to pay them well, because the amount of burnout on the front line is probably at its highest right now.

“And a lot of the people who are on the front line serving this population are people with lived experience, and people who are barely out of experiencing some form of poverty themselves.

“So that’s why I think it’s so important to build this strategy around people’s input, because you cannot build a provincial strategy for people without people,” she said.

The Manitoba government’s website is interactive and has a section to fill out a survey, a tab to share ideas and a link to register for an upcoming meeting.

More than 800 organizations have also been contacted for input into the poverty reduction strategy.

For information on the strategy, including registration and submitting ideas, visit https://engagemb.ca/poverty-reduction

» mmcdougall@brandonsun.com

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