An informal network of non-profit community organizations across Canada. The work of social planning organizations (also referred to as "Social Planning Councils") focuses on a range of community development and social justice issues.
The general purpose of social planning organizations is to help build and strengthen community.
Social planning organizations may undertake a variety of activities, including:
Their work focuses around social issues affecting individuals and families, including:
Social planning organizations face numerous challenges in their work:
Informal networking between SPOs has taken place to varying degrees since 1976. In the beginning, the Canadian Council on Social Development (CCSD) took a leadership role in bringing the local/regional councils together around social policy issues. Since the 1980s, individuals social planning organizations have taken a greater role in organizing SPO conferences and collaborating on social issues.
Due to the high number of social planning organizations in Ontario, communication and collaboration between SPOs in that province are more frequent than in other provinces across Canada. The Social Planning Network of Ontario (SPNO) has often facilitated discussions between Ontario-based organizations.
A two-year national project (January 2006 through March 2008) aimed at identifying strategies to improve the income and wages, including the living wage, of young families and their children.
Partners:
A multi-year cross-Canada civic initiative with the purpose of enhancing social inclusion across Canada. The goals of Inclusive Cities Canada (ICC) are to strengthen the capacity of cities to create and sustain inclusive communities for the mutual benefit of all people, and to ensure that community voices of diversity are recognized as core Canadian ones.
Partners:
The Green Party of Ontario is a political party in Ontario, Canada. The party is led by Mike Schreiner. Schreiner was elected as MPP for the riding of Guelph in 2018, making him the party's first member of the Ontario Legislative Assembly. In 2023, Aislinn Clancy became the party's second elected member following her win in the Kitchener Centre byelection.
David Edward Crombie is a former Canadian academic and politician who served as the 56th mayor of Toronto from 1972 to 1978. Crombie was elected to Parliament following his tenure as mayor. A member of the Progressive Conservative (PC) Party, he served as minister of national health and welfare from 1979 to 1980, minister of Indian affairs and northern development from 1984 to 1986, and secretary of state for Canada from 1986 to 1988.
Homelessness in Canada was not a social problem until the 1980s. The Canadian government housing policies and programs in place throughout the 1970s were based on a concept of shelter as a basic need or requirement for survival and of the obligation of government and society to provide adequate housing for everyone. Public policies shifted away from rehousing in the 1980s in wealthy Western countries like Canada, which led to a de-housing of households that had previously been housed. By 1987, when the United Nations established the International Year of Shelter for the Homeless (IYSH), homelessness had become a serious social problem in Canada. The report of the major 1987 IYSH conference held in Ottawa said that housing was not a high priority for government, and this was a significant contributor to the homelessness problem. While there was a demand for adequate and affordable housing for low income Canadian families, government funding was not available. In the 1980s a "wider segment of the population" began to experience homelessness for the first time – evident through their use of emergency shelters and soup kitchens. Shelters began to experience overcrowding, and demand for services for the homeless was constantly increasing. A series of cuts were made to national housing programs by the federal government through the mid-1980s and in the 1990s. While Canada's economy was robust, the cuts continued and in some cases accelerated in the 1990s, including cuts to the 1973 national affordable housing program. The government solution for homelessness was to create more homeless shelters and to increase emergency services. In the larger metropolitan areas like Toronto the use of homeless shelters increased by 75% from 1988 to 1998. Urban centres such as Montreal, Laval, Vancouver, Edmonton, and Calgary all experienced increasing homelessness.
Egale Canada is a Canadian charity founded in 1986 by Les McAfee to advance equality for Canadian lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people and their families, across Canada.
Frances Lankin,, is a Canadian senator, former president and CEO of United Way Toronto, and a former Ontario MPP and cabinet minister in the NDP government of Bob Rae between 1990 and 1995. From 2010 to 2012, she co-chaired a government commission review of social assistance in Ontario. From 2009 to 2016, she was a member of the Security Intelligence Review Committee.
Polish Canadians are citizens of Canada with Polish ancestry, and Poles who immigrated to Canada from abroad. At the 2016 Census, there were 1,106,585 Canadians who claimed full or partial Polish heritage.
Philip Andrew Gillies is a former politician in Ontario, Canada. He served in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from 1981 to 1987 as a Progressive Conservative, and was a cabinet minister in the government of Frank Miller.
Poverty in Canada refers to the state or condition in which a person or household lacks essential resources—financial or otherwise—to maintain a modest standard of living in their community.
The BC Healthy Living Alliance (BCHLA), formed in 2003, is the largest coalition of health leaders in British Columbia's history. As a non-partisan advocacy group, the BCHLA works with government and holds them accountable to promote wellness and prevent chronic disease.
Open data in Canada describes the capacity for the Canadian Federal Government and other levels of government in Canada to provide online access to data collected and created by governments in a standards-compliant Web 2.0 way. Open data requires that machine-readable should be made openly available, simple to access, and convenient to reuse. As of 2016, Canada was ranked 2nd in the world for publishing open data by the World Wide Web Foundation's Open Data Barometer.
Stephen Gaetz, is the director of the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness (COH) and a professor at the Faculty of Education at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Dr. Gaetz has enhanced pan-Canadian collaboration between stakeholders interested in homelessness research in Canada.
The Mowat Centre was an independent Canadian public policy think tank associated with the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. It was established in 2009 with support from the government of Ontario, and published its first report in February 2010. It closed in June of 2019 after its funding agreement with the Government of Ontario was cancelled. It was named after Ontario's longest-serving Premier, Sir Oliver Mowat.
Chronic disease in Northern Ontario is a population health problem. The population in Northern Ontario experiences worse outcomes on a number of important health indicators, including higher rates of chronic disease compared to the population in the rest of Ontario.
Council for Canadians with Disabilities (CCD), formerly known as the Coalition of Provincial Organizations of the Handicapped (COPOH), was created by people with disabilities in 1976 to provide support for all people with disabilities who seek the opportunity to go to school, work, volunteer, have a family, and participate in recreational, sport and cultural activities. The CCD is a national human rights organization of people with disabilities working for an accessible and inclusive Canada. In the 1970s, the CCD became a permanent part of the disability rights movement and it became a fluid entity that includes people with a range of different disabilities. To manage the work that will lead to the achievement of this goal, CCD established the following Committees to guide their activities in key areas:
The Community Futures Network of Canada is an extensive network of 269 community futures development corporations. The national Community Futures Program is administered by four regional development agencies, the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA), Canadian Economic Development for Québec Regions (CED-Q), Western Economic Diversification Canada (WD), and the Federal Economic Development Initiative for Northern Ontario (FedNor) under Industry Canada (IC). In Western Canada the Community Futures Program is delivered through a network of 90 non-profit organizations that are supported by four associations and one Pan-West Community Futures Network.
Poverty in Ontario refers to people living in the province of Ontario, Canada who are deprived of or facing serious challenges in meeting basic needs such as shelter, food, clothing and other essential needs. Based on relative and absolute measures, there is a significant level of poverty in Ontario.
Michael J. Prince is a Canadian political scientist and public policy and administration scholar. Prince is the Lansdowne Professor of Social Policy at the University of Victoria in Canada.
Open educational resources in Canada are the various initiatives related to open education, open educational resources (OER), open pedagogies (OEP), open educational practices (OEP), and open scholarship that are established nationally and provincially across Canadian K-12 and higher education sectors, and where Canadian based inititatives extend to international collaborations.
Kwame Julius McKenzie is a British-Canadian psychiatrist employed as the CEO of Wellesley Institute, a policy think tank based in Toronto, Ontario. McKenzie is a full professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto. He has worked as physician, researcher, policy advisor, journalist and broadcaster.
La Passerelle-I.D.É is a Canadian Franco-Ontarian not-for-profit organization based in Toronto, ON, devoted to the integration and economic development of Francophone immigrants, with a special emphasis on visible minorities. The organization is focused on building bridges between forward thinking private sector companies and talented Francophone newcomers.