Social Development Centre Waterloo Region

COVID Safe Spaces - Living Room partnerships project funded by the Canada Healthy Communities Initiatives has come to an end... but it will live on through the two local initiatives Civic Hub Waterloo Region and Kitchener's Festival of Neighbourhoods! We have learned more about safety in a range of communities, beyond COVID safety, namely, physical, cultural, spiritual, emotional, and community safety. Our pop-up spaces were created in collaboration with the SHEN Centre, Peace for All Canada, L'Harmonie Indigenous Garden, Bring on the Sunshine, A Better Tent City, some of the unlikely places for a sofa and a floor lamp to be usual fixtures. Watch the full presentation of the project, and we hope to sit with you on the same sofa soon for an unusual conversation about safe public spaces.

Civic Hub Waterloo Region is the proud host for the development and rehearsals of the anti-poverty engaged theatre production rooted in lived expertise! Living Below the Line is a stereotype-busting work about struggle, resilience and hope, co-created by Watercourse Theatre and fourteen individuals living in poverty. Over the course of five free, regional public presentations between June 17- 25, these new actors will share their stories. Scenes include perspectives on stigma, a mock quiz show, and superheroes! “These stories are important truths, shared from the heart. I am honoured to help bring them to the stage,” says Catherine Frid, Artistic Director of Watercourse Theatre.

The Social Development Centre has partnered with the City of Kitchener to initiate a Lived Expertise Working Group on housing. Over the next two years the working group will be advising the City of Kitchener’s Housing for All Strategy to implement and monitor some of the affordable housing actions and programs that better address the challenges of people experiencing marginalization. 

This working group is a pilot project to model how Lived Expertise engagement can evolve and look like in the future. Building on the City’s desire to ensure representation of those with lived experience, our model of Lived Expertise encompasses advocacy, community accountability, and transformative power. The working group will continue refining this model to make recommendations for other institutions engaging people with lived experience in decision making and hands-on collaboration.

As a follow up to the displacement studies we collaborated with the University of Waterloo School of Planning, the Social Planning Network of Ontario is launching a call for a coordinator position to implement similar studies in four communities in Ontario - deadline for applications is April 29 2022. Halton Region, Kingston and District, Oxford County and the Region of York will engage and work alongside tenants with lived experience of precarious housing, collecting the narratives of those who have been impacted in both urban and rural settings and mapping instances of eviction and displacement. See the attached project summary that addresses gaps in data and knowledge about displacement in rural and urban settings and development of lived experience leadership and tenant organizing.