Kershaw – community engagement

We’ve been collecting that data for the best part of a decade. And one of the amazing things is that because the Early Development Instrument speaks about the children in our neighbourhoods, people get mobilized. It’s not a random child, it’s the child out there on my street in my backyard, in my park, who I see as I drive to work. And that get’s people excited. And in British Columbia, in short order, we know that in a four-year period, 500 local responses emerged to our data showing that over one-in-four kids was vulnerable. That’s impressive. That is a tremendous amount of local and community development that was happening on the ground. People said, “we’re working harder”, “we’re collaborating better”, “we’re volunteering in more efficient and smarter ways”, and that is exciting.  But despite that, over the exact same time period, vulnerability rates rose in British Columbia. Now I can’t imagine how high they would have risen, had it not been for all that local community development work that people were doing by focusing attention on the early years in a way that had not been done before in British Columbia. But it also shows that the local is not going to be the sufficient place for community development in Canada because Canadian federalism doesn’t work that way.  

The places where we have the greatest opportunity to shift the way we live, and organize and institute policy, are at our provincial and federal levels. So community development has to have this groundswell of interest and be informed by the values and commitments of the people locally, but it needs to be directed evermore, to our provincial and federal levels.  Local community development requires citizens to be more savvy when they digest information from our senior levels of government.  But we need to now recognize that we’ve been so slow to implement good early child development and family policy that a modest incremental change is not going to do it.  Eliminating the rate of vulnerability from 29% down to 10% where it ought to be, it’s going to cost us, in British Columbia alone, three billion dollars. Across the country closer to $22 billion. A year. And until people start hearing those numbers, then local community development can’t get distracted by saying “Oh we’ll spend a couple, you know, a million dollars here, or a $100 million there across the country”. It’s not going to be sufficient and so we need to be more savvy, more intelligent in the way we digest theses policy announcements.