Community leadership
Community leadership is one way the Foundation works with partners on the bold moves needed to tackle some of Hamilton’s toughest challenges. Community leadership initiatives are largely supported by the Community Fund, as well as by interest-aligned granting from donor-directed funds. Here are some highlights of progress on the community leadership goals in our strategic plan.
Increase investment and support for affordable housing development in Hamilton to support community well-being.
Safe, affordable housing is an important part of the Foundation’s community leadership, impact investing and granting. This winter, the Foundation will release its comprehensive affordable housing strategy, a 10-year, $50 million commitment based on research, consultation and, in particular, on the work of Steve Pomeroy, one of Canada’s leading housing policy experts. The housing strategy will guide HCF’s decisions on where our philanthropic capital will have the most impact and the best roles we can play. In addition, over the last year our community leadership work in this area included:
Supporting the development of the City of Hamilton’s Housing Sustainability and Investment Roadmap, recently approved by council. This included sharing the relevant findings of Steve Pomeroy’s work as input to its development. In addition, HCF was a funder of two reports by Dr. Brian Doucet, Canada Research Chair in Urban Change and Social Inclusion, which helped inform the plan. HCF is also providing funding to the City’s new housing secretariat to support implementation of the roadmap.
Funding, convening support and participation in Social Innovation Canada’s Transit-Oriented Affordable Housing lab, which brings together partners to preserve and create affordable housing projects along transit corridors, including LRT. The goal of this lab is to develop up to three affordable housing projects for Hamilton that could serve as pilots for other Canadian communities. Partners include the City of Hamilton, McMaster University’s Canadian Housing Evidence Collaborative, Hamilton is Home (an alliance of community housing providers) and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. The lab recently received $400,000 of funding from CMHC’s National Housing Strategy Solutions Lab program.
Increase the capacity and health of equity-deserving organizations and communities to address systemic barriers.
HCF is working to build the capacity and sustainability of organizations whose missions focus on the needs of equity-deserving and marginalized groups, including racialized people, newcomers, people with disabilities, 2SLGBTQIA+ and Indigenous people. This includes support for areas such as board, leadership and volunteer recruitment and training, becoming incorporated or achieving charitable status and building a resource development/fundraising plan — in short, whatever is needed to bring a non-profit to the next level of organizational maturity so it may more effectively and efficiently advance its mission. Three grants provided through an open-call process that focused on small grassroots organizations included:
Somali Community in Hamilton, which provides youth programs, legal advocacy, elders programs and employment services to the significant number of Somalian immigrants who now call Hamilton home.
Rafiki Hamilton, which serves the city’s Congolese community and other local francophone Africans.
Munar Learning Centre, which serves Somali communities in Hamilton by creating bridges between Somali refugees, the education system and service providers.
Relationships with Indigenous communities
HCF’s strategic plan calls us to “expand and strengthen relationships with Indigenous organizations and communities.” We recognize that this requires a cultural shift in our mindsets, behaviours and practices. For support in this journey, HCF became a member of the Circle on Philanthropy, an Indigenous-led organization that works to incorporate Indigenous ways of knowing into Canada’s philanthropic sector. This membership, centred in reciprocity, provides opportunities for (un)learning and partnership. It comes with responsibility and obligations that commit the Foundation to use its resources to work towards Truth and Reconciliation, aligning with the TRC’s 94 Calls to Action and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Over the last year, HCF has drafted a Declaration of Action on Truth and Reconciliation, and is now meeting with Indigenous partners to validate its contents.
Focus on Grades 6, 7 and 8 and supporting the transition into and out of the middle-school years to increase the likelihood that young Hamiltonians graduate high school and access post-secondary opportunities.
This goal is delivered through the Foundation’s 10-year initiative called ABACUS. Last year, ABACUS Phase II was introduced, sharpening its focus to include the importance of children’s overall social and emotional wellness to their academic achievement, the needs of students historically underserved in the education system and the transition in and out of the middle-school years. It also included a particular focus on learning interruptions arising from the pandemic. As a result, 29 programs totalling $2,120,934 were offered in two streams:
ABACUS+ for Grades 6, 7, 8, the transition through Grade 9 and into Grade 10.
ABACUS Liftoff! A pilot program for Grades 4 and 5 with an emphasis on reading acquisition and numeracy.
A complete list of these grants is available HERE
Since the start of ABACUS in 2016, the Foundation has convened a “community of practice” in which grantees and school board partners share experiences, insights and guidance to learn how we can best collaborate to support students — for instance, early learning from the ABACUS Liftoff! pilot is that students in Grades 4 and 5 are often more open to engaging with academic and social support programs than older students, and also that many of them are experiencing pronounced pandemic-related effects. Shared learning from the community of practice will continue to shape ABACUS and the work of its partners to best respond to the needs of local students.
Work with our education partners to influence policy, attitudes and culture to strengthen equity, wellness and academic achievement in the universal public education system.
In collaboration with our partners, some of the projects toward this goal with which HCF was involved over the past year include:
Hamilton Community Research Partnership: This is a data-sharing coalition between HCF, McMaster University, Mohawk College, Hamilton’s public and Catholic school boards and the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario. Together they have developed a prototype for collecting and connecting data to build a comprehensive understanding of student pathways that can inform policies and programs to better support students in their journey from K-12 to post-secondary.
The pilot successfully built a privacy-protected resource that connected data across multiple school boards and post-secondary partners — the first of its scale in Ontario. The first two reports from this partnership — The Power of Connected Data: Charting Student Pathways to and through Postsecondary in Hamilton, and CRP Blueprint: How We Built a Community Data Infrastructure — provide valuable insights into the pathways of students in Hamilton, a roadmap for other communities interested in pursuing this type of coalition and the case for a provincial data-sharing strategy.
HCF staff secondment: In 2016, HCF learned first-hand from the Cleveland Foundation about the value of seconding staff to community partners in furthering mutual goals. Such an opportunity arose for HCF in 2022, when the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board (HWDSB) was working to implement recommendations from the Safe Schools: Bullying Prevention and Intervention Review Panel, an initiative that had been supported by HCF. Building on the relationship between the two organizations, HWDSB requested dedicated HCF staff to support engagement efforts within communities currently and historically underserved by education.
For 18 months, a Foundation staff member worked as a “systems advisor” to bring an outsider perspective to the school board, along with an understanding of the Hamilton community and best practices to build healing relationships and engage equity-deserving communities. The secondment supported HWDSB with strategic direction and advice, organizational development, and change management. In a formal evaluation, participants identified that the systems advisor acted as a “critical friend”, asking important questions and supporting staff to reflect on organizational culture and practice, and how anti-racist and anti-oppressive practices applied. It also fostered trust-building within the school board and between the board and community organizations. The secondment also highlighted the importance of leveraging research and data to support systems change. The secondment is the first of its kind in Ontario between a school board and a community foundation. The learning from this experience may inform the development of a model for other institutions looking to address increasingly complex community contexts in a co-created way.
Pandemic Education Research Project: This project examined the effects of the pandemic on students and families by hearing directly from youth and youth-serving agencies. The project identified experiences with online learning from youth that included disengagement, disconnection from friends and teachers and a “loss of joy.” Service providers, while identifying the benefits of connecting with other family members, found it more difficult to build relationships with youth, increased anxiety and depression among participants and a lack of maturity and growth that hindered students’ return to in-person school. The findings from this research were shared with partners and used to shape ABACUS Phase II funding, as well as our ongoing education work. A summary of the report’s findings is available HERE