Poverty Reduction Fund
Working Women Community Centre’s FLOCK
FLOCK is an innovative platform for women that bridges self-employment coaching and skills training to local social services and community involvement. The program is delivered out of a Community Hub successfully engaging vulnerable women and families in a City of Toronto Neighbourhood Improvement Area where 25% of lone-parent households are predominantly female-headed. The FLOCK project also aims to demonstrate ways a Community Hub can help anchor an inclusive neighbourhood economy through supporting micro-enterprises, aligning place-based investment strategies, building local economic networks and integrating wraparound services for vulnerable women. The evaluation aims to assess the causal impact of the program using a mixed-methods strategy that combines longitudinal panel data with qualitative longitudinal data. The evaluation will explore if the changes in outcomes were perhaps a function of the background characteristics of the individuals rather than the causal impact of the program; and collect multiple measures on intended outcomes, thus better ensuring that the causal relationship will hold in other settings for similar outcomes.
Funder:
Local Poverty Reduction Fund, Ontario Treasury Board Secretariat
Period of Grant:
February 2017-December 2018
Margaret’s Toronto East Drop-In Centre
Margaret’s drop-in is a community hub offering a non-judgmental and safe space where individuals can access a variety of services, including: daily meals, crisis beds, clothing, nursing care, mental health and justice workers, and women and senior’s programming. The drop-in centre employs a low barrier philosophy to work with vulnerable clients who may otherwise be turned away by traditional service providers, works with the drivers of marginalization to meet clients where they are through an anti-oppressive framework, and also respects autonomy and personal freedom.
The evaluation of Margaret’s Toronto East Drop-In Centre is a realist impact evaluation, which aims to examine outcomes attributed to Margaret’s drop-in centre. The evaluation uses a realist evaluation framework, which focuses on “what works, for whom, in what respects, to what extent, in what contexts, and how?”
Funder:
Local Poverty Reduction Fund, Ontario Treasury Board Secretariat
Period of Grant:
February 2016-December 2017
Thorncliffe Neighbourhood Office’s (TNO) Community Enterprise Resource Centre (CERC)
TNO’s CERC is a Centre of Excellence for emerging newcomer women entrepreneurs; it is a knowledge centre that leverages peer mentoring, provides entrepreneurial training and resources through partnerships, infrastructure support and enhanced links to markets beyond the immediate community to increase women’s capacities and sales. The evaluation of TNO’s CERC is an example of a realist impact evaluation. We explore impacts for specific individual contexts and also explore the differential mechanisms by which the program can work. Realist evaluation explores “what works for whom and under what conditions.”
Funder:
Local Poverty Reduction Fund, Ontario Treasury Board Secretariat
Period of Grant:
February 2016-December 2017