The Neighbours Project
How Connecting Street-Involved Community Members to Odd Jobs Builds Understanding and Relationships
By Dominique Beaupre, Zeinab Elbarrad, and Pachy Orellana-Fitzgerald
Sustainable social change is best created from and for the community. We are three community members who came together as change makers who wanted to bridge the divide between street-involved community members and businesses of the Old Strathcona neighborhood.
We wanted to imagine what would happen if everyone had the opportunity to contribute to their community, build relationships with their neighbours, and be valued for their presence.
Our initial challenge was to connect marginalized community members with casual employment opportunities in and around the Old Strathcona neighborhood. We came together while participating in Edmonton’s ‘RECOVER.’ We wanted to imagine what would happen if everyone had the opportunity to contribute to their community, build relationships with their neighbours, and be valued for their presence. This was our challenge and we were trying to solve this by rapid prototyping new concepts until one stuck.
We started by having conversations with a range of people to help us understand the challenges that both businesses and street-involved people have, when it comes to finding jobs and employees, and explore solution ideas. Discovering the fears, needs, and abilities of participants gave us insights into the challenge and motivation required to get people to participate. By engaging with a divided community, we learned about ways to create opportunities for others to feel connected and valued for their presence.
We knew that establishing trust between the participant, business, and The Neighbours Project was going to be the linchpin for success. We tried to collaborate with everyone involved during each cycle of prototyping to build a trusting relationship. Both participants and businesses helped us understand the core challenges as we guided them through the “community first” process.
Early on, we set the goal of connecting marginalized community members to odd jobs in the Old Strathcona neighbourhood. After conducting research within the community and exploring the different methods that we could use to address this challenge, we decided to implement a job lottery system at the Neighbour Centre. We learned that a similar lottery was already taking place, and we wanted to capitalize on the familiarity of this process to introduce the new “odd jobs” program. Easy right?
Planning a prototype is a valuable exercise, but executing it is an entirely different, and extremely beneficial, activity.
Not exactly. In real life, there are external variables that you are not in control of. However solid your plan is, everything may change when you’re faced with unexpected hurdles or situations that your plan was not designed for. Yet, you can never discover these hurdles or external variables if you remain in the “lab.” Planning a prototype is a valuable exercise, but executing it is an entirely different, and extremely beneficial, activity. Through it, you are able to find the holes in the plan, make appropriate changes, and develop a more robust service that considers the needs of everyone taking part.
Right from the get-go, we ran into unexpected problems. Nonetheless, we continued on as planned, providing participants with paperwork and guiding them through the process that was about to take place. The first time we tried it, we sensed that the participant was very nervous (albeit trying to hide it). After introducing them to the business owner, we left, spending the next hours anxiously counting the minutes before we could return back and make sure the community member was doing well in this new setting we had left them in. Could this get any worse?
Upon returning to the job site, we interviewed the community member and the employer. To our relief, things were running very smoothly. While the employer did admit that they too were nervous, they were very happy with the work that the community member had completed. The lottery winner was also very happy with the opportunity, insisting on finishing the job before leaving. The participant’s enthusiasm made us even realize that our challenge was not about providing jobs to create community, but about creating community through a variety of means (which could include jobs). Could this get any better?
We learned a lot through our experience and look forward to future iterations of this prototype.
It takes a community of changemakers to make any meaningful change and we could have not achieved our project milestones without support from our city connector Nor’Ali McDaniel, urban wellness educator Raffaella Loro, and social enterprise coach Sandra Spencer. Read more about our Neighbour Project and how you can get involved here.
You can also check out this blog from Social Innovation Canada that talks about our work.