A group of community partners has been studying neighbourhoods in Windsor-Essex to find children need more support and has identified three areas.
The ProsperUs partnership has released a milestone report called Coming Together: Building a hopeful future for children and youth in Windsor-Essex County.
It aims at guiding the next stage of its vision for the community.
ProsperUs partners plan to target the collective investments of over 45 partners in three neighbourhoods – West Windsor, downtown Windsor, and Leamington.
“Our plan is to focus the Cradle to Career Strategy in key neighbourhoods, with the goal of expanding its impact over time,” says Janice Kaffer, ProsperUs co-chair. “Not all children and youth are thriving, and that’s more apparent when you look at the numbers neighbourhood by neighbourhood.
Kaffer says they want to level the playing field and give children equal opportunities to help youth succeed and become independent, prosperous adults.
ProsperUs has a vision to transform the conditions and capacity in our region to dramatically improve the outcomes for children and young people of Windsor-Essex County, from the time they are born until they complete post-secondary education and enter the workforce full-time – a Cradle to Career (C2C) approach.
“This is an historic undertaking – the first of its kind in Canada,” says Jim Inglis, ProsperUs co-chair. “Our region’s greatest strength is our youth – they are the generation that will help shape our changing economy.”
The 60-page report that was crafted over the last eight months, supported by all the ProsperUs partners, outlines the data-driven process that led to the selected neighbourhoods for the initial C2C investments.
“Our goal was to identify three ‘neighbourhood clusters’ that were experiencing the most constraints for children and youth. The results were clear, when we looked at the data,” says ProsperUs Backbone Lead Lorraine Goddard.
“Equity is an important ProsperUs value. That means that some children in certain neighbourhoods need more help than others - your postal code shouldn’t determine your future,” Goddard added.
This year, ProsperUs partners entered into unprecedented data sharing agreements, allowing the collective to better understand the successes and barriers experienced by children, youth, and their families in our community.
Twenty locally identified indicators emerged, highlighting economic, educational, health, civic and safety factors. These indicators were used to rank every single neighbourhood – 30 neighbourhoods in the City of Windsor and 25 in Essex County.
