Commentary by Mary Lewis

Neighbourhoods Under Stress (NUS) is a concise report, but its impact has been considerable.  Produced by the Joint Task Force on Neighbourhood Support Services, chaired by Marvyn Novick, it is follow-up research to Marvyn’s Metro’s Suburbs in Transition (see previous commentary by David Hulchanski). The ideas articulated in NUS can be traced back to a major address that Marvyn Novick gave in 1976. [i]

Marvyn’s basic thesis was that community services, when offered to people in relation to where they live, have a critical role to play in improving social patterns and amenities and thereby reducing the potential incidence of need. The community agencies that provide these services, he argues, are important because they promote opportunities for local responsibility and are a source of contact, support and social integration.

Suburbs in Transition Part II, was explicit in recommending voluntary agencies to promote opportunities for local responsibility in high risk and socially diverse neighbourhoods. Their functions were described as:

• providing social services where critical gaps exist,
• initiating outreach work with isolated groups,
• recruiting volunteers for neighbourhood programs,
• encouraging the development of local leadership,
• being a source of multi-lingual information and support, and
• coordinating neighbourhood projects with public and voluntary agencies.

Specifically, Suburbs in Transition Part II calls for up to 20 such organizations in the suburbs with annual core funding of $50,000 to $70,000 (in 1980 dollars). Suburbs in Transition identifies the priority needs of suburban communities which these neighbourhood support programs serve.

Neighbourhoods Under Stress defines a Neighbourhood Support Programs as “locally initiated activities controlled by participants and residents which enable people to cope with daily needs and to contribute to community life”. They are locally rooted (belonging to the community people who participate in their development, operation and use), provide wide-ranging formal and informal support in daily living, reduce isolation and alienation, foster personal growth, self-confidence and interdependence, create opportunities for social integration and demonstrate voluntary initiative.

The report makes the case that this “ground level” within a hierarchical human services system of public and city-wide agencies is critical because radical changes in family structure, forms of urban-suburban life-styles and settlement patterns had led to an erosion of the primary support networks which traditionally formed the basis of social support.

While neighbourhood-based voluntary support programs were increasingly emerging in Toronto’s outer suburbs (Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough) in response to changing social and economic conditions, the report describes their crisis of survival. It proposes new public core funding for them arguing that the Province, Metro Toronto and the six area municipal councils of the day should “recognize neighbourhood support programs as essential services providing a primary base of support to the daily living needs of people in their communities.” The report outlines the need for a core budget of a typical neighbourhood support program in the range of $67,300 to $74,500 ($184,000 to $203,500 in 2022 dollars).

Neighbourhoods Under Stress became the key document of a very active advocacy campaign that resulted in the announcement in 1985 of a new pilot program, called the Community and Neighbourhood Support Services Program (CNSSP). It was cost-shared by the province, the then Metro Toronto and the United Way of Greater Toronto. After ten years of funding, the CNSSP was discontinued in 1995 falling victim to the Harris Government’s social services cuts.

Through CNSSP, NUS had an immediate impact by contributing to the existence of about 20 voluntary agencies that built community capacity and promoted social support. It can also be argued that the report’s impact went well beyond the decade immediately following its release. Several of the agencies funded under the pilot program have had a profound impact on their communities. In addition, many of the most significant policy efforts of the City of Toronto and United Way of Greater Toronto over the following three decades can trace their roots to this initial report.

CNSSP was evaluated in 1992 by the Community and Neighbourhood Support Services Association and the Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto. Their report concluded that the program had been successful in encouraging locally initiated programs, thereby promoting community responsibility and participation, and fostering social integration and prevention by providing services tailored to the specific needs of the local community.

Are there still lessons to be learned from Neighbourhoods Under Stress? One lesson is that a short, focused research report can be extremely helpful in influencing social policy, particularly when it engages local actors and their insights about what communities need. In that sense, it can be argued that the process was as important as the product. The entire process of stakeholder engagement to work on Suburbs in Transition and Neighborhoods Under Stress built a strong coalition committed to action. A wide group of highly committed individuals formed the Joint Task Force credited as the authors of Neighborhoods Under Stress. Senior officials from the then Metro Toronto and United Way of Greater Toronto were directly engaged throughout. The group was mobilized for extensive advocacy efforts following the report’s release, which led to the introduction of CNSSP.

How did the document influence social policy? Although establishing recognition of local-rooted support programs as essential services was not realized as such, there has been significant adoption of the principles of the neighbourhood support model in other provincial and municipal initiatives, as the following examples illustrate:

• Early ON Child and Family Centres combine four programs to provide support to parents of young children in their neighbourhoods.
• The expansion of the Community Health Centres in the 1980s-90s reflects commitment to locally developed and provided health and social support.
• The United Way, working with the City of Toronto, released the Building Strong Neighbourhoods Strategy in 2006, which echoes Neighbourhoods Under Stress, identifying 13 priority communities as the focus for community capacity building.
• The City of Toronto’s report Toronto Strong Neighbourhoods Strategy 2020 continues to build on the same themes.

Was the recommendation to give priority to Metro’s outer suburbs addressed? This recommendation was more central to Suburbs in Transition than to Neighbourhoods Under Stress. The evaluation report in 1992 and other data on Metro grant allocation show that eleven of the 21 CNSSP grants went to outer suburban neighbourhood programs, three to inner suburban groups (York and East York) and seven to programs in the City of Toronto, so that a priority focus on suburban communities was moderated to some degree.  As well, the level of core funding provided in 1991 was $44,000 per agency, about two-thirds of amount proposed in Neighbourhoods under Stress.

The issue of prioritizing resource allocation to underserved suburban communities has been longstanding for both Toronto and the United Way.  In the last few years, grant restructuring in the amalgamated City of Toronto has focused on allocating two-thirds of new program funding to “suburban” communities. The identification of the 13 priority areas in 2006 provided the City with the rationale for directing funds to suburban areas and for some significant investments in several suburban communities.

What is the relevance of Neighbourhoods Under Stress for today? The language of today is a little different with a focus on “placed-based” strategies and hubs. It is not clear that there is as great an emphasis on local leadership and local accountability. It is worth noting that as early as 1976 Marvyn noted the risk of focusing on multiple services cohabiting without ensuring accountability to the community and acknowledgment of the critical role of neighbourhood support services. Specifically, he stated:

This author is hardly excited by recent efforts to pursue co-ordination through a space consolidation approach, known as multi-service centers. Reinstitutionalizing the settings from which community services are offered, even if these new bureaucracies are now neighbourhood-based, is both a mis-reading of the current problem and counter-productive to normative perspective of service provision.

The issues of today are no less urgent. The lack of a mental health system to address growing mental health issues, precarious employment, the lack of affordable housing and the needs of our refugee population have been well documented. The pandemic has underscored the inequalities across Toronto. Combatting anti Black racism will require systematic solutions that go well beyond neighbourhood services. Yet local organizations have already played an important role in developing the leadership that is bringing much needed attention to these issues and have a role to play in reducing isolation and alienation for all equity seeking groups.

The pandemic has reinforced what Marvyn always knew: a lack of community leads to less favourable individual outcomes. COVID-19 has illustrated this on a population basis and it will take years for the full physical and mental recovery. Community will be critical in that recovery. Given that the community infrastructure has been tested to its limits with COVID-19, policy makers must not lose sight of the need to act now to ensure we continue to have that very infrastructure. The silver lining in our COVID-19 response has been the evolving use of virtual tools to stand in for community connections. They are a poor proxy for community in the context of Marvyn‘s work (contrary to pundits of the virtual world). However, they do provide new and helpful opportunities to build and maintain community connections. They can and will be a helpful component of community development going forward.

The issues of Toronto’s suburbs persist. At the same time, the demographics of the 905 region have changed and it seems clear that a report like Suburbs in Transition and a subsequent concerted effort to implement its recommendations on a larger scale are desperately needed to understand and address the needs of this larger Greater Toronto Region.

The ideas articulated in Neighbourhoods Under Stress can make a contribution to these larger system issues and should be incorporated as part of broader strategies. It seems appropriate to leave the final words to Marvyn, again from his address in 1976:

Most of us periodically require some form of support to make it through the experiences of daily living. Nor do we wish to be clinically defined in seeking such support. For community services to perform this role, they must come to be perceived as visible and natural elements of a community.

Mary Lewis was a Children’s Aid community worker in Jane/Finch in the mid 1970’s and introduced Marvyn to the area. She later worked at North York Inter-agency Council and United Way of Greater Toronto.

[i] Novick, Marvyn. (1976). “Developing a Municipal Framework for Coordination”, in Coordinating Human Services in Metropolitan Toronto, Urban Seminar Three. Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto and Institute for Public Administration of Canada (IPAC), Toronto Group.