Quarterly Member Spotlight: June 2023
Promotion and amplification of coalition members' campaigns and work is crucial to our shared success. To this end, we are unfurling a new series this year. Welcome to our second Quarterly Member Spotlight! (Missed the first one? Check it out here!)
Four times a year, we will highlight a few member organizations working across a broad range of fields in poverty reduction. This month, we are featuring four organizations working in Food Security, Education, and Child Care: Inclusion BC, Pacific Immigrant Resources Society, Coalition of Child Care Advocates of BC, and Vancouver Neighbourhood Food Networks. Read on to learn more about the work of these member organizations!
Pacific Immigrant Resources Society (PIRS)
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PIRS delivers accessible, inclusive, low-barrier programs for immigrant and refugee women and their children that create a sense of belonging, meaningful participation, and leadership. Access to affordable and culturally safe childcare remains one of the biggest barriers to gender equity and pandemic recovery, especially for immigrant and refugee women. PIRS has always recognized that without reliable child care, primary caregivers can’t access employment and education. This is why our programs provide high-quality care and early education for children while primary caregivers are in class.
Current Campaigns, Reports, & Services:
To ensure equitable employment for immigrant and refugee women, PIRS started Pop Up Child Care, a social enterprise offering innovative childcare solutions. All profits made from Pop Up Child Care services go towards funding Pathways to Childcare Careers program - an occupational English language training specially designed for newcomer, immigrant, and refugee women pursuing careers in early learning and childcare.
The Building a Childcare System that Works for Immigrant and Refugee Women project is a 2.5-year PIRS initiative funded by Women and Gender Equality Canada. It supports a feminist response and recovery from the impacts of COVID-19 through systemic change in the childcare sector. The project convenes the Childcare Leadership Group (CLG) - community of practice of 40+ immigrant and refugee women - where participants learn from lived experience to identify and co-design solutions to intersectional barriers in the childcare system. The project also provides capacity-building training in systems-thinking, advocacy, and skills for action.
Watch: this video series produced by the Childcare Leadership Group to learn more about the intersectional barriers that immigrant women experience in the childcare system in Canada.
Read: the Shifting Systems: PIRS Childcare Staffing Solutions Pilot Report to learn about the innovative childcare substitute staffing model developed by PIRS that enables service providers to transfer administrative responsibilities while creating employment and training opportunities for immigrant and refugee women in the childcare sector.
Fun fact: some of the PRC’s CAN program members are a part of the video series!
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Coalition of Child Care Advocates of BC
Twitter: @ccca_bc
Twitter: @10adayplan
Facebook: Coalition of Child Care Advocates of BC
Facebook: 10 a Day Child care Campaign
Instagram: ccca_bc
Instagram: 10adaychildcare
The Coalition of Child Care Advocates of BC (CCCABC) is an inclusive, feminist, membership-based organization.
Current Campaigns, Reports, & Services:
We are individuals and groups including parents, grandparents, child care providers, community organizations, academics and unions. We work collectively, using research, public education and mobilization, to achieve the vision of a high-quality, affordable, accessible child care system that serves the public interest - the $10aDay Plan.
Our current advocacy priorities include fair compensation for Early Childhood Educators including a province-wide publicly funded wage grid of $30-$40/hr that reflects and respects the importance of their work.
Sign the petition: Add your voice to the tens of thousands of individuals and organizations calling on governments to implement the $10aDay Plan.
Become a member of CCCABC: Student, Individual, Group, and Organizational membership tiers are available.
Inclusion BC
As Inclusion BC advocates for the rights of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families, they see the relationship between disability and poverty every day.
Current Campaigns, Reports, & Services:
Through employment equity programs like MentorAbility and Ready, Willing and Able, Inclusion BC is working towards a future in which everyone has opportunities to find meaningful employment. Inclusion BC offers a free Advocacy Line that supports adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families.
Alongside these programs, they continue to promote a National Disability Benefit and a Provincial Housing Supplement to allow people to thrive in their community. Through the Diversity Includes campaign, they advocate at both a provincial and national level for meaningful income security for the people they work for and with as an advocacy organization.
Inclusion BC also hosts an annual conference that brings together people from all over Canada and beyond to discuss how to raise the profile of this sector and the people they support.
Read: a 2020 report by Inclusion BC and Community Living BC found that over 5,000 people with intellectual disabilities in British Columbia alone will be looking for a home in the next 5 years.
Vancouver Neighbourhood Food Networks
The Vancouver Neighbourhood Food Networks are committed to promoting food security and justice in neighbourhoods across Vancouver. This work is based on the principle that all members of society have the right to quality food.
Current Campaigns, Reports, & Services:
We [Vancouver Neighbourhood Food Networks] assert the need for a more effective community-driven, collaborative, and cross-sectoral organizational structures supporting participatory food systems and justice policy development and advocacy led by community knowledge.
The 14 Vancouver Neighbourhood Food Networks currently work with 24 other community-based food organizations (so far!) towards organizing a food system framework overhaul in the Greater Vancouver Area. This project will facilitate food-sector-based networking with the goals of sharing knowledge, providing research and data, and generating bold new food system priorities and political action.
We continue to work towards upstream solutions to food insecurity, support a more equitable and just food system, and challenge the traditional food charity model, especially where we are seeing persistent food insecurity.
Food insecurity is largely driven by income inequality. A fragmented and ineffective policy landscape has us advocating for a more comprehensive and inclusive guaranteed basic income. We encourage people to check out the Basic Income BC website while we plan to put a campaign focus on basic income and food insecurity ourselves.
Read: From food charity to food justice - Vancouver Neighbourhood Food Networks Annual Report 2022.
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Next up: we’re looking to profile member organizations that are working in the policy and practical areas of Transportation, Health Care, and Workers’ Rights. If that sounds like your team and you'd like to snag a spot in the next feature, get in touch!
Not a member organization yet, but curious to see if Coalition membership is a good fit? Connect with our Operations and Partnerships Manager, Victoria.
