Urban Exchange

Happy summer and info on Speak Up Winnipeg’s charette

The weather has been fantastic over the past several days and it finally feels like summer is here! While Urban Exchange will continue to be abuzz with activity (poverty survey analysis, information-sharing meetings, report-writing, planning for next questionnaire, etc.), Working Group members will be taking a break until September.

At today’s year-end wrapup meeting, Working Group volunteers reflected on a successful year and talked about plans for the fall. A few highlights?

• More than 2800 Winnipeggers participated in our conversation about poverty. In one month! If you filled out the survey, thanks!
• Of those Winnipeggers, a significant number said they have a household income of less than $20,000/year. We’ll report on demographics in the fall, but so far it’s looking like we were able to reach a wide cross-section of people.
• We trained – and paid – several people living in low-income neighbourhoods to do face-to-face interviews with their neighbours.
• Through social media like blogs, Facebook and Twitter, a lot of you helped spread the word about Urban Exchange.

Speak Up Winnipeg, the City of Winnipeg’s new engagement process, came up during the discussion at today’s meeting, too. The SUW website was mentioned as a great example of how to give citizens a way to talk about what’s important to them.

The process isn’t just about a website, so it’s important to mention the charrette that started Tuesday and is happening for the rest of this week.

What’s a charrette? According to SUW, it’s “a way to harness the collective power of a community by gathering everyone with an interest in a set of issues in the same place in a concentrated time period.”

Here’s some commentary on the first day of the charrette from Graham at Progressive Winnipeg, who’s also a member of the newly-formed Speak Up Squad, a kind of “street team” that will be at various public events to hear what you have to say about Winnipeg this summer.

If you get a chance to check out the charrette, it’s going on at the Winnipeg Art Gallery until June 26th.

Poverty definitions offer individual insights

Our survey on poverty closed a month ago and we’re working hard to compile and analyze what you’ve said so we can report back to you and the community. With 2855 participants (a few hundred more than our original estimate) – and almost as many open-ended definitions of poverty to sort through – that’s going to take some time.

In the meantime, we wanted to keep the conversation about poverty in Winnipeg going.

Right now we’ve got a few respondents’ poverty definitions rotating in the “Poverty Is . . .” banner in the sidebar and we’ve posted a handful of them below.

If you filled out the Urban Exchange poverty survey, how do these definitions differ from yours?  If you didn’t fill out the poverty survey – how do YOU define poverty?  Please let us know by leaving a comment below!

To get you thinking, here are some short samples of what other Winnipeggers said:

• Poverty is . . . a lack of hope – a feeling of not belonging.
• Poverty is . . . when people go hungry.
• Poverty is . . . when opportunity is a closed door.
• Poverty is . . . when you have no hope or choice – it’s not really about money.
• Poverty is . . . living paycheck to paycheck, or worse, on the streets.

We’re planning to release a report on the full findings in the fall.  Until then, we plan to share smaller bits of information on MyCityMySay.ca. We hope you’ll come back every now and then to check it out!

Photo credit:  Kieran 2009 (Flickr)