History
Our Start
In May 2017, Edmonton’s City Council passed a motion for City staff to work with the Province, the Edmonton Police Service (EPS) and community stakeholders to prepare a shared Inner-City Wellness Plan. This plan would coordinate with other initiatives, such as EndPovertyEdmonton and neighbourhood revitalization efforts, and address a proposal for a Community Wellness Centre that would have several social service agencies located in one place.
This work would focus on five inner city neighbourhoods (Boyle Street, Central McDougall, Downtown, McCauley and Queen Mary Park) and was named Recover: Edmonton’s Urban Wellness Plan.
While precariously-housed people do live in these neighbourhoods, Recover has always been about the wellbeing of everyone and everything in these neighbourhoods — residents, businesses, neighbourhood conditions — and how they all fit together.
“Innovation, trying new ways to address stubborn challenges, is always ahead of the evidence curve. We have to try new things out, accumulating evidence as we go, before we know what works, and does not, for whom, in what context, and why.”
~ Mark Cabaj, Here to There Consulting
Baby Steps...
Defining and improving urban wellbeing is complex for many reasons. There are many perspectives on what it means, and little agreement on how best to tackle it.
In late 2017 and early 2018, Recover spent time with people in inner-city neighbourhoods to find out about their experiences and perspectives. This research approach is called ethnography, and it involves getting to know and understand people on a deeper level than more quantitative research methods allow. The information we gathered helped us to better understand street-involved people — their needs, their aspirations, and their challenges. We then invited people from all kinds of backgrounds to learn about these experiences, and to design new ideas to address them, in prototype teams. In 2018, twelve prototype teams built out their ideas and tested them in the neighbourhoods.
“Generally, people want a life, not just a service; a community with unpaid reciprocal connections, with services there to supplement. But, a forest of institutionalisation has encroached on all our lives to a greater or lesser extent.”
~ Cormac Russell, Nurture Development
Big Questions…
The deeper we got into this work, the more questions it spurred. These questions became the philosophical heart of our efforts, and drove our work in the first couple of years:
How do we best meet the needs of people who are highly marginalized?
How do we support thriving communities?
How do we plan wellness services that consider the cumulative effects on neighbourhoods and community?
In time, our thoughts evolved to ask this central question:
How do we open up new pathways for healing, and help build reciprocal relationships across differences?
This is how we approach our work now. We don’t necessarily have answers, but we have a willingness to try, to experiment, and to draw on the wisdom and experience of the people with whom we are co-creating.
“RECOVER is an emergent strategy. We were set up on purpose to experiment and learn as we go. The things we’ve learned from experimenting means that our work keeps evolving. We discard the things that aren’t helpful for us, and we build on the things that are useful.”
~ Recover Project Team
Growing...
Recover presented to City Council in August 2018 and were given the go-ahead to continue our work. In December 2018, we received four years of funding (2019-2022).
Our work has been identified as part of the City’s 2019-2022 Corporate Businesses Plan, under the Healthy City strategic goal, along with initiatives like affordable housing and poverty elimination. It also fits within one of the Big City Moves: “Inclusive and Compassionate.” This recognition of how our work contributes to the City’s strategic goals provides focus and stability as we move forward.
“RECOVER ... was an emotional rollercoaster for both participants and conveners, involving difficult conversations and unlikely collaborations; deep skepticism and contagious optimism; experiments that fizzled and breakthrough successes.”
~ Alex Ryan, MaRS Solution Lab
Building and Learning...
2019 was a busy year of growth. Not only did we add a sixth neighbourhood, Strathcona, to our scope, we and our partners undertook more research, designed and tested more prototypes, supported the local social innovation community, tested prototype evaluation tools, and evaluated our past work, in order to learn from our successes and failures.
In 2019, we had our first opportunity to work with a large private business, City Centre Mall. The collaboration explored how private/public spaces could better support people experiencing marginalization, and what guidance private businesses need in order to provide this support.
In our first two years (2018 and 2019), we amassed a significant amount of data from our research, including the 59 stories of street-involved Edmontonians. We aggregated this data to give us a better understanding of what is important to these 59 people, and also what wellbeing means for Edmontonians from all walks of life. We learned from the street-involved people we got to know, and connected their thoughts to our research into 3000 years of Eastern, Western, and Indigenous traditions, as well as contemporary interdisciplinary thought, in order to develop our wellbeing framework.
Find out more about our past and present projects, and our next steps.