Prince George teachers are taking it to the streets to fight child poverty.
On Tuesday, Nov. 20 at 4 p.m., members of the Prince George District Teachers' Association will host an hour-long public information session at Duchess Park secondary school with guest speaker Adrienne Montani, the provincial co-ordinator for First Call: B.C. Child and Youth Advocacy Coalition.
From the school, teachers will march casserole-style (banging pots and pans) to the downtown office of Prince George-Valemount MLA Shirley Bond, where food and clothes will be collected for the Elizabeth Fry Society.
The event coincides with the United Nations' International Day of the Child and it will be a fundraiser for First Call B.C. For the past seven years, the Vancouver-based organization has produced a child poverty report card which reflects current conditions in the province. Montani, a former Vancouver public school board trustee, will offer the Prince George audience a sneak preview of the 2012 report card, to be released two days later.
"I think it will be a really good eye-opener for what's really happening around child poverty in British Columbia," said Matt Pearce, president of the Prince George District Teachers Association.
In April, the province announced Prince George would be one of seven B.C. cities to take part in a poverty-reduction pilot project and over the summer appointed consultants in each of the seven cities to form partnerships with local governments, community organizations and local businesses to gather information from low-income families and individuals vulnerable to poverty.
Pearce wonders why it's taken the province so long to come up with a strategy to find ways to reduce child poverty.
"This government's been in power for 11 years and it's only this last couple of months they've come up with a pilot project to start looking at child poverty," said Pearce. "Newfoundland, the poorest province in Canada, had a child poverty reduction program in place five years ago. We're one of the wealthier provinces in Canada and it shouldn't be like this. There's been no plan."
There are 115 families province-wide now involved in the project, 15 of which live in Prince George. Local project co-ordinator Wendy Flanagan, a community poverty strategy consultant for the Ministry of Children and Family Development, will be consulting school principals to help those families connect to social agencies in the city and get the help they need.
"The focus of our group is to find safe affordable housing, transportation and a collaboration with all the social service groups sitting around the table to come up with a poverty-reduction plan," said School District 57 trustee Betty Bekkering, part of the strategic committee.
The group will meet for its fourth meeting in mid-November. UNBC students have now created a research focus group to determine what constitutes a living wage needed for people to exist in the city. That report is expected in late December.
The latest figures released by Statistics Canada based on 2010 figures rank B.C.'s child poverty rates second-worst in the country after Manitoba. The poverty rate in B.C. was 10.5 per cent in 2010 (87,000 children), down from 11.8 per cent (98,000 children) in 2009. Prior to 2010, B.C. had the worst record for child poverty for eight consecutive years.
A B.C. family is considered poor by Statistics Canada standards if the total after-tax income of a family of four living in a city of 500,000 or more was $35,469 or less, or if a single parent in a large city with one child brought home $22,831 or less.
The overall poverty rate for people of all ages in B.C. was 11.5 per cent in 2010, down from 12 per cent in 2009. The left coast province has ranked worst in that category for 12 straight years.
