Reflections on CPJ's Poverty Workshops

As you may know from reading Chandra’s blog from Monday (“Highlights from CPJ’s Poverty Workshops,”), CPJ hosted a series of workshops on poverty last week in Southern Ontario. Along with Karri and Chandra, I travelled to Kitchener-Waterloo, Toronto and Whitby over a three day period to help coordinate and host them.

Since Chandra has already described how they went, I thought this might be a good chance for me to reflect on my own experience of the workshops as an intern and what I took away from them.

The Thursday workshop in Kitchener was the first CPJ poverty workshop I had ever attended, as the previous ones were held last spring before I joined the CPJ team. I had the opportunity to watch the workshops in Kitchener and Toronto before I facilitated part of the one in Whitby, which gave me a chance to see how they flowed.

I thought that each workshop provided a great opportunity to witness what happens when people are brought together to dialogue at a local level. The participants were open with their questions, and the discussions proved to be engaging, thoughtful and often rooted in personal experiences with poverty and advocacy.

The most interesting part for me was listening to the diversity of perspectives found in each group of participants. At each workshop, there were some individuals who had been engaged in advocacy for years, others whose lives had been touched by poverty, and many more who were just beginning to learn about poverty and poverty reduction.

As an intern, it was an enriching experience to have an opportunity to engage directly with people in the communities we visited. Being involved in policy research at the national level can sometimes feel detached from the experiences of those living in poverty. The workshops enabled me to hear the personal perspectives of those who have lived in poverty, and how people have engaged in advocacy.

It was also interesting to watch how participants learned through sharing their experiences with one another. For me, this re-emphasized the importance of developing community networks between groups involved in advocacy.

It was uplifting to hear the enthusiasm of some of the participants when the discussion turned to advocacy (one Toronto participant described advocacy as “the essence of being human!”). It was also quite sobering to hear the difficulties that some of our participants in Whitby have had in their efforts to advocate on behalf of the poor.

Altogether, I thought the workshops provided a venue for thoughtful discussion and wanted to send out a big thanks to all who were involved.

If you’d like to learn more about CPJ's work on poverty, or about how to contact your MP, you can explore the section of our website on poverty.