«MUNICIPALITÉS RURALES ET PAUVRETÉ…LE DÉFI D’EN PARLER» - A Poverty Awareness Toolkit
The Québec Healthy Cities and Towns Network (RQVVS), the Participatory Research Collective on Rural Poverty (Le Collectif de recherche participative sur la pauvreté en milieu rural), and the Women, Politics and Democracy Group (Groupe Femmes, Politique et Démocratie) launched a poverty awareness toolkit for elected officials in rural municipalities.
The toolkit intended for elected officials in rural municipalities is the result of collaborative work between the Québec Healthy Cities and Towns Network (RQVVS), the Participatory Research Collective on Rural Poverty and the Women, Politics and Democracy Group.
The Toolkit includes:
You’ll also discover highlights from four approaches that were used to fight poverty and exclusion in:
Poverty in a rural setting isn’t always acknowledged: the stigma affecting people living with poverty can at times be greater in rural areas than in large urban centres that provide anonymity. What’s more, elected officials don’t always feel equipped to tackle the issue of poverty.
The toolkit, which is the result of collaborative work with elected officials and individuals living with poverty, contains some important facts about poverty, some testimonies from people who experience poverty, as well as insightful statistics and strategies to fight rural poverty.
The Need to Acknowledge, Include and Take Action
Three key steps have been proposed to help elected officials take action on rural poverty, which has been rendered largely invisible. First, they need to acknowledge poverty where it exists. Then, they need to include people who live with poverty in the selection of potential projects and policies. And finally, they need to take action together with those who face poverty.
Researchers had found that municipal stakeholders already had levers of action to fight poverty in their communities, but needed greater support in developing approaches and interventions. This toolkit will provide them with guidelines for action.
The poverty awareness toolkit is based on the results of research that spanned three years, from 2015 to 2018, with the aim of understanding how rural municipalities that are members of the RQVVS address the problems of poverty and exclusion and how they carry out initiatives relating to these issues. The research was conducted by Paule Simard, with the National Public Health Institute (Institut national de santé publique), Lorraine Gaudreau and Lucie Gélineau, with the Université du Québec atRimouski, and Sophie Dupéré, with Université Laval, in collaboration with partners from various university institutions, as well as the RQVVS and the Women, Politics and Democracy Group.
The research was financed by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Québec Health Research Fund (Fonds de recherche du Québec - Santé FRQS) as part of the Population Health Intervention Research Initiative. Support from the other partners involved, the Université du Québec at Rimouski, the Québec Health Research Fund and Université Laval, was also critical in the success of the project.
