Central Central Station is embarking on an ambitious project, with the end goal of seeing a reduction in poverty in our community.
"We were able to see the poverty in our community and respond to some of those things. But, at some point we wanted to get to the where it was less about doing well at helping people who are living in poverty, and shifting to trying to figure out how we can make sure fewer people are living in poverty," said Executive Director Anita Wiebe.
Wiebe says they have been working together with various organizations, and have created a leadership table representing a lot of different agencies and sectors in our community.
"We've talked about what the root causes of poverty are, and the effects of poverty. We've been able to generate some great discussion around what that looks like here in Winkler."
Wiebe says once they start identifying some of those pieces, they'll be able to develop a more concrete plan for moving forward.
Krista Rempel, Director of Social Impact at Central Station, says they're currently engaging in data collection before going full force, in a few months.
"We're looking at strategic plans that are already happening for different organizations, and trying to build a wealth of information and tools so when we come together for our fall meeting, we can dig into creating some actionable items."
Action tables are one initiative they're working on creating. "That will be tables of people who are volunteering to carry out some of these ideas and solutions that are thought of by the group."
"Some of the poverty we're seeing is regularly seeing people come in who are facing food insecurity, who just don't have enough food. The cost of living has skyrocketed, as we all know, and so they're just not able to make ends meet."
Rempel says they’re also seeing a steadily increasing homeless population. Not only people who are homeless, but people who are couch surfing, or who are facing inadequate housing.
"Maybe they don't have enough bedrooms for their kids, or maybe they're in a situation with multiple families living in one household, who are just inadequately housed."
Rempel says they’re also seeing many people lacking basic life necessities. She says lacking certain things can sometimes turn into desperation, which can lead to criminal activity.
"With a lack of some of the resources contributing to that, such as mental health resources and some of the resources that larger communities have, I would say, it’s turned into a crisis of poverty in our community."
Recently, Central Station was one of ten community poverty reduction projects invited to participate in a program through Tamarack, an institute focused on making change.
"They’re focused on helping other communities make a change in their communities, and they’ve been providing us with invaluable resources. They coach us. They assist us with collecting and analyzing data for our community."
"We're in a cohort with ten other communities who are currently doing the same thing we are doing right now across different provinces. There was a community that released an equity building tool kit not long ago and some of the ideas and some of the plans that have come out of that have been significant in reducing poverty for their community," Rempel shared.
Rempel says some of the data they have been shown so far by Tamarack has been very interesting. She said it’s all information from within the last census, which Tamarack has interpreted for them.
"We've seen that the median age for Winkler is much younger than we would have assumed at 34. And this is all based on 20/21 data, so, some things have changed."
Through the data interpretation, Rempel shared they learned where poverty lies within the city and where the high spots of poverty are. "There's a lot of child poverty in Winkler, which interests us."
Rempel said they have been provided with many bits of data that will inform them how to approach some of the solutions they as a committee, and their leadership table come up with based on that data.
For this initiative to be successful, Wiebe says need this project to be a community initiative.
"We at Central Station are excited to be helping lead the way on this, and giving some leadership and direction to it. But we really want this to become a community initiative. It's not something we can do alone."
"There are so many agencies and community-minded people who are already doing poverty reduction work, and they're doing an excellent job," said Rempel. "I think as we move forward as a community if we can get more traction and more people interested in that type of work, we will affect poverty."
For information on how to get involved, connect with Central Station.