Breaking the chain of multi-generational poverty

Subject: Terminal Ave
Date: April 12, 2019
To: Mayor&Council@nanaimo.ca

It’s said “the well-defined problem is half solved.” The origins of the problems that have landed in numbers at the Terminal Ave temporary housing are not of your making but your citizens, I’m sure you’ve noticed, are howling for you to solve them.

To use your municipal resources to solve the problems and to know how to leverage resources of the senior levels of government (where it starts to get closer to the origins of the problems) requires solid reliable data on the nature of the problems you’re asked to solve. I’m assuming you’re not currently in possession of this comprehensive analysis, parts of it perhaps.

Whether sourced from Island Crisis Care, VIHA, Cindy Blackstock, your own social planning dept or other sources, among the perhaps two dozen questions I’d want to see examined by this analysis : How many of the residents of the temporary housing were “aged out” of foster care at 19, after a childhood of upheaval to find their own way in the world without resources? Is the failure to seize that opportunity to break the chain of multi-generational poverty among the core problems you and we face?

Other resources : The Vancouver Foundation’s initiatives Fostering Change and First Call, BC Child and Youth Advocacy Coalition. I recommend Dr Gabor Maté’s book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts on childhood trauma and addiction.

Best of luck to do what you can. We have to do better than trying to fence these problems out.

Frank Murphy

Opportunities in Transition : An Economic Analysis of Investing in Youth Aging out of Foster Care by SFU economist Marvin Shaffer and Family Policy Researcher, Lynell Anderson.