St. James Town Initiative

Neighbourhood and Health Community Voices The Wellesley Institute, Community Matters Toronto, and residents of St. James Town recently held a community forum and photo exhibition at Rose Avenue Public School. The forum and exhibition provided residents with an opportunity to voice - through photos, maps, and videos, the realities of their neighbourhood and how it affects their health and well-being To view the photo voice exhibition and community mapping initiative, and to get more information on the Initiative and the community itself, visit our St. James Town Initiative site

Who We Are...

The Wellesley Institute is a Toronto-based, non-profit, non-partisan research and policy institute that:

• funds community-based research on the relationships between health and housing, poverty and income distribution, social exclusion and other social and economic inequalities;
• works to identify and advance practical and achievable policy alternatives and solutions to pressing issues of urban health;
• provides workshops, training and other capacity building support to non-profit community groups;
• works with many partners in Toronto, across Ontario, and nationally to help build healthy urban areas.

The Wellesley Institute is very unique in its approach of combining training and community development – that is, community capacity building – with research into health issues, and the advancing of concrete policies and action to improve health.

St. James Town Initiative: advancing newcomers’ health

The St. James Town Initiative is currently the Wellesley Institute’s largest research and community capacity building initiative. It builds on many years of service to St. James Town, first through the Wellesley Central Hospital and now through the work of the Wellesley Institute. Over the next five years, the initiative will focus primarily on the health and wellbeing of newcomers in the St. James Town neighbourhood, whether they arrived recently or many years ago.

Purpose
The initiative aims to work with the community to discover how the neighbourhood itself affects newcomers’ health and wellbeing. It will study the buildings, the open spaces, the shops, other amenities like transit and recreation, the social clubs and groups, social networks, and the health and social services that newcomers use. The initiative also intends to find out what changes need to be made and what needs to stay the same in order to make St. James Town as healthy a community as possible.

Working with the Community This initiative is a partnership with the community. People living in St. James Town will work as advisors, participants and staff on the project. An advisory group comprised of neighbourhood community groups and organizations will help manage the initiative. Together these groups, and individual residents, will take the lead in identifying what needs to be changed and in organizing actions to make these changes happen.

What We Want to Achieve
The initiative will pinpoint the features of the St. James Town neighbourhood that strongly affect the health of residents, either by making them healthier or by harming their health and wellbeing. We can then present this knowledge to policy-makers so they can see what works in the neighbourhood and what needs to be changed. The goal is to help the residents of St. James Town lead healthier lives. The community will also be able to use this knowledge in thinking about actions they can take to make their neighbourhood a better place for themselves, and their families, to live in.

Community Partners...

Community Matters Toronto (CMT) is the community partner in the initiative. CMT is a neighbourhood organizationin St. James Town with more than twenty cultures among its participants. CMT runs a wealth of community programs, ranging from after schoold programs to adult ESL cafes. The Wellesley Institute has also collaborated and worked with a number of the many St. James Town neighbourhood service and residents organizations that address the health, planning and social needs of the local community. These organizations include:

• The many residents of St. James Town
• Central Neighbourhood House (CNH)
• City of Toronto’s Division of Parks, Forestry and Recreation
• Community Matters
• SJT chapter of The Ethiopian Association in Toronto (EAT)
• Sherbourne Health Centre (SHC)
• SJT chapter of Toronto Tamil Seniors’ Association (TTSA)
• St. James Town Festival Committee
• St. James Town Safety Committee

For more information:

Visit: www.wellesleyinstitute.com
Email: sjt@wellesleyinstitute.com
Call: (416) 972-1010