Building community capacity
We work with low-income groups or individuals or members of disadvantaged communities to assist them to build viable community organizations. We can provide meeting space, start-up assistance and other supports. Our goal is to create self-sufficient local grass-roots groups that can advocate for their own interests.
Examples of groups we helped to start include:
- Quinte & District Domestic Violence Coordination Network
- Belleville Task Force on Hunger
- Quinte & District Injured Workers Group
- Partnership Against Poverty
- Tenant Associations and the Tenant Action Group
- Partnership Against Poverty
- Affordable Housing Action Network
- All-Together Affordable Housing
- Housing Assistance Lennox & Addington (HALA)
- Prince Edward Affordable Housing Working Group (PEAHWG)
- Poverty Roundtable
Working towards an inclusive, healthy and vibrant community is an important part of our service mandate.
We can provide:
- legal and social analysis
- research support and resources
- organizational and logistical support
- access to our library resources
- training and learning opportunities
- editing and printing of reports
- help drafting government submissions
- strategic planning
- meeting space
- multimedia equipment
Building community awareness using popular and adult education approaches
We have:
- put on short plays to build community awareness and provoke discussion on social justice topics
- sponsored workshops playing the “Poverty Game.” This interactive Monopoly-like game developed by a group in Dawson Creek, B.C. helps to build awareness and sensitivity to the realities of life on welfare and was updated by law students at Osgoode Hall Law School.
Our “Reality Check” drama was produced for our Annual General Meeting (AGM) in 1998. Read the script.
The Domino Effect was a short dramatic presentation written and performed by CALC staff and board in November 2003. It highlighted the “domino effect” of misfortunes that can befall any of us and plunge us into the depths of poverty and despair. It also illustrated CALC’s role in trying to prevent dominoes from toppling in our clients’ lives. The play has since been performed by other community agencies, and in several classes. If you would like to read it, please contact us. Read the script and commentaries.
Ontario Project for Inter-Clinic Community Organizing (OPICCO)
We are members of OPICCO, and work to ensure that legal clinics continue to fulfill their community development mandate.