Reimagining Livelihoods Forum Program

This Framework explores four dimensions of a livelihood, all of which can be customized to working with individuals, groups, and communities, and to different local contexts. The Vulnerability Context is what creates and perpetuates people’s vulnerability to poverty, and what has to be addressed in order to support more active, strategic interventions. We encourage you to customize SL to identify the challenges you face in your communities. Assets are the building blocks of any sustainable livelihood. SL identifies six broad asset areas, which usually include but are not restricted to basic needs, connections, money, identity, skills/knowledge, and health. Building strengths holistically in these areas is essential to advancing social inclusion and participation in the economy. The Stages of Livelihood Development are the asset building steps that people cycle through as they build assets and, over time, move towards social and economic engagement. SL supports people to develop livelihoods strategies that build the conditions and capacity to participate. Finally, the Policy and Institutional Context refers to the context, driven by institutions and their current policies, that can influence and determine people’s access to resources and prospects for success. SL promotes learning and advocacy to strengthen poverty reduction initiatives.

In this presentation, we will share work conducted as part of the Disability and Livelihoods in Canada project. This project recognizes that people with disabilities in Canada respond to limited access to employment by finding alternatives to meet the needs of themselves and their families. However, existing responses from policy makers, communities, and academics dominate disability policy discussions, often excluding the knowledges and lived experiences of diverse people living with disabilities. Conducted by team members at Canadian Council for Rehabilitation and Work (CCRW), the DisAbled Women’s Network of Canada (DAWN Canada)​, and the Live Work Well Research Centre​, our research under this project responds to this gap by focusing on the experiences of diverse young women with disabilities in the Youth the Future program. Using our collaborative research with young women with disabilities in Canada and an intersectional analysis, we will discuss what diverse young women with disabilities identify as barriers and facilitators to their livelihoods choices, including employment, and what types of support they need to thrive in their day-to-day lives. We look at how programs like Youth the Future can facilitate thriving, along with some recommendations for policy makers around meeting the needs of diverse young women with disabilities. Our presentation will finish by sharing tools we have developed to support young women with disabilities in making livelihoods choices, including a self-advocacy tool and knowledge briefs for employers and policy makers. 

With increasing urgency to mitigate and adapt to global environmental challenges, like climate change, there is an uptick in the calls for “Green Jobs.” As students prepare for the job market, it is vital that higher education institutions adapt to meet their future career needs. To help facilitate these changes, we conducted a student opinion survey (N=773) at a Dutch University. Our aim was to better understand students’ perceptions of sustainability in relation to their education and future careers, as well as identify any addressable institutional barriers they may face in studying sustainability. Most students told us they think environment-specific sustainability issues (e.g., climate change) will be increasingly valued on the job market, and 50% said they see increasingly more jobs for this type of expertise. However, less than 40% of students perceived a similar trend in their education, with just over 1/3 reporting an increasing number of their peers taking classes about environmental sustainability and the number of professors integrating this topic into their classes. When it comes to students’ experiences in learning about sustainability, 90% said at least one of their classes had touched on sustainability in some way, most frequently Gender Equality. However, when we compared the sustainability-related topics they were interested in learning about with what they are currently learning about, we identified areas where student interest was well-matched with current teaching efforts (e.g., Decent Work & Economic Growth) and where current teaching efforts are lagging behind student interest (e.g., Climate Action). Lastly, when we asked students what barriers they face to learning about sustainability, they identified a number of institutional barriers (e.g., “Teaching sustainability is not a priority in my [discipline]”) which the university can address.

Although many countries have introduced laws and policies that promote the employment of disabled people over the last thirty years, disabled people still have significantly lower rates of employment than non-disabled people. To explore this gap between policy and impact, the PROUD Project conducted qualitative research interviews with disabled people who succeeded in working as artists/entrepreneurs or obtaining employment in five countries (Canada, US, UK, France, and Belgium). In learning about their experiences and expertise, we asked participants about their childhoods, families of origin, social networks, interactions with government and non-profit agencies, education, and career trajectories. During these interviews, participants recalled what their own (and others') expectations for their livelihoods had been at transitional moments in their lives (i.e., leaving school, becoming disabled). Some had assumed that they would easily find work, some had believed that finding work would be extremely difficult, and some had not expected to work at all. Interestingly, these expectations were not cleanly correlated with government policy, demonstrating that other factors were involved. Drawing on the data from the PROUD Project's research, this presentation will explore how governments, NGOs, institutions (medical, educational, governmental, etc.), families, and individuals influence the ways in which disabled persons understand available livelihoods in their social "ecosystems." By studying how livelihood expectations for disabled people are constructed, this research will help disabled individuals and their communities to challenge these expectations and to explore more options for livelihoods.

Fostering inclusive and diverse cities has been a major goal of contemporary urban policy making in Canada. Yet growing inequality remains an issue, with important consequences for civic engagement, social inclusion, and belonging. My case study examines the relationship between the cultural displacement of BIPOC residents and the gentrification of South Parkdale, Toronto. South Parkdale has long been the home of diverse Indigenous peoples, and over the past 20 years, the neighbourhood has been home to a variety of shifting immigrant cultural groups including Afro-Caribbean, Filipino, Vietnamese, and Tibetan communities. However, the neighbourhood is experiencing gentrification masked as revitalization, threatening the diversity, affordability, and inclusiveness of the community. Affordable housing is being replaced by luxury apartments, and culturally specific amenities and places of worship are disappearing, creating a loss of sense of belonging for cultural groups. As such, my developing study explores the questions, “how has gentrification contributed to the cultural displacement of long-time BIPOC residents?” and “is this associated with a decreased sense of neighbourhood belonging for particular cultural groups?” I intend to draw on my lived experiences as someone previously living in Regent Park public housing and Rexdale, a low-income marginalized community, other community experiences, as well as interview findings with long-time residents of South Parkdale for answers. Overall, this will contribute to political science literature on gentrification by creating new knowledge on how public policies contribute to the cultural dimension of gentrification as well as the implications of cultural gentrification for civic engagement and trust.

This presentation offers an interpretation of the empirical findings in a multi-year research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, titled “Disabilities and Livelihoods in Canada.” The project involves a partnership between four faculty members of different disciplinary backgrounds, including the author, at the University of Guelph, and a handful of community partners in the country. The project consists of three different pilot studies that focus on how disabled individuals live from the lens of livelihood by looking at volunteering, art and artistry, and pre-employment support programs for young women with disabilities. Livelihood as such is a conceptual framework adapted from the “sustainable livelihoods approach” (SLA) used in international development policymaking and studies. At the core of SLA is the recognition that beyond securing the basic necessities of life, individuals should be able to thrive. The research project was originally conceptualized based on the findings that the livelihoods approach is absent from policymaking and academic studies regarding disability in the global North. Yet the positive correlation between disability and poverty is a long-noted problem that transcends the North-South divide. Using the livelihoods framework to study the everyday life of disabled individuals in developed countries such as Canada therefore provides much needed insights into disability as a way of life. The presentation argues that it is our moral obligation to understand how disabled individuals live their lives when what is considered essential to one’s sense of well-being, which is economic security through employment, is denied to them disproportionately and persistently by society. Moreover, the life of a disabled person may help to shed light on what makes a life livable.

Barbados has a significant overhang of plantocratic patriarchal culture which results in high levels of all forms of gender-based violence.  Women are obviously disproportionately affected by gender-based violence and there are significant gaps in women's lived experiences with violence. This study seeks to investigate the correlations between disability and gender-based violence in Barbados.  The major question is whether the levels of gender-based violence have resulted in disabilities among women living with disabilities in Barbados.

The research uses a livelihoods framework to move disabled women's survival beyond the minimum standard to include their experience of safe partnership and family life and an ability to access state resources.

The Sexuality and Access Project 2023 is interested in starting conversations around sexuality and disability, specifically within the context of the attendant care dynamic. This project is a continuation of a previous project conducted by Fran Odette and Cory Silverberg in 2011, the Sexuality and Access Project. One of the key conclusions they came to was “Everyone wants to talk, but no one knows how to start the conversation.” There are two surveys for our national project, one for those who use attendant care services and one for those who provide these services. Our preliminary findings indicate that the acknowledgement for sexual health support within the attendant care dynamic has increased, but with this so has the experience of barriers and feeling unsafe when attempting to access sexual support. These preliminary findings pertain only to data from service users, as we have struggled to engage with service providers. We are currently trying to address this lack of engagement. Over this next year, the team will head into Phase 2, which will involve the development of training for attendant service users, attendant service providers, and train the trainer programs, based on our findings from the surveys and follow-up interviews. We hope to establish a national advisory committee to ensure the training developed is inclusive and representative.

Overall, the main goal for this presentation is to promote conversations around sexuality and disability, specifically in the realm of attendant care service dynamics.

The DisAbled Women’s Network (DAWN-RAFH) Canada is a national, feminist, cross-disability organization whose mission is to end the poverty, isolation, discrimination, and violence experienced by Canadian women with disabilities and Deaf women. DAWN-RAFH is an organization that works towards the advancement and inclusion of women and girls with disabilities and Deaf women in Canada. Grounded in the lived experiences of diverse women with disabilities, we aim to start mapping the relationship between gender-based violence, trauma, healing, and resistance through an intersectional livelihoods framework. We will do this by sharing stories of surviving and resisting violence, with a focus on healing, peer support, and community building. Through these stories, we will identify what livelihoods factors were impacted by, or contributed to, surviving and resisting violence. The workshop will also involve a healing activity through journaling to support participants in reflecting on their journey to healing, community building, and meeting their livelihoods goals and dreams. An intersectional livelihoods framework can contribute to developing holistic ways to prevent and address violence against women with disabilities. The workshop will centre around the following reflection questions: (1) How do experiences of violence and trauma shape the livelihood choices of women and gender-diverse people with disabilities? (2) How can peer support facilitate the livelihoods of women and gender-diverse people with disabilities? (3) How does an intersectional livelihoods framework help us develop strategies to prevent and address violence against diverse women with disabilities?

In this workshop, we will use different mediums to explore our livelihoods through journey-mapping. Drawing from design thinking, journey-mapping enables participants to consider key moments of the graduate student experience; while livelihoods approaches draw attention to the choices people make in meeting their needs to survive, thrive, and live well. In this workshop, participants will reflect on the barriers and facilitators of living and working well as graduate students. As we map graduate student journeys, we will ask participants about their livelihood goals, what options they feel are possible in their own lives, what choices they make in response, and ultimately in what ways do these strategies shape our day-to-day lives. After mapping our journeys, we will then collectively identify and share strategies and supports for thriving and living well as graduate students. Through sharing our journeys, we will work towards building networks of peer support and solidarity within the graduate student community. While this workshop is geared towards students, we are open to including faculty, staff, research partners, and all those interested in improving the work-lives of graduate students.

This creative display will showcase the artwork and stories of community members who participated in Art in a Just Recovery. Organized by Art Not Shame and the Guelph Neighbourhood Support Coalition, Art in a Just Recovery is a community arts initiative focused on building and facilitating conservations on community care. During Art in a Just Recovery, participants from across the City of Guelph took part in a series of workshops to make individual art pieces, which the lead artist, Mel Schambach, combined to create a large-scale mural which is currently installed at the Guelph Farmers’ Market. Accompanying Art in a Just Recovery is a community-based research project, working closely with participants to build knowledge about community care and collective artmaking throughout the mural-making process. For this research, we are inviting interested participants to take a follow-up survey and take part in art-elicitation interviews to share the story behind their art piece, their reflections on making art together, and what is needed for Guelph to be a more caring place. This creative display will highlight the art pieces and stories of participants. Attendees of the Reimagining Livelihoods Forum will also be encouraged to make their way to Guelph’s Thursday Evening Farmers’ Market, where they can view the mural in-person.

Allison Furniss: Women in Central Africa’s artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) sector: What constitutes livelihoods? Based on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in eastern DRC and Rwanda between 2019 and 2023, this paper asks, what constitutes livelihoods in contexts of poverty and precarity in extractivism? How are survival strategies and livelihoods intertwined yet distinct? How do we define livelihoods in this context? Discussing these questions through a gendered lens, I put in conversation women’s lived experiences of extractivism with theorizations of life and living.

Jie Qin: Sand frontier: From river sand to manufactured sand. Sand mining is a significant livelihood option for many people in rural areas of China. There have been recent changes in the governance of sand mining, with a decentralized ‘river chief’ system established to manage the use of rivers. In parallel, more crushed rock is being used as an alternative to sand. My research uses the concepts of livelihoods, governance, and the commodity frontier, to ask, how do these changes affect rural livelihoods?

Chris Huggins: Gendered livelihoods and community development in the ASM sector in Southern Africa. ASM is an important livelihood strategy for at least 10 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, but few material ‘community development’ benefits may be visible in and around the mine-sites. ASM settlements are also widely associated with various forms of exploitation of women and girls. Research conducted under a SSHRC Partnership Grant examines how women and men involved directly or indirectly in the ASM economy use their income.

This research provides a quick ethnographic snapshot into the everyday care experiences of older Canadian senior citizens and how those experiences are complicated by their experiences of aging. Through the use of graphic elicitation, I received 10 participant drawings depicting care experiences from different perspectives. By looking at these participant drawings called “Carescapes” and pulling from semi-structured qualitative video interviews with 10 senior citizens, this paper seeks to begin addressing the relationship between care and aging by attending to the ways senior citizens have learned and are learning to care for their changing selves as they continue to age past 65 years old. This presentation will begin to address the questions of how experiences of aging influence conceptualizations of good care and how practices of care influence seniors’ experiences of aging from a phenomenological perspective. The main finding of this research is that practices of “good care” enable senior citizens to continue to age meaningfully and with dignity well into their later life stages.

The Canadian Feminist Disability Coalition (CFDC) is dedicated to empowering women and girls with disabilities throughout Canada. Supported by Women and Gender Equality, Canada (WAGE), our three-year project focuses on enhancing skills through tailored activities and collaborating with other organizations to advocate for the rights of women with disabilities. We aim to address the issues and challenges faced by women and girls with disabilities in accessing meaningful livelihoods and explore how the CFDC addresses these obstacles. Additionally, we seek to understand how the CFDC promotes self-advocacy and leadership among girls and women with disabilities in their communities. We also aim to examine how the project addresses intersectional barriers and discrimination based on factors like race, ethnicity, age, and socioeconomic status. Through our work, we have learned that providing activities and resources tailored to the specific needs of our members is crucial for improving opportunities for women and girls with disabilities. Creating a supportive and inclusive environment that values their perspectives is essential. Collaborating with other organizations within the CFDC project allows them to share their views, receive guidance, and access resources for their personal growth and capacity building. This collaboration brings diverse perspectives, mentorship opportunities, and a support network, strengthening overall support systems for women and girls with disabilities. Our project has a significant impact on the community, academia, policymakers, and others involved. By empowering women and girls with disabilities, we increase their representation in various spheres, fostering a fair and inclusive society. The knowledge gained from our project activities informs policies and guides organizations in creating accessible environments. In summary, the CFDC's three-year project can greatly improve the lives of women and girls with disabilities, increase their representation, and create lasting changes across Canada.

CCRW's Employment Services provides trauma-informed employment and wrap-around supports to women jobseekers with disabilities through the Empower program. Throughout the program's duration, we have conducted evaluation research to monitor the program and assess impact on participants served. Empower seeks to address, using a person-centered approach, issues of labour market detachment and un- or under-employment faced by women-identified Canadians with experiences of disability and other intersections of identity. We explore the following questions: (1) How does provision of skill-training and job-searching support through a trauma-informed practice enhance employment outcomes (attaining and retaining work)? (2) Does the Empower model (8 weeks of training, 10 weeks of work experience) positively impact employment outcomes? and (3) What are the impacts of wage subsidies on employment and retention for women with disabilities? Through longitudinal collection of quantitative data (baseline, midpoint, and service closure), as well as qualitative data collected through focus groups (with first cohort to be collected in June), we are gaining a deeper understanding of the barriers women with disabilities face in their journeys navigating the labour market and building livelihoods; the necessary supports (employment and wrap-around) that can contribute to living and working well; and how these supports can contribute to success in the form of meaningful paid work. Through statistical and thematic analysis, we will show the significance and impact of this program as it relates to the disability community; to community organizations; and to policymakers in the disability and work area, with recommendations to inform future program development and best practices.

The Building Equitable Economies Project sought to develop two conceptual models: (1) a Family Needs Framework; and (2) a proposed Services Pathway. For this presentation, we focus on the Family Needs Framework which reimagines how settlement workers support the resettlement of immigrant and refugee families. The current settlement needs assessment and service process is highly individualistic and focuses predominantly on ‘basic’ resettlement needs (i.e., housing, employment, etc.). However, this separates newcomers from the systems in which they are embedded, particularly the family, and impedes recognizing the compounding nature of resettlement, pre-migration factors, and family conflict in impacting mental health. Further, it does not recognize how macro-level policies and practices regulate and, at times, cause harm in the lives of newcomers. With rising levels of immigration to Canada, as well as several systems crises creating barriers to meeting resettlement needs and barriers to addressing immigrant mental health, a reimagined approach to settlement needs assessment is critical. We contend that a collaborative, systems approach is imperative for settlement workers to holistically understand the needs of and to support the mental health of families. The resulting Family Needs Framework is informed by systems theory, the social determinants of health, and family resilience, alongside our community-based participatory research approach in which qualitative and quantitative data were collected. The purpose of the framework is to focus not only on needs but on how to maximize protective factors in the face of ongoing struggles and structural barriers with the goal of enhancing the resilience and mental health of families. This project has implications for community services and collaboration, and for policymakers making decisions about settlement services.

In this presentation, we will share work conducted as part of the Disability and Livelihoods in Canada project. This project recognizes that people with disabilities in Canada respond to limited access to employment by finding alternatives to meet the needs of themselves and their families. However, existing responses from policy makers, communities, and academics dominate disability policy discussions, often excluding the knowledges and lived experiences of diverse people living with disabilities. This includes approaches to community based inclusive development (CBID). This presentation starts from Ntinda et al.'s 2019 definition of CBID, where “CBID is achieved when people with disabilities are respected and appreciated as valuable members of their communities, participating in recreational activities in their neighbourhood settings, and working at jobs in the community that pay a competitive wage and have careers that use their capacities to the fullest.” We then use a disability and livelihoods framework combined with threads from critical community-engaged scholarship, intersectionality, and critical disability studies to consider what it means to include communities meaningfully in development. Using empirical evidence from collaborative research with diverse people with disabilities in Canada, this presentation will then share three cross-cutting characteristics of meaningful inclusion within CBID, including the involvement of civil society organizations and community members in setting the agenda of community-based development aims; the importance of a sense of belonging for disability inclusion; and the belief in community as a source of expertise in development. We will finish by including some recommendations for what mobilizing these cross-cutting characteristics can look like in practice.

In this workshop, we will reimagine the university in terms of what it would look like to live and work well in academic institutions. The session aims to collaboratively identify concrete changes to everyday practices and academic systems and policies that could improve the work-lives of those who engage with, study, or work in academia. Using creative facilitation techniques (including storytelling, artistic and creative brainstorming), we will explore the ‘uncaring university’ together and collectively imagine a more caring future. While acknowledging the structural realities we work and live within, we will build on the moments of ‘actually existing care and justice,’ to emphasize the possibilities of creating more caring universities. This includes doing traditional academic practices differently such as rethinking how we organize research teams, how we do qualifying exams, what and whose knowledge counts, and how we engage with community partners. It also includes engaging with longer-term strategies of resistance such as advocating for university-wide policy changes and questioning the mechanisms for participation in structural decisions. Ultimately, by creating and imagining together, in this workshop we will consider what a more caring university can look like across scales—from our classrooms to our campuses, communities, and university structures more broadly. We invite anyone interested in reimagining the university to take part in this workshop—particularly those who have experienced the negative effects of the university on their ability to live and work well.