A Community Safety and Wellbeing Plan underway for Waterloo Region

During the pandemic, the Region of Waterloo learned the importance of listening and making decisions “with the community.”

The goal of the Community Safety and Wellbeing Plan is to enable every person who calls Waterloo Region home to feel safe, cared for, and to have the opportunity to thrive.

“One of the things we learned, working with the community through the vaccine rollouts, was how important it was to have the community at the decision-making table,” said Connie MacDonald, chief strategy and communications officer with the Region of Waterloo at this week's Waterloo Regional Police Services Board meeting.  

The vision for the Community Safety and Wellbeing Plan is to hear from community leaders, organizations, and groups to build a framework for a safe and well community.

“Key themes are affordable housing, homelessness, mental health, and income, all very important issues which we are all trying to tackle within the community,” MacDonald said.

“We have also been talking about needs from an upstream and crisis perspective, focusing on any barriers to safety and well being.”

Waterloo Region Police Chief, Bryan Larkin says with 17 shootings in the region this year, the key is to figure how to stop shootings before they happen.

“How can we prevent it? We are so worried about money in the system and who’s paying for what. I ask everyone to pause and think about what the definition of well-being is. The definition of safety can mean different things to everybody,” Larkin said.

“My challenge with this plan, is how do we bring all of these individuals together around alignment, around unity, around how we can build a better tomorrow, to solve complex issues that we all want to solve?”

The focus of the Community Safety and Wellbeing Plan is on equity and making sure Black, Indigenous, racialized, and marginalized voices are heard.

This approach emphasizes listening to the community's knowledge, experience, and suggestions as participants engage in meaningful conversations with a goal is to develop a common understanding of safety and wellbeing.  

“Developing this plan, we intentionally developed a steering committee that would be more representative of the community regarding direction and advice.” MacDonald said.

“We then brought together an advisory group of system leaders across sectors.”

A youth advisory group has also been created.

“We have a youth planning table where we recruited 20 diverse youth who are committed to action on community safety and well being,” MacDonald said.

“Youth have been nothing but incredible and I can’t wait for them to present their recommendations and advice. We have made it very clear that the voices of the youth are just as important and carry some weight. These youth are our future.”

MacDonald says these groups have been instrumental while 170 reports and plans are currently underway.

“We many amazing organizations in Waterloo Region including the John Howard Society, The Bridges, and the House of Friendship” Larkin said.

“We have all of these family and children’s agencies, our health care system, our social services system, our public health system, and policing. But we didn’t have the table anymore where we would chat and build relations.”

Those participating in the Community Safety and Wellbeing Plan will continue to build relations alongside community partners to address the root causes of problems in the region and help find solutions.

“As we move this plan forward, I hope it brings community accountability and I hope it actually starts to chip away at organizational “ego” Who does what? This impacts our everyday efficiencies,” Larkin said.  

“The region is doing a lot of work. and the Community Safety and Wellbeing Plan team is moving a lot of pieces.”