Over the past ten years, No Community Left Behind has become a strategy development process at the neighbourhood level in which community development specialists, community policing professionals and neighbourhood activists and almost all concerned service providers collaborate to address factors that lead to communities’ volunerability, crime, victimization, fear of safety, and social exclusion.
The NCLB strategy development process leads to strategic action vis-a-vis community development, community-partners engagement, exploring opportunities for local development and adopting new ways to building stronger, heathier and safer communities.
Working in close partnership with various other agencies, South East Ottawa Community Health Centre (SEOCHC) has effectively engaged and supported communities to restore their sense of safety and pave the way for effective service delivery. NCLB has now become a core component of the City of Ottawa’s Community Development Framework (CDF) for community engagement at the grassroots level.
Vision
The vision of No Community Left Behind is to keep people well; to enable them to live, work, and raise their families in a safe and prosperous environment.
This vision is achieved through:
- Developing a comprehensive community-based strategy for addressing social determinants of health, while working to address major risk factors that lead to fear, isolation and crime;
Mobilizing community members and service providers to assist each other in addressing the community identified and prioritized problems; - Assisting concerned service agencies to respond to social/community/health service needs; and
Engaging and supporting community members to participate more fully in neighbourhood planning and decision making processes.
Determinants of health are addressed at the neighbourhood level. The positive outcomes of this initiative highlight the impact of holistic community based initiative that include multiple partnerships and a balance between broad based and neighbourhood specific planning.