Highlights of the 2024 Virtual Forum

By: Nalisha Sankreacha and Tod Duncan

February 2025

Why Community Safety and Well-Being? 

Each year, OMSSA develops the topic of our annual Virtual Forum according to the interests of its members and on current developments in the municipal social services in Ontario.

Since the Ontario Ministry of the Solicitor General ordered that all Community Safety and Well-Being (CSWB) plans adopted before July 2021 would need to be reviewed and revised by July 2025, it seemed both timely and appropriate that the 2024 OMSSA Virtual Forum be focused on issues directly linked to this work.  

With much excellent insight provided to us by our Planning Committee, the 2024 Virtual Forum addressed a number of important topics connected to CSWB. However, what was clear from the research and conversations that took place for the development of the panels is that far from a peripheral issue related to the work of a small group within OMSSA member organizations, CSWB is a framework that underlines much, if not all, municipal social services work. CSWB is municipal social services work seen from the broader perspective of integration and partnership building, all with the goal of addressing the upstream supports needed from thriving and resilient communities.  

The 2024 OMSSA Virtual Forum took place over two, half days and dealt with a wide array of topics in the vicinity of CSWB, ranging from situation tables to gender-based and intimate partner violence, and from adverse childhood experiences to harm reduction and treatment for substance use disorders. Here are some highlights from this year’s event.  

Opening Plenary Sessions - From Partnerships to Meaningful Integration: Shaping the Future of Safety and Well-Being Across Ontario & Measuring, Monitoring, and Evaluating CSWB Outcomes in Urban and Rural Contexts 

The Forum kicked off with plenary session that brought together panelists from the Canadian Centre for Safer Communities, Peel Regional Police, Association of Municipalities of Ontario, Ministry of the Solicitor General, City of Toronto, City of Kingston, and CMHA Peel Dufferin to examine the importance of partnerships and coordinated service delivery to effectively address local priorities. With many different stakeholders being involved in this work, panelists spoke about their respective roles and responsibilities, how to build effective partnerships, multi-sectoral planning, and collaborative implementation. Panelists also spoke about funding to support some of the emergent high-intensity needs and common standards for measuring and evaluating initiatives. The latter conversation was continued on Day 2 of the Forum, which focused on practical knowledge and tools to for measuring, monitoring, and evaluating both short-term and longitudinal initiatives that improve community safety and well-being.  

We heard from Halton Region, the Canadianâ¯Centre for Safer Communities, Huron County, and the Rural Ontario Institute who examined the complexities and challenges of data collection and how communities can leverage existing information to identify priorities and trends.â¯The Rural Ontario Institute shared their new, free community wellbeing dashboard, which you can learn about from this post. There was also a discussion how communities might use an integrated bottom-up and top-down approach to identify indicators that both focuses on local priorities, but also takes into consideration what is selected by subject matter experts and other officials. The session concluded with the importance of âtelling the storyâ in this type of work and how the most compelling forms of report back are those that carefully select and organize findings in a way that is essential to telling the story, and to answering the key questions that will be of interest to the main target audiences.⯠

The Impacts of ACEs: Experiences of Marginalization and Childhood Well-Being 

In this session we heard from scholars and experts from the Black Health Alliance, Toward Common Ground, and Dillco Anishinabek Family Care about why understanding adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are important for service system planning, building a sense of belonging, and fostering resilience. Addressing the impact of ACEs was identified as a whole-of-community approach that needs a coordinated approach. "Safe, stable, and nurturing relationships and environments" were identified as critical to supporting children's healthy development, including high quality child care, social support for parents, access to mental health and addictions services and adequate incomes protect against the occurrence and effects of ACEs. We also heard specifically how Black and Indigenous youth are impacted by ACEs. Notably:  

• Participants learned about the increase exposure to ACEs (at least 2 – 8 times higher) specifically in indigenous communities related to family violence, intimate partner violence, divorce, mental health, and incarceration.  

• How Black youth in Canada are the least likely among their peers to voluntarily access mental healthcare support through mental health organizations or therapists and are more likely to access care involuntarily via hospitalization or the justice system. 

• ACEs and expanded ACEs such as neighborhood surveillance, violence, migration, intergenerational trauma are directly impacting the mental and physical well-being of Black children and youth. 

Understanding the Politics of Harm Reduction and Treatment 

In what was a session designed to unpack the high stakes debate that has evolved around the seemingly opposed drug policy approaches of âharm reductionâ and âtreatment,â panelists sought to bring necessary nuance to the topic. Moderated by a municipal policy expert, this panel brought together a lived expert, a drug policy-focused epidemiologist, a primary and addiction physician, and a police chief, each doing work in Ontario. 

The lessons this session’s experts brought, in some ways, present a very different story of drug policy in Ontario than we are currently seeing in Ontario. While all agree that substance use in the context of a drug toxicity crisis is a wicked problem that needs to be addressed immediately, their perspectives tended to diverge from those in the media eschewing the politically expedient abandonment of harm reduction principles including education, safe-consumption, safer supply, needle exchange, drug-checking, among others. Instead, each, drawing on their diverse expertise, characterized the need for a diversified drug policy that includes both harm reduction approaches and treatments that meet the needs of drug users where they are at. Ultimately, among the takeaways these experts provided was the need to see harm reduction and treatment approaches as complementary, and not opposed efforts. The central need is to ensure that the blend of approaches be evidenced-based using scientific and social science research, not anecdotes, speculation, or politics.   

Ensuring the Success of Situation Tables? 

Some OMSSA Members have been a part of local situation tables for over 10 years now. For instance, the City of Toronto and the City of Greater Sudbury have been early adopters, with their situation tables being well-established, permanent fixtures in their approaches to community safety and well-being.  

Situation tables are regular meetings that bring together staff and representatives from different sectors and organizations in order to resolve situations where a community member or issue approaches a level of acute risk. Because resolving such issues require the involvement many agencies, a situation table provides a forum for bringing these groups together towards these urgent needs. 

OMSSA assembled a panel of several of its members representing how situation tables have been deployed at varying stages. The session included speakers from the cities of Toronto and Greater Sudbury, and also from York Region and Bruce County. In each instance, the speakers shared how they established their tables and what has been required to maintain them. The session also addressed how situation table can be tailored to specific needs and communities. To this end, a key takeaway from this session was the need to build a table that recognizes and affirms the cultural practices of its partners and the communities it serves in order to build meaningful and long-lasting relationships and buy-in. 

On behalf of OMSSA, we are so grateful for the committee members, presenters, and attendees for making this year’s Virtual Forum a success. 

About the Author

Nalisha is the Education and Events Coordinator at OMSSA. She works with our many facilitators to ensure our workshops are seamless, inclusive, and impactful. She also works to research content and speakers for our conferences and forum. Nalisha is passionate about creating thought-provoking programming that captures the diverse needs of our members, equipping them to address complex societal, environmental, and political challenges

Tod is OMSSA’s Manager of Research and Conference Programming and is both an experienced researcher and educator. A life-long learner, he has an MA in Political Science and is a PhD candidate in Social and Political Thought at York University, where his dissertation research focuses on Canadian multiculturalism, and the internment and redress of Japanese Canadians. This research is as much a personal history as it is an academic project, since several members of his family were interned during the Second World War. Tod has also carried out research on the new economy, barriers to post-secondary education, and migrant labour.