No More Poverty Strategies: One Year Later

By: Mike Davis

November 2024

Last year was my first time attending the OMSSA Policy Conference. I gave the opening remarks at the conference and was pleasantly surprised by the warm reception my observations received. But I also felt challenged by the complexities of Ontario's social services environment. Despite years of experience with governments across Canada and internationally - including in the UK, Austria, and countries like Kenya and Azerbaijan - I found Ontario's system uniquely intricate.

I can honestly say that I found Ontario’s social service delivery system to be more confusing than any other I’ve encountered.

This year, I’m returning to the conference with a deeper appreciation for Ontario’s unique challenges and I’ve have had the opportunity to collaborate on meaningful projects with several OMSSA members. Through these experiences - my admiration for the work in the field has only deepened. I think this is a near impossible challenge to deliver outcomes while improving the system with one hand tied behind your backs. I believe in my remarks last year still hold true, but these subsequent experiences have sharpened my understanding of how best they can be applied.

That’s why I continue to say: no more poverty strategies (or affordable housing strategies, or homelessness strategies, or childcare strategies. Traditional approaches to social services strategies and transformations have rarely resulted in the intended outcomes. There is usually too much focus on government objectives and not enough on the needs of those being served.

My experiences are based on three fundamental misunderstandings:

• People don’t understand government.
• People don’t understand people.
• People don’t understand people in poverty.

People don’t understand government

Government is actually two distinct systems: politics and civil service, each with its own objectives. In the political system, announcements come first and outcomes second. Politicians prioritize announcements to inform the public of government decisions and priorities.

In the civil service, responding to political directions is the priority and driving client outcomes is second. Civil servants take their guidance from politicians and must be responsive to their direction.

These announcements often take the form of strategies, which are intended to address community and client needs. Residents see these announcements and strategies and believe that they will result in the necessary change.

But do they?

There is an assumption that once government develops and releases a strategy, the hard work is done. But it’s really just beginning. Anyone who has ever tried to implement large-scale change in government knows this. They understand that this ‘hard work’ involves months of things like policy change, service redesign, new technology, consultation and engagement, and obtaining further approvals from elected officials.

Residents assume that the problem will be fixed soon after a strategy is released and are surprised and frustrated when the progress (of the real work) seems slow.

This isn’t anyone’s fault. It is simply a lack of understanding of how government works and a misalignment of expectations. 

People don’t understand people

The common assumption is that humans are logical and rational in their thinking. It is assumed that people can assess large amounts of information to form opinions and make smart decisions.

Behavioural science shows us that it isn’t that simple. We are much closer to our prehistoric ancestors than we want to admit - relying on instinct, emotion, and unintentional thoughts in everything we do.

And, what does that have to do with government?

Government caters to how we all form opinions. It skews towards action because action is salient, and humans pay more attention to things that are salient. They interpret this action as a solution instead of what it is: just an activity. Politicians will always favour making announcements and releasing strategies because it is easier to point to these activities as doing something than to allow time to be spent getting to the heart of a problem and trying to drive better outcomes.

The electorate lacks the understanding, bandwidth, or capacity to consider outcomes because of how we make decisions in a very busy world.

I’m not suggesting that the efforts to develop strategies aren’t well-meaning. They absolutely are. But even the smartest and most diligent people in government need to consider how the public and special interest groups will respond to these efforts. Whether we like it or not, this is democracy in action.

As a result, poverty strategies must consider the needs of those in poverty as well as the average person.

And I have observed firsthand that the average person has no appreciation for what someone in poverty experiences.

People don’t understand people in poverty

There is a general misconception about people in poverty held by a majority of Canadians. It is that many people live in poverty due to poor individual decisions. Evidence has shown that this simply isn’t the case. People aren’t poor because they make bad decisions; people make bad decisions because they’re poor. People’s psychology and cognitive bandwidth gets rewired due to a lack of scarce resources.

Our systems for dealing with poverty lack adequate resources and operate within a maze of bureaucracy. Rather than adhere to the notion that the people closest to a problem are the people closest to a solution, we have a shortage of resources and an abundance of bureaucratic red tape that combine to make it even harder to escape poverty.

The root problem stems from how most people think about those living in poverty.

Basically, our system of government weighs the (uninformed) opinion of people who have never experienced poverty more heavily than those who have. Since the former group is much larger, their collective voice tends to dominate. The average citizen may not actively oppose effective poverty programs, but they certainly don’t advocate for them.

Therefore, any poverty strategy developed needs to take into account these differing perspectives, which makes it difficult to prioritize first-voice input.

So where did all that leave us?

Lessons Learned

These experiences have overwhelmingly shaped how we do our work at Davis Pier. Here are the three takeaways I presented last year that describe much of our approach.

1. We all need to start by just doing a thing. Cutting-edge ideas, multifaceted transformation plans, and comprehensive strategies are only useful if they can be implemented - and often they can’t be because they take too long and don’t consider local context. The magic is in the implementation: trying something, seeing how it goes, keeping the impactful pieces in place, and continuing to learn from them to generate insights, ideas, and new things that work. Evolution, not revolution.
   
   
2. How do you ‘do that thing’? By testing out ideas. Innovation is an overused term these days, but that’s exactly what I mean. When one knows how to use innovation for problem-solving, the results speak for themselves. Innovation relies on prototyping and iterating solutions (i.e., ‘doing a thing’ to not only demonstrate action but also to learn quickly what will work and what won’t). Prototypes are not pilots. Pilots are fully formed programs or services that last for months or years before being anointed as permanent. Prototypes are scrappy and used to test and gather more insights from first-voice participants. They are not intended to be fully functioning solutions.

Innovation and prototyping rely on putting the user at the centre of the work. This requires a different type of consultation and engagement than government is used to doing.

3. Consult? Engage? Surebut also involve and collaborate. Design with people. Anyone who has been involved in building strategies or launching new programs has participated in consultations and engagements with the public. These efforts are often challenging to execute, and the input gathered is often not useful.

I strongly believe in involving people with lived experience, those closest to a problem. Because of the way government is, it’s difficult to do this. But I have seen many examples of engagement work thanks to clients and partners being open to new approaches.

These new ways of working and people’s lived experiences are what we plan to talk about at the upcoming OMSSA Policy Conference: Tangible Approaches to Community Engagement to Build Trust and Drive Better Outcomes.

It all starts by considering how people make decisions and putting those in poverty at the center of the work, where their voices are heard, and their needs are addressed.

If you’d like to learn more, join our session at the OMSSA Policy Conference or connect with us at davispier.ca.

About the Author

Mike is the CEO of Davis Pier, a social impact consultancy with offices in Toronto and Halifax. He has worked as a consultant, public servant, and researcher with government and community sector partners across Canada, Europe, Africa, and Asia for over 20 years. His background as an engineer and social scientist brings a unique perspective to social service delivery—Mike is well-regarded for his ability to design and architect truly implementable solutions to complex societal issues. Mike’s passion for improving the well-being of Canadians has been a driving force behind Davis Pier’s transformation into a socially-focused consulting agency and its mission: innovative solutions to complex government and social challenges.
 
Mike’s consulting work has included projects focused on social service strategies, social assistance reform, the redesign of employment support programming, daycare regulatory reform, affordable housing innovation, and the design of new service models to support people living in food insecurity. 

Mike has Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Industrial Engineering from Dalhousie University.  He also spent two years conducting research on the behaviour and decision-making of people living in poverty while completing his Master’s degree in Behavioural Sciences at the London School of Economics.  He has completed the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Behavioural Insights Program. He is certified as a Professional Engineer (P.Eng.) a Distinguished Fellow with the Dalhousie University Faculty of Management.
 
Mike is the Vice Chair of the Board of Directors for Kids Help Phone and Chairs its Youth Experience and Innovation Committee.  He was named to Province of Nova Scotia’s Environmental Racism Panel and dedicates significant time to supporting community organizations with a focus on alleviating poverty and better promoting equity, diversity, and inclusion principles.  Mike has also been named one of Atlantic Business Magazines Top 50 CEOs.