1. working
neighbourhood:
A Community
Action Lab
CAPACITY-
BUILDING:
SKILLED PEOPLE
PARTNERSHIP
DEVELOPMENT:
INNOVATIVE
ORGANISATIONS
KNOWLEDGE
MOBILIZATION:
RESEARCH
PLATFORMS
TRANSITIONAL LEADERS
IN INNOVATION &
ECONOMIC GROWTH
CROSS-SECTOR
INTERACTIONS
NETWORKS
BUILDING
LOCAL BUSINESSES
& WORKFORCE
DEVELOPMENT
COMMERCIAL
-ISED IDEAS
ENTREPRENEUR
INCUBATION
WORKING NEIGHBOURHOODS: A Model for Anchoring Place-Based Strategies to Local Economic Development
Prepared by Angela Koh for Working Women Community Centre, November 2015

2. Working Neighbourhood: A Community Action Lab
Neighbourhoods in Toronto are places of ongoing social change. As sites of research and knowledge production,
however, they have been overlooked. A Community Action Lab is an intentional platform to explore, test and
develop policy recommendations that support value creation at a community level. Consciously levering
investment, jobs and other opportunities locally through the development of a Community Action Lab
partnership model, proposed community-based participatory research can examine the potential of
“Community Hub” spaces such as the Victoria Park Hub in Victoria Village to anchor a neighbourhood workforce
development strategy that transitions low-income community members, especially women, newcomers and
racialized youth, into meaningful asset accumulation and career pathways. A rapid appraisal will map the scope
of local employment practices and the impacts of this on underemployment among residents. Research
platforms co-designed and co-delivered with community members integrate local knowledge frameworks,
continuous learning and new idea prototyping. This will allow us to identify the critical ingredients of what
makes a neighbourhood an innovative place, including how a community acquires the capacity to catalyse
revitalization around ongoing large-scale infrastructure development (eg. Metrolinx Eglinton CrossTown) and
deliver a workforce better able to not only navigate the increased mobility of labour, but understand how to
harness the modular fluidity of new economic patterns with effective entrepreneurial habits. By focusing on
building many kinds of local wealth in a broad-based community development strategy, we can test community
ownership models which reduce the impact of employment precarity and create access to alternative economic
opportunities. Engaging active existing partnerships, a Community Hub can convene a community of change that
scaffolds social and economic ecosystems of support to build a neighbourhood that works for everyone.
1. Background:
Investing in the self-efficacy and entrepreneurial ability of community members helps community-based
organisations (CBO) co-located in “Community Hubs” learn how to co-design and champion engines of economic
growth and value creation at a neighbourhood level. As a low-income neighbourhood with diverse racialized
groups, experiences of challenging structural economic and social inequality in Victoria Village have been mixed
despite the existence of neighbourhood revitalization investments since 2007. While the Building Strong
Neighbourhoods strategy through the Action for Neighbourhood Change project supports a vibrant and
connected social infrastructure where community members are able to cultivate, transfer and build skills and
knowledge among peers, addressing long-term barriers to employment remains an urgent priority, especially
among key equity-seeking groups of newcomers, women and racialized youth. Present community development
strategies need to be renewed by asking if people are thriving and finding their place in the workforce.
Intentional, policy-directed research can help us find out what is or is not working in the neighbourhood, as well
as help prototype, test and deliver micro-social innovations that can offset the isolation, disengagement, and

3. CO-REVIEW OF EVIDENCE
CO-DESIGN SOLUTIONS
CO-DELIVERY OF
ACTIVITIES
CO-LEARNING CIRCLE
Asset
Accumulation
Brokering
Institutions
Entrepreneruial/
Employment
Rentation Habits
Networks of
Opportunity
stress that community members experience when they lack economic opportunity (Toronto Public Health, The
Unequal City, 2008. Canadian Institute for Health Information, 2011).
2. Overview:
A working neighbourhood harbours strong social and economic ecosystems of support,
viewing the community itself as a new, inclusive economic institution. Our approach
understands neighbourhoods as not just physical geographical spaces but as the
products of social interactions and wider city building-type activities. In one of the
largest, participatory poverty assessments, lived experiences of poverty get described in
terms of physical, human, social and environmental assets (Narayan et al., Voices of the poor, 2000). This lens is
reflected in participatory community planning process developing annual Resident Action Plans in Victoria
Village and more recently in Toronto’s Poverty Reduction Strategy. Promoting accumulation of assets (friends,
education, affordable housing, etc) is a potentially valuable strategy to produce resilient, resourceful individuals
who can manage risks and identify opportunities. When our neighbourhood economies flourish, they are
expanded networks of continuous production, modification, and accumulation. Components of vital social
infrastructure that can foster asset accumulation include diverse brokering institutions that facilitate
relationship building, encourage the exchange of ideas and resources that occur through relational interactions,
and enable the pursuit of skillful living (see Friesen, The Business of Re-Weaving A Good City, 2010). With the
rise of networked, skill-based economies, it’s critical for CBOs to learn how to take on these brokering roles for
community members in order to support networks of opportunity. Building a workforce development strategy
anchored by “Community Hubs” starts by engaging a community of change with identified project partners - a
collaborative learning process committed to improving economic livelihoods of low-income groups facing
barriers to the labour market (newcomer, women, youth, etc) with dedicated staff to connect organizational
goals. Research frameworks are based on the idea of ‘social terraforming’, not necessarily creating new places,
but opening up spaces in our social landscape for equitable access to channels of innovation and greater
economic agency. We aim to identify and strengthen neighbourhood attributes that motivate creative people
and the innovative, competitive enterprises that rely on them to grow and stay in
the area, supporting the animation of places that connect people to what they
need to grow as individuals and as a community.
Ingredients of change are skilled people, innovative organisations and research
platforms that spur new ideas. A community action lab sets out to engage the
smart and skilled people who live and work in the neighbourhood to partner with
innovative organisational champions and build opportunities to test potential
COMMUNITY ACTION LAB

4. COMMUNITY
CONNECTION
ACTION LAB
PARTICIPATION
PROTOTYPING
SOLUTIONS
PROVEN
CONCEPTS
DEEPENING
ENTREPRENERIAL
HABITS
COMMUNITY
OF CHANGE
INTENTIONAL
ECO-SYSTEM
solutions around increasing access to local economic opportunities. Activities are coordinated through the
instigation of the lab, embedding human-centered design and disruptive innovation practices (Christensen et al,
Disruptive Innovation for Social Change, Harvard Business Review, 2006) with participatory research
methodologies. Using rapid appraisal tools to map the scope of local employment practices, including those
linked to large infrastructure projects and other planned developments, help us understand local workforce
development needs. Community members participating as peer researchers acquire entrepreneurial habits as
they seek to make business cases for promising solutions, prototyping over a launch year period a pool of new
ideas to build an equitable, local economy. By starting small and building on proven
concepts, community-tested innovation translates into a set of relevant and
meaningful policy recommendations for an engaged community of change.
Examples of potential prototypes include a campaign to educate local businesses, a
referral pipeline for jobseekers, or a pop-up business. Prototyping will be linked to
exploring commercialization and community ownership models, creating access for
emerging entrepreneurs to technical assistance, leadership and business
development training. The community action lab will also map local supply chains
and vending channels in order to facilitate cross-sectoral interactions, including
creating a network of local business owners. This process taps into increasingly
shifting patterns of content creation and collaborative consumption as ways of
exercising social and economic agency (see Rachel Botsman on The New Economy:
www.vimeo. com/11924774) that a local workforce can be supported to navigate.
3. A Call to Action:
The last decade of targeted space-based investment in the city (United Way Toronto, Poverty By Postal Code
2005) has not led to fully realized integrated social and economic planning. A Working Neighbourhood approach
challenges assumptions that improving the economic health of the community will automatically translate into
improved social conditions for all residents, especially the most vulnerable (City of Nainamo, Removing Barriers
to Social Isolation 2013; Parkdale Community Land Trust Report, 2012). For example, increased cost of housing
can result in problems for the often precariously employed in-work poor. A Community Action Lab strategy
represents a more thoughtful, action-oriented and intentional way of collaborating with key community
partners and members to build inclusive social architecture that scaffolds social and economic ecosystems of
support. Belonging to social groups and networks such as those supported out of community spaces by CBOs’
community development work can foster the kinds of social support that help lower-income communities buffer
individual experiences of adversity. However, we do not have strong understanding of how social ties and

5. systems contribute to reproducing or alleviating patterns of poverty. The intended research will produce
community-specific knowledge of how positive behaviours and values are transmitted through local social
networks and which learned or reinforced habits can contribute to successful employment retention within a
local workforce.
The experiences of being economically deprived and socially excluded are strongly correlated. A direct linkage is
the lack of social networks which provide opportunities; reflecting existing disparities. Understanding groups
within a community differ in their access to resources and power, strategies need to meaningfully expand the
assets of lower-income individuals to participate in, negotiate, influence and hold accountable decision-making
institutions. Declining social infrastructure may provide more negative influences than positive ones and a
disenfranchised, unhealthy community is also one where individuals have a harder time escaping poverty. It’s a
neighbourhood that doesn’t work. A working neighbourhood may need to not only offer economic
opportunities for residents, but also provide role models, networks, and growth mindsets with the other
resources and essential services we so earnestly wish to deliver.