Poverty

Dexter Voisin to become new dean of U of T’s Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 17 May 2019 15:10:27 +0000

Dexter Voisin to become new dean of U of T’s Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 05/17/2019 - 11:10

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After two decades as a professor at the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration, Dexter Voisin will take up the position as dean of the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work for a five-year term (photo by Sean Blackwell)

Richard Blackwell

Topic

Our Community

Cheryl Regehr

Diversity

Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work

Mental Health

Poverty

Research & Innovation

Truth and Reconciliation

Dexter Voisin, a renowned expert on community violence, mental health and HIV prevention, will become the University of Toronto’s new dean of the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work.

Voisin, after two decades as a professor at the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration, will take up the position on July 1 for a five-year term.

He said he is excited to assume the leadership role at a faculty known for its excellence in both teaching and research.

“This is a world-class faculty at a world-class university. The faculty is ranked among the top in North America, and the university among the top 20 globally. Yet they are both distinctly known for innovation,” he said.

Compared to other social work faculties, U of T’s “is unique in that you have a large faculty embedded in a multi-faceted institution that is so nimble, in terms of moving towards innovation and making change,” Voisin added.

Another big draw for Voisin is the broad, interdisciplinary focus at U of T, where the social work faculty can interact with academics working in public policy, education, kinesiology, and other “sister disciplines which align well with social work.”

Voisin replaces Faye Mishna, who is completing a ten-year term as the faculty’s dean.

“I sincerely thank Professor Faye Mishna for her leadership over the past decade,” said Cheryl Regehr, the university’s vice-president and provost.

“The Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work is ideally situated to welcome Professor Dexter Voisin as its new dean. Professor Voisin’s exceptional leadership, insight and keen dedication to collaborative administration will be invaluable to the faculty and its exemplary work in the years to come.”

Voisin said his first priority at U of T is to become familiar with the faculty, students, staff, and alumni and learn the “local context” of the Faculty of Social Work.

“One of my early priorities will be amplifying a lot of the already exceptional work and the capital that already exists in the school,” he said.

Voisin’s own research focuses on how community violence affects mental health, academic performance and risky sexual practices that can lead to HIV infection, particularly among emerging adults. While these issues may not be as apparent in Toronto as in Chicago, they are present here, he said.

“When looking at my research foci – like disadvantaged populations, child welfare, individuals exposed to neighbourhood violence, structural inequality and poverty – those are conditions that exist not just in Chicago, but in Canada and across the globe.”

Gun violence and homicides may also not be as acute a problem in Toronto as Chicago, he noted, but it is still an issue, and there are many other factors that have an impact on low-income and marginalized populations in the city, and which need deeper study.

“I will be trying to understand how I can take insights from the U.S. contexts, as well as from other global settings, and bring it to bear on the pressing needs that are prevalent in Toronto,” Voisin said.

Voisin has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from St. Andrews College in Laurinburg, N.C., a Master of Social Work from the University of Michigan, and a Master of Philosophy and PhD from Columbia University in New York.

He said the multicultural fabric of Toronto is an exciting draw, especially after having grown up in Trinidad and Tobago, the most culturally diverse island in the English-speaking Caribbean. “Diversity is strength, because there are unique needs for every sub-group, and those sub-groups also have important expertise and insights that need to be part of the conversation when you are thinking about the issues that are present in these communities,” Voisin said.

Voisin added he is also interested in Indigenous reconciliation, which he sees as a broad human rights issue in Canada. “That for me is central. It is a priority that the government, the university and Faculty of Social Work supports, a real cross-system commitment to an important issue.”

With his research often cited in the U.S. media and globally and his commentary sought out on public policy issues, Voisin said he will advance the public profile of U of T’s social work faculty.

“It is important to take the knowledge and the insights that we have in the academy, and bring them to bear on larger societal discourses,” he said. “I’m very big on breaking down the artificial barriers between the university and community and public spaces. Social work, as a values-driven profession, should be at the foreground of some of these complex conversations.”

Voisin has had an influence on public health policy in Illinois, through his appointments to state-level committees and advisory work as a director of the STI/HIV Intervention Network and co-director of the Center for Chicago HIV Elimination.

As he makes the shift to U of T, Voisin will be shepherding the launch of his new book, to be released this summer. America the Beautiful and Violent: Black Youth & Neighborhood Trauma in Chicago is expected to get considerable press attention when it is released, and he hopes he will be able to use the publicity to raise the visibility of the social work profession and U of T’s social work faculty.

“I’m excited about working with other administrators across the university, around their shared vision, elevating the profile of the school of social work, and advancing the impact of the institution,” he said.

“My initial goal would be to promote the important scholarship, teaching and community impact that is already happening, amplify it, and work with the faculty, students, staff and alumni to create a shared vision moving forward.”

Stranded without transit? U of T researchers say one million urban Canadians suffer from 'transport poverty'

geoff.vendeville — Wed, 09 Jan 2019 21:54:36 +0000

Stranded without transit? U of T researchers say one million urban Canadians suffer from 'transport poverty'

geoff.vendeville Wed, 01/09/2019 - 16:54

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A new U of T study found about one million urban Canadians live in low-income households and are also transport-poor, meaning they live in areas lacking transit options (Rene Johnston/Toronto Star via Getty Images)

Geoffrey Vendeville

Topic

City & Culture

Cities

Faculty of Arts & Science

Geography and Planning

Poverty

Transit

U of T Scarborough

If you can't afford a car or Uber, and there's no major public transit route in your neighbourhood, finding a job and keeping it can be an uphill battle.

It's an all-too-familiar challenge for up to one million urban Canadians, according to an estimate by U of T geographers Jeff Allen and Steven Farber, who published their findings in Transport Policy last month.

The authors used household demographic and employment data from the 2016 census, among other information, to do a national accounting of so-called “transport poverty” across the country for the first time.

“We know how many poor children there are in this country, we know how many recent immigrants there are, but no one has ever known how many people are transport-poor,” says Farber, who is an assistant professor in the department of human geography at U of T Scarborough.

He and Allen say they hope their research will help inform government policy on transportation.

“In Canada, governments are currently investing billions of dollars in public transport with very little guidance on whether and how this infrastructure can be used to achieve a higher degree of transport justice in Canadian cities,” they write.

What does it mean to be transport-poor? Farber says it's a mix of disadvantages: socioeconomic status (low income, ill health, being a recent immigrant or elderly) and a lack of access to transportation (being unable to afford a car, or reach destinations easily by transit, for example).

These circumstances can create a vicious cycle, he adds. “It can have long-run implications on your quality of life and well being,” he explains. “Your ability to access goods and services, your ability to access the political process, your ability to find work and keep a job – that all feeds back into your socioeconomic status.”

Allen, who grew up in Toronto, says it's a topic that's long been on his mind as he noticed the range in transit services available across the region. Now a PhD student in physical geography, he and his supervisor Farber looked at the problem in Canada's most populous urban areas: Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, Ottawa, Edmonton, Quebec City and Winnipeg.

A screenshot of an online map created by Allen and Farber that shows access to jobs by transit in Toronto (photo courtesy of Jeff Allen)

“We find that within Canada's eight largest cities, 5 per cent of the total population are living in low income households which are also situated in areas with low transit accessibility,” they write. “This totals nearly one million people who are at risk of transport poverty nation-wide.”

In an online map, they plotted some of their data to show access to employment opportunities across these cities. Zooming in on Toronto, one sees that people who live downtown have a wealth of opportunities, but they become more scarce farther out from the city centre.

When it comes to transport poverty specifically, the researchers pointed to two types of at-risk neighbourhoods. The first are the inner suburbs: low-income, high-density communities living in apartment towers. Neighbourhoods like Flemingdon Park and Thorncliffe Park in Toronto are relatively close to downtown, but they aren't situated on high-order transit routes. They're also home to many low income and recent immigrant households who can't afford a car. The other typically transport-poor neighbourhoods were outlying low-income suburbs like Scarborough, pockets of Markham, Etobicoke, Oshawa and Brampton.

As more and more people find themselves priced out of downtown – a trend known as the suburbanization of poverty – more households could find themselves living at a transport disadvantage, Farber said.

Their paper references and builds on the work of the Neighbourhood Change Research Partnership led by U of T Professor David Hulchanski, that has documented the growing gap between rich and poor in Canadian cities.

Farber says there hasn't been much weight given to transport poverty in decisions about where to put new transport infrastructure or add transit routes. “They'll give a project bonus points if it goes through a low-income neighbourhood,” he says, “but they haven't really been up to speed with what's been going on in academia and other jurisdictions where there's been more of a concerted effort.”

By putting the problem on the map, the researchers hope to change the conversation and raise the issue to the national level.

“The bigger the problem, the more important it is that we solve it,” Farber says.

Poverty is a significant risk factor for premature death, U of T researcher finds

ullahnor — Wed, 15 Mar 2017 20:22:56 +0000

Poverty is a significant risk factor for premature death, U of T researcher finds

ullahnor Wed, 03/15/2017 - 16:22

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New study by U of T researcher found that mortality is impacted by poverty (VancouverBC Food Bank via Flickr)

Deborah Creatura

Author legacy

Deborah Creatura

Topic

Poverty is one of the strongest determinants of health, regardless of immigration status, according to a new study from U of T's Dalla Lana School of Public Health and the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES).

“What our study found was despite the healthy immigrant effect, those living in the most deprived areas, irrespective of immigration status had the highest mortality rates,” says Laura Rosella (pictured below), the study’s lead author who is an assistant professor of epidemiology at U of T and a scientist at ICES.

“These findings support the need to better examine the factors that drive these inequalities to ensure equitable health for the totality of the population.”

The “healthy immigrant effect” refers to a trend where new immigrants to Canada are healthier than the Canadian population, but over time and successive generations, their health as well as that of their children and grandchildren tends to decline.

In the study, published today in Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, the researchers examined data representing all deaths in Ontario from 2002 to 2012 to analyze how socioeconomic factors impact mortality according to immigration status.

The study found:

All-cause and premature mortality were about 60 per cent lower among immigrants compared to Canadian or long-term residents. Over the 10-year study period, this translated into 42,700 fewer deaths overall and 18,400 fewer premature deaths in immigrants compared to Canadian-born or long-term residents.
The average age at death for female and male immigrants was approximately six years younger than that of female and male long-term residents.
For both immigrants and non-immigrants, those living in the most deprived areas had higher rates of all-cause and premature mortality, although immigrant mortality was lower across all levels.
The advantage in all-cause and premature mortality among male immigrants over male long-term residents was slightly more pronounced than the advantage among female immigrants over female long-term residents.

U of T Libraries to forgive some overdue fines for canned goods donations

ullahnor — Tue, 22 Nov 2016 17:40:38 +0000

U of T Libraries to forgive some overdue fines for canned goods donations

ullahnor Tue, 11/22/2016 - 12:40

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Students have begun turning in canned and boxed food for overdue fines

Geoffrey Vendeville

Author legacy

Geoffrey Vendeville

Topic

Attention library scofflaws: this week is your chance to unburden yourself of the hefty overdue fine that is weighing on your conscience – and to help the needy at the same time.

Until Friday, University of Toronto libraries will forgive $2 of overdue fines for each nonperishable food item donated, waiving up to $20 per person. The donations are sent to the U of T Food and Clothing Bank, a year-round campus resource for students run out of the Multi-Faith Centre.

U of T libraries have participated in the Food for Fines charity drive since 2012. Last year alone, U of T Libraries waived nearly $2,600 of late fees. Students can drop off food at library branches across all three campuses:

Criminology Library
Engineering and Computer Science Library
Gerstein Science Information Centre
Graham Library, Trinity College
Inforum
Law Library
Music Library
OISE Library
Robarts Library
U of T Mississauga Library
U of T Scarborough Library

“Many people benefit: those who use the food bank, and those who have the opportunity to contribute,” said Renata Holder, access services manager at Gerstein.

Read Metro News story on Food for Fines

The food bank is especially in need of baby food, nutrient-rich canned foods such as fish and beans, canned vegetables, juice boxes, salad dressings and condiments.

The Food for Fines week comes just as the food bank enters its busy holiday season, said Mathias Memmel, who is part of the executive committee of U of T's Student Union.

“I think this is really fantastic. The most exciting thing for me is it brings these sorts of issues to spaces where people are studying on campus,” he said.

More than 20 single adult students and heads of families used the food bank weekly in May this year, Memmel said.

Across the country, more Canadians are relying on food banks. More than 863,000 people turned to a food bank in March of last year, a 1.3 per cent increase over March 2015 and a 28 per cent increase since 2008, according to a Food Banks Canada report.

See what a U of T expert has to say about food insecurity and how it affects health

Second-generation social scientist traces effects of poverty; tackles myths about racists

lavende4 — Mon, 18 Jul 2016 18:56:54 +0000

Second-generation social scientist traces effects of poverty; tackles myths about racists

lavende4 Mon, 07/18/2016 - 14:56

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Geoffrey Wodtke: growing up in poor neighbourhoods impacts success in school (Diana Tyszko photo)

Peter McMahon

Author legacy

Peter McMahon

Topic

Our Community

Faculty of Art & Science

The neighbourhoods I grew up in were middle class,” says Wisconsin-born University of Toronto sociologist Geoffrey Wodtke. “But growing up in and around Milwaukee — one of the most segregated cities in the U.S. and containing some of the poorest areas in the country — we were never that far from some very disadvantaged places.”

As a prof in the 60s and 70s in the U.S., Wodtke’s educational psychologist father became interested in racial inequity and schooling, “back when it was a taboo topic,” Wodtke says. “I grew up talking with him about that, reading a lot of the stuff he’d put in front of me and got into that as an area of research as a result.”

Wodtke — whose mother worked with students from a variety of poor neighbourhoods as a special education teacher in Wisconsin — has started to make a name for himself with the discovery that the amount of time children spend growing up in poor neighbourhoods directly impacts their success in school. “In general, the longer a child spends in a poor neighbourhood, the worse off they are,” Wodtke says.

An individual who lives in a poor neighbourhood for part of their childhood and in a wealthy neighbourhood for another part of their childhood is more likely to finish high school, for example, than comparable youth who spend their entire childhood in poor neighbourhoods.

Wodtke’s findings are derived from data from the U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which has followed children from birth through early adulthood almost every year since 1968.

He compared outcomes — whether someone graduated from high school, whether someone became a parent as a teen — among children who lived in different neighbourhoods for different amounts of time but who were otherwise comparable on measured family and household characteristics.

The findings about the importance of duration of exposure to certain neighbourhoods have led to a re-analysis of some big housing mobility experiments in the U.S., Wodtke says.

For example, Wodtke notes that moving a child from an environment of poverty to one of opportunity specifically during early childhood appears to increase the chances for those youth of attending college and earning a higher income as a young adult. There has been some success in the U.S. on this score when randomly-selected residents of poor, high-density housing projects are provided with housing vouchers enabling them to move to a higher income neighbourhood.

Wodtke hopes to next investigate why growing up in a poor neighbourhood has negative effects on children.

“There’s some sense that children living in poor neighbourhoods don’t go as a far in school because the schools to which they have access just aren’t very good.”

But there may other explanations, Wodtke says. For example, children living in poor neighbourhoods are disproportionately exposed to violent crime and environmental health hazards that interfere with brain development and cognitive function.

“Unfortunately, there are few empirical studies on this, so I’m currently in the process of gathering data.”

Another area of interest for Wodtke is attitudes toward race. Several years ago, there was extensive media coverage of a study that said smart white people are less racist than less-intelligent white people. The findings didn’t ring true to Wodtke.

“I was a little skeptical of that claim and I thought ‘That’s a much too simple answer,’” he says.

Working with data from the General Social Survey and Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality, he found that white people who ranked as intelligent think of themselves as quite liberal and are more likely to reject negative racial stereotypes and support racial equality in principle. They support residential integration and inter-racial marriage and are less likely to refer to black people as lazy or unintelligent.

However, this same group of intelligent white people were no more likely, and in some cases they were even less likely, to support policies designed to encourage racial equality — such as workplace affirmative action, open housing laws, or busing between school districts — than their less-intelligent counterparts. Moreover, among white Americans who were born well before the Civil Rights Movement, the association between higher intelligence and rejection of negative racial stereotypes completely disappears.

“When you take a broader look at the association of racial attitudes and intelligence in the U.S., you see a much more complicated picture than what was being put out in the media,” Wodtke says.

Poverty, not delinquency, drives homelessness among world's youth, research finds

sgupta — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 09:17:34 +0000

Poverty, not delinquency, drives homelessness among world's youth, research finds sgupta Mon, 04/04/2016 - 05:17

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Associate Professor Paula Braitstein with children at an orphanage in Kenya (photo courtesy of Paula Braitstein)

Nicole Bodnar

Author legacy

Nicole Bodnar

Topic

Global Lens

Poverty can both hinder and stimulate entrepreneurial creativity, says U of T prof

sgupta — Fri, 01 Apr 2016 10:44:12 +0000

Poverty can both hinder and stimulate entrepreneurial creativity, says U of T prof sgupta Fri, 04/01/2016 - 06:44

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poverty can help stimulate entrepreneurial creativity, but also hinder it (photo by World Bank via flickr)

Terry Lavender

Author legacy

Terry Lavender

Topic

Breaking Research

Features

Rotman School of Management

Does poverty hinder or encourage market creativity? That’s the question Laura Doering, an assistant professor at U of T’s Rotman School of Business, set out to answer when she travelled to Panama to interview poor entrepreneurs.

Doering’s research was recently written up in the Sunday New York Times and will soon be published in the journal Sociology of Development. In the paper she writes that entrepreneurs are both catalyzed and constrained by conditions of poverty. Ultimately, poverty limits entrepreneurs’ capacity to profit from the creativity they bring to the marketplace, Doering concludes. She discussed her findings with U of T News recently.

How did you get interested in the relationship between poverty and entrepreneurship?

Before I went to graduate school to study sociology, I worked in international development, mostly in Latin America, and so that got me interested in the effects that development programs were having on poverty. I became curious because often they weren’t effective or the effects were different from what was intended. I was originally interested in how relationships between loan officers and their clients shaped microfinance outcomes. So it was through the lens of microfinance that I became interested in poverty and entrepreneurship. I realized that a big part of what I was interested in was the way that business and entrepreneurship could potentially be a tool for fighting inequality and so I did up an additional degree in business. That’s the long story of how it all connects.

What were your conclusions regarding poverty and entrepreneurial creativity?

At first, poverty is something that helped people in Panama to overcome the barriers to creativity. Creativity is always in some ways more difficult than replication of existing business ideas. What I found was that individuals were migrating quite a bit for work and education and through that they gained access to lots of different ideas and were talking with people who had migrated. That migration helped or facilitated the creative process. Later on, conditions of poverty made it very difficult to sustain those creative ventures.

You went to Panama to interview people for your study. Did you encounter any practical difficulties doing your research?

There were a lot of challenges. I interviewed 41 low income entrepreneurs for the Sociology of Development article, as well as many higher income individuals for another study, so it was difficult logistically coordinating hour-long interviews with almost 100 people, especially since a lot of my interviewees were in rural areas. So I would take a bus out to this far-flung community and it would be pouring rain and I would get there and the person would say, “Oh I’m sorry, I forgot about this interview today, can we reschedule?,” and so there was a lot of time often lost in those transactions.

Is Panama representative of other Latin American countries with regards to poverty and entrepreneurship?

The rates of entrepreneurship among low income populations in Panama are quite representative and so in that sense it’s very similar to other countries in the region. I think it’s also different in some ways, in part because much of the Latin American financial sector is located in Panama City. Panama is also one of the fastest growing economies in Latin America. I think what that does is facilitate migration processes because you have lots of people from rural areas who are spending some time in Panama City where there are lots of opportunities and then going back to their home communities. In that way it fuels this import-export of ideas. What’s unique to this study that you might not see in other places is how much people are moving around.

In your article you suggest governments use business incubators and cash grants to help poor entrepreneurs. Are there other ways these people can be helped?

The idea for incubators and cash grants is very much aimed at helping people to develop their creative ideas and to keep those creative businesses alive. In my opinion, that would be the best way of developing novel businesses, but that said, there are lots of ways to support micro-entrepreneurs that don’t involve cash grants and incubators. For example, some short-term training programs have been shown to be quite effective, especially among people who are extremely poor and even more effective when used in combination with cash grants.

Are you doing any follow-up research?

Not at the moment, although I’ve been in touch with a few organizations interested in implementing and testing these ideas. Right now I’m looking at a public housing complex in Colombia, where people have been randomly assigned to housing. My colleague and I are looking at how an individual’s location in the housing project affects whether or not they start a microenterprise and how much they earn from their business.

What has the reaction been to the New York Times article?

Many organizations that work with micro-entrepreneurs have reached out to me to ask for advice, asking for suggestions for ways they might integrate a cash grant incubator system. I’ve also heard from a few organizations who say that they run incubators and trainings, but that they don’t target entrepreneurs who have novel businesses. It seems that there’s a possibility in the future for potentially collaborating with organizations that are working on the ground on these issues. So that was a pleasant surprise that came from this, how many organizations reached out to me.

Have you gone back to see how the people you interviewed in Panama are doing now?

I haven’t been able to follow up with everyone, but I went back a few times during the course of the research to see how people were doing. Often the updates are disheartening. A lot of the time people have abandoned their businesses or something really bad has happened in their family and they’ve had to move. But one of my interviewees won a major award for micro-entrepreneurs and that really launched her onto the national scene. She got lots of attention and received lots of capital. So that was really exciting.

(Visit flickr to see the original of the photo at the top)

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