Toronto hopes new project can help non-profits map, collect data on root causes of crime

The City of Toronto hopes that a new pot of funding for non-profits will help prevent violence in some of the city’s vulnerable neighbourhoods. 

Through SafeTO, the city’s community safety and wellbeing program, $300,000 in funding has been made available for non-profits to use data, analytics and digital maps to advance the goal of preventing violence.

“No one entity can address the complexity of safety and wellbeing challenges,” said Scott McKean, manager of SafeTO. 

“It takes multiple sectors and communities working together.”

The City is making $100,000 available to three non-profits, each of whom has already started leveraging data analytics in their community work. 

The grant opened for applications in early 2024, and successful applicants were notified at the end of March. 

Grantees will begin their projects over the next few weeks, with the main project being a visual map of community assets in particular neighbourhoods. 

The SafeTO team hopes to create a shared data hub, allowing several organizations working on community safety and violence prevention to access data – including government entities and non-profits. 

“Our interventions produce datasets that are really strong, but the City had not been using them to advance preventative [measures],” McKean said. 

“We quickly realized that we were looking at these datasets in isolation.”

The City has defined the neighbourhoods it wants to focus on based on places vulnerable to violence and where young people’s wellbeing is at risk. 

The non-profits awarded the grant can then develop data points and maps based on what they deem essential in their communities. 

“It’s not for us to say exactly what the non-profit sector needs to improve their capacity,” said Wayne Chu, manager of SafeTO’s Collaborative Analytics and Learning Environment (SCALE). 

“Part of this is that non-profits need to tell us what they need.”

What is a public health approach to violence prevention?

“The root of violence can be complex,” said Dr. Ardavan Eizadirad, executive director of YAAACE (Youth Association for Academics, Athletics and Character Education).  “It’s what happens in childcare settings, schools and communities.

Working in Toronto’s Jane and Finch neighbourhood – a historically low-income community – Dr Eizadirad and his team use data regularly in their intervention work. They’ve also built a digital asset map of local community programs, which is updated monthly. 

“A systemic barrier is when institutions work in silos,” he added. “But the onus falls on the individual to navigate it. Let’s say you come out of jail: you then need to go to your school to get your transcript and another place to get your identification.

“For folks in vulnerable circumstances, those mini tasks can become a mountain to climb.”  

These stories often remain anecdotal, he said, but consistent data can drive more change.

Finding links and patterns through data can allow for a “public health” approach to violence prevention, he added. He noted that this approach has worked in places such as Glasgow, Scotland. 

Individuals can fall through the cracks in a system where certain social services are disconnected. A public health approach to crime and prevention recognizes these as root causes and trauma, as well as the “socioeconomic status of communities and experiences of poverty, economic inequity, systemic racism and violence, and trans-generational trauma,” according to research published by the Samuel Centre for Social Connectedness. 

In comparison, a law enforcement approach does not necessarily reduce crime and violence, the research found. 

At the City of Toronto, the SafeTO team was born out of legislation that mandated every municipality in Ontario to develop a community safety and wellbeing plan by July 2021. As well as reducing violence and vulnerability, the City’s plan includes addressing the overrepresentation of racialized and low-income communities in the criminal justice system and advancing Indigenous-led safety and wellbeing practices. 

For instance, in January 2023, the City collaborated with the Toronto Transit Commission and the Toronto Police Service to track the safety and wellbeing of the city’s transit system.

The dashboard tracked not only the rate of offences but also the number of wellness checks conducted by TTC Safety Ambassadors, the number of people served by a multidisciplinary outreach team, and the number of shelter referrals. 

Why is the City of Toronto turning to the non-profit sector?

One of the City’s main goals is to foster multi-sector collaboration, including health services, education, social services and services for children and youth. 

“How do we share, integrate and analyze data across institutions?” asked McKean. “And then how do we actually build community capacity to access that data?

The quality of the data varies, Chu added, particularly when it is about violence prevention interventions. Non-profits and community groups have often been vital partners in enabling these interventions on the ground and can help fill in information gaps.

“We know that the current model of policing is not working to keep our communities safe,” said Kanaka Kulendran, director of organizational systems at Social Planning Toronto. 

“Non-profits and community-based organizations have expertise and experience on issues impacting community safety and are essentially on the ground doing the work, often underfunded, and seeing and witnessing first hand the challenges, gaps and assets that do contribute to local community safety.

“This definitely feels like an indication that the City is interested in expanding more alternative models to policing and violence prevention work,” they said, adding that they’d like to see storytelling, lived experience and other non-quantitative forms of data valued as the City chooses its non-profit partners. 

Non-profit staff don’t always have the bandwidth to dedicate to research, said Dr. Eizadirad. However, research and data interest funders, especially if they want to renew a program. 

“Communities want to be engaged and involved,” said Chu, who has a background in poverty reduction and social research. “They feel that some of this analytics work happens without their consent. It’s important to provide the community with the ability to do this work as well.

“Data is power.”

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