What is infrastructure? It goes beyond walls and pavement: Social sector

It took 70 years for Sun Youth to find a place to call home. 

On June 16, the Montreal youth assistance charity will unveil its new facilities to a group comprised of dignitaries, donors, partners, and community members.

“We were scattered in five locations, all of which were rented,” said Marina Boulos, Sun Youth’s executive director. 

“All organizations need cohesion, and you get cohesion when the team is under the same roof. A roof that nobody can take away from you.”

The building is a $36.5 million project;  30 per cent was paid by government grants, and 70 per cent came from donations.

Future of Good was granted a sneak peek a few weeks ahead of the official opening.

The gymnasium, food bank, community kitchen, and community garden are all bright and inviting. 

“I plan for it to be occupied, morning, day and evening, seven days a week,” said Boulos.

Now that the building is built, a new challenge begins: community infrastructure, whether it is social housing, shelters, or food banks, relies on humans.

“Unlike roads and bridges, once our space is built, the project is not completed. However, the funding is designed for traditional infrastructures,” said Boulos.

Earlier this year, the future Embleton Community Centre and Park, in Brampton, Ont., received the first funding from Canada’s new Build Communities Strong Fund: $64 million, along with $148 million in municipal funding.

“Brick and mortar funding is essential. However, it is the human infrastructure that gives our buildings their raison d’être: the staff, the social workers, the programs,” said Boulos.

It is the community sector paradox, she added. 

“We are being told, ‘If you don’t have the money to hire more employees, why do you spend on a new building?’ But what is the rationale for hiring more employees when you don’t control your housing costs and might have to make massive lay-offs and service cuts overnight? That is the catch-22 our sector is struggling with now.”

Is it time to revisit the definition of an infrastructure?

The word infrastructure first appeared in France in June 1842, in the context of railway development. It was used to delineate the boundary between public and private investment. The French government financed infrastructures: land acquisition, bridges, and tunnel construction. Private companies financed superstructures: the tracks and the trains.

After the Second World War, infrastructures referred to all military installations.

In the ‘60s and ‘70s, the term migrated to the civilian sphere and became the vocabulary of major state programs .Infrastructure replaced public works.

Roads, bridges, dams, schools, and hospitals were tangible assets that enabled everything else.

Sun Youth’s gymnasium. ( Eric Carrière/Supplied)

Then, economists noticed that institutional conditions mattered as much as physical ones. “Soft” infrastructure entered the lexicon — legal systems, financial institutions, education networks, and public health capacity.

Then came a U.S. controversy: the meaning of what infrastructure is expanded politically.

Former President Joe Biden championed the concept of “human infrastructure”, including childcare, home care, education, and parental leave.

Proponents argue that these services are structurally identical to roads: they enable labour market participation, produce massive positive externalities, and are chronically underfunded because they have historically been provided free of charge by women. 

Critics argue this definition stretches the concept to the point of losing analytical coherence, reducing it to a synonym for “public good we want funded.”

Q&A: The social infrastructure paradox

Future of Good discussed the social infrastructure paradox with Boulos. Questions and responses have been edited for brevity.

Q: Why is it critical to include salaries in the financing of social infrastructures?

A: For the last few decades, inequalities have been rising, which translates into more citizens using our services. Moreover, since the pandemic, our clientele presents more serious challenges. We need more professionals, and we need them to be more experienced.

Q: You were the executive director of a women’s shelter during the pandemic. What shift happened?

A:  For many years, Chez Doris was a happy place where fragile women would drop in to rest, to find comfort and to seek company. The pandemic brought in a different crowd. Many visitors were suffering from mental illness, and some were violent. Our personnel were not prepared to handle this caseload. We became the overflow of the downtown hospitals’ psychiatric emergency.

The situation became so intense that I discussed it with the Jewish Hospital to see if Chez Doris should operate a psychiatric service. It makes no sense; that is not our mission. However, we considered that scenario because our personnel were resigning one after another, due to the challenging new clientele and its impact on working conditions.

Q: You envision an emerging risk of cherry-picking the clientele. Can you explain?

A: The community sector has become an extension of the health sector. Sometimes, I even feel we are the end of the line for regular health and social services. It is unsustainable. Our turnover rates are peaking, and recruiting is becoming very difficult. Under those adverse conditions, community organizations could be forced to cherry-pick their clientele. It will create a situation in which the most affected clientele will be outside, looking in and not receiving the care, support, and sometimes treatment they need. It will add to citizens’ feelings of insecurity and potentially lead to dramatic events.

Q: The community sector is suffering from a positioning problem, you say. Can you explain?

A: Let’s take one of our biggest issues: recruiting. Many of our employees are immigrants, with various statuses. However, at each level of Quebec’s immigration policy, the same priority sectors reappear— health, education, early childhood, construction, IT, and engineering. The community sector is systematically absent from the list. When I mention a positioning problem, I mean that we should be considered part of the health sector, making us a de facto priority sector. After all, our missions are human health-related.

Q: What is the biggest challenge for the community sector advocacy?

A: We are a sector, but government funding is distributed by theme, which forces the groups to plead each on their own with their respective funder. This system creates a tension within the sector: organizations are stronger when they speak with one voice on funding and recognition, but they often have more leverage on specific issues (housing, domestic violence, food security) when they advocate with the sectoral expertise of their thematic group. Thematic fragmentation often weakens the power dynamic on structural issues such as wages and funding indexation.