This year's conference, the largest nonprofit housing conference in North America, was held from November 15 to November 18. ONPHA, an umbrella organization representing almost all of Ontario's nonprofit housing sector, uses its annual awards to showcase member organizations doing especially interesting and innovative work.
"The awards were developed really to serve two functions," says John Wilson, manager of communications and marketing with ONPHA. "First, to reward groups that are trying new things that really push the envelope in the way that we do our job. But also, at the same time, to inspire the rest of the people in the room to maybe try something new or to do something differently."
Since 2004, the Ja'Fari Housing Association has worked tirelessly to build partnerships with community members and community organizations, a strategy, says Wilson, which the awards committee wanted to celebrate.
"What stood out for the group in this case is really two things. One, how attentive Ja'Fari is to their tenants and their needs, and also how it works to secure the partners it needs to meet those needs."
About five years ago Ja'Fari's board recognized that their already marginalized tenants were having difficulty accessing culturally sensitive social services as well as services in languages they could understand. Ja'Fari board members and staff reached out to the wider community in order to provide much needed services for their tenants, including language interpretation, legal advice and employment counselling.
One of Ja'Fari's biggest partners, York Region's
Sandgate Women's Shelter, was offered onsite space to provide support services for Ja'Fari tenants. Ja'Fari has also recently partnered with York Region Police in order build trust between its community and the police force. And Ja'Fari's affiliated youth-focused charity, the Crescent Village Fund, has built basketball courts and shared work and activity spaces for younge people in the community.
To top it off, Ja'Fari has also partnered with a local yoga instructor to provide subsidized yoga for its tenants three times a week.
It's these kinds of partnerships, Wilson hopes, that will inspire other nonprofit housing boards.
"A lot of our members work with very difficult communities. But also, at the same time, many of our members are funded as landlords, not as community developers and not as social workers. Making a healthy community when you don't have the internal capacity can be difficult. So what we liked about Ja'Fari’s approach is they brought the community into their building. By housing those services it also brought the wider community in and also situated Ja'Fari in the context of the wider community."
As it does with all its award winners, ONPHA produced a video documenting Ja'Fari's many successes and challenges (check it out
here) and shared the Ja'Fari story with audiences over the course of the four-day conference.
Writer: Katia Snukal
Source: John Wilson, Manager of Communications and Marketing,ONPHA