Capacity building using your community Social Capital Community Learning Centre(CLC)

1. Capacity building using your community Social Capital Community Learning Centre(CLC) CHSSN retreat October 2009 Paule Langevin Project Manager Services à la communauté anglophone MELS

2. History • New Approaches New Solutions 2002 • Two of the objectives of this program are • To engage parents • To reach out to the community • Research team on defining what a Community school would be like in Quebec 2003 • MELS/Pilot schools 2004 • Saint-Willibrord for the English sector

3. History • Supporting Montreal School Program 2005 • Westmount Park and Riverview Elementary • Community Learning Centres, 2006 • Phase 1,15 Centres from Sept 2006 to June 2009 • Phase 2, 7 Centres from Sept 2007 to June 2010 • Phase 3, conditional to funding 2009 to 2012

4. CLC Definition Community Learning Centres are partnerships that provide a range of services and activities, often beyond the school day, to help meet the needs of learners, their families,and the wider community. Their aim is to support the holistic development of citizens and communities.

5. CLC Objectives • To deliver educational and support services in a seamless and integrated fashion • To have various agencies pool resources and share the responsibility of service delivery • To nurture symbiotic relationships between schools/centres and their communities • To rejuvenate the role and importance of the school and its services to communities

6. Common Features of CLCs • Schools and centres will initiate these offers of service in partnership with agencies and institutions in the private, voluntary and community sectors. • Services are primarily offered in the school/centre but may be augmented in other settings.

7. Common Features of CLCs • Extended hours: A CLC is open to students, families, and the community before, during and after school, seven days a week, all year long. • Based on a partnership between the school and one or more community agencies. • Managed by an on-site coordinator.

8. Common Features of CLCs • Families, youth, principals, teachers, and neighborhood residents help design and implement activities. • Activities focus on school development as well as community development.

9. CLCs should be able to… • Provide access to the conditions deemed necessary for student success • Respond to the particular culture and needs of the communities they serve • Provide services that are accessible to the broader community • Deliver a range of services that are self-supporting and sustainable over time

10. and also be able to… • Integrate existing services and resources with those available from external agencies • Develop financial/resource partnerships that insure long-term sustainability • Resonate within their communities as a successful response to their needs • Demonstrate flexible and innovative approaches to service delivery

11. Here are some examples of how CLCs are opening their doors to their community: • A space for women’s group to meet; • Badminton on weekends for children and adults in a school that normally would have stood empty; • A library that expands its collection to reach adult readers; • A permanent home for a pre-literacy program for tots; • Space for cultural associations to meet, such as the Highland Frasiers or a choir; • Rooms for immigration assistance; • An internet café open to all; • Use of the VCN to provide tele-health services for adults in the community (on menopause, how to deal with bullying issues, building study skills with children, etc); • Use of the school as a space for summer camps and community garden.

12. Paricia LamarreUniversity of MontrealCLC and Community Vitality • “Any strategy that aims to strengthen vitality requires a thorough understanding of the situation to be changed – the starting point – so as to be able to target the destination.”  • The starting point for this project is a very diverse group of existing schools, each with its own set of needs and challenges, its own particular community and student population, and its own goals as to what a CLC can be and should provide, in other words, its own destination.

13. Questions to be answered through the evaluation • Can schools, which must continue to meet their educational mandate, expand this mandate to meet community-based goals? • Are CLCs showing their potential to meet the challenges facing Quebec’s English language schools and the communities schools serve?

14. Findings • CLCs are showing their potential to bring in, as well as bring support to, regional and local associations and service providers. • Partenerships being established between CLCs and different organizations: Carrefour Jeunesse Emploi, CEDEC, health and social services, regional Anglophone associations such as the Coasters, immigrant associations. • Easier for services to reach targeted populations.

15. Partners in CLCs report that being partnered allows them to better fulfill their mandate within mutually beneficial relationships: • As a partner, we now have an arm into the community/ It makes our mandate easier • It’s like having a ground person in the community • It’s the missing link / what we needed. • In this respect, CLCs are showing their ability to strengthen associations and the communities they serve.

16. CLCs are also showing their structuring capacity in other ways particularly when it comes to pulling together different people within a school’s community and reinforcing their ties: • It’s pulling the generations together, from students to seniors. • I’m a grandmother and I hadn’t set foot in the school since my children were there. • Its bringing the community together but also making us more open to the region, to the outside world.

17. A closer relationship between a school and the community can bring benefits to the delivery of the educational program: • It fits with our mandate – (adult ed, guidance counselor)/ Makes life easier • Life is easier, the job is easier (teachers)

18. CLCs are showing their potential to improve local communication through newsletters aimed at local CLC community. Ability to increase communication goes beyond newsletters: • Bringing everyone together... Organizations. People. We are communicating more, joining forces • We know what’s going on. Our efforts are less scattered. we are all going in the same direction. • It took what was there and improved it… Fills a gap… It’s like a glue …Meshes together scattered efforts.

19. CLCs might not be generating great amounts of new funding but they do appear to be providing important services at relatively little cost – relying on volunteer hours and a space that is being heated whether used or not. • The VCN is also showing its ability to provide schools and communities with access not only to the larger world but to the neighboring school and other English schools in the province. • The existence of CLCs provides an opportunity for the Anglophone community to voice and take charge of their own local needs, put in place services at lesser cost and plan for the future.

20. Schools are showing that they can become CLCs which address broader community issues; • The transformation of schools into CLCs is garnering approval from those involved; • CLCs are showing their potential to bring in regional and local associations and service providers; • Partners in CLCs are reporting that this relationship can be mutually beneficial, allowing them to better fulfill their mandates and reach target populations; • CLCs are showing their potential to pull together different actors within a school’s community, reinforce ties and encourage networking;

21. CLCs are clearly having an impact on local and regional communication; • CLCs have demonstrated their potential to provide space and support to a wide range of different activities; • CLCs might not be generating important sums of new revenue, however, they are contributing to better use of available resources (gymnasiums, libraries, rooms to meet in) and providing new services and activities to the communities they serve at relatively little cost- a factor that school boards and other agencies able to provide financial support to maintain coordinator’s positions into the future should be considering; • CLCs are in some sites saving considerable school board money thanks to the VCN; • The VCN is opening up new possibilities for quality education of students and for expanded services;

22. Although CLCs cannot be expected to meet all of the challenges facing English schools, one of the main areas of potential within the CLC initiative is in its ability to find tailor-made solutions. As was recently stated about English schools in Quebec: • No one size, one curriculum, one model will fit all… issues have to be resolved in different ways for different schools.  (Quebec Advisory Council for QESBA, 2006).

23. In Conclusion • CLCs are already at this early phase showing an ability to pull together communities, a critical contribution, given that in Quebec, the English-speaking community have not been very active or effective in joining forces to identify needs and lobby for services.

24. Conclusion • CLCs, however, do have the potential to help counter some of the consequences of demographic decline of the student population. They can, for example, impede school closures and provide a better use of resources in schools with small student populations. As more resources, services and programs are brought into a school, it becomes more viable, less tied to student per capita funding.