Community Working Group Announces The Cut of Access to Sports Project at the SDP Planning Committee Meeting of October 6, 2021

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SDP Community Working Group announces the cut to Access to Sports Project and presents a revised plan to SDP Planning Table.

The role of the SDP Planning Committee is to set the agenda for decision making items that have to be made at the SDP Stakeholders Table as well as deal with time sensitive issues related to the SDP.

On Thursday October 6, 2021, the SDP Planning Committee met to deliberate on final issues related to this evening’s first Deep Dive Session. The Deep Dive is a unique consensus decision making model, designed by the SDP Planning Committee, to determine how $500,000.00 (five hundred thousand dollars) yearly of City funding allocated towards the Regent Park Social Development Plan will be spent.

The SDP Planning Committee meeting of October 6, 2021, was hosted by Lindsay Jackson of the Social Development Table and a resident of Regent Park. The following is a report of this meeting.

After a land acknowledgement led by Denise Soueidan-O’Leary and approval of the agenda, the meeting officially began with an announcement led by Joel Klassen and Walied Khogalli, who are co-chairs of the Community Building Working Group.

Joel and Walied announced that the Community Building Working Group had recently decided not to continue the hiring of an Access to Sports project co-ordinator and to cut the Asses to Sports project.

The Access to Sports project was one of the SDP projects that was funded by the City of Toronto in 2020. The aim of the project was to hire a coordinator to design a feasibility study on models of sports engagement and develop an action plan to provide sports and life skills initiatives to youth in Regent Park. The deadline for the project was May 31, 2022, and as of October 7, 2021, no one has yet been hired for the project.

According to Joel, the Community Building Working Group failed to identify a strong candidate for the position and decided not to continue the hiring, as the working group does not see a productive path to completing the project by the end date of May 31.

Instead, Joel and Walied presented a plan to the SDP Planning Committee, recommending that the $48,000.00 in project funds for the Access to Sports project, be reallocated to a group that had submitted a sports project request to the SDP for funding for 2021, under the stipulation that the awarded group would have to withdraw their current proposal request. The funded group would not be eligible for funding in this Deep Dive round. Joel assured the Planning Committee that he has consulted with the City and the City has agreed that the funds can be re-directed to another sport’s project that has applied to the SDP deep dive funding allocation.

After presenting their plan committee members were given an opportunity to respond.

Ibrahim Afrah argued that instead of reallocating the funds to a sports group, that the funds should be added to the city funding increasing it to $548,000.00 for 2021. Michael Rosenberg, felt that the plan was fine as long as they identified the group before the next Deep Dive session on October 14, 2021. Ines Garcia questioned why after almost 10 months have passed, did the Community Working Group wait only till now to tell us that the project wasn’t on track.

Although there was no formal voting or decision made at the meeting, tacit approval was given to the Community Building Working Group’s plan. In a follow up email to the SDP Planning Committee, Joel writes,

“The Community Building co-chairs are convening a meeting/s of sport-oriented deep dive applicants. With input from the interested groups, co-chairs will as soon as possible make a recommendation to the City's Community Funding Unit for allocation of the Access to Sport funding.”


Written by
Adonis Huggins

Journalist
FOCUS Media Arts Centre


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