Building Bridges Research Project

Project status: ongoing

In Canada, some reports estimate that 5.8 million people live in poverty. One of the ways our community in Durham Region is assisting those living in poverty is through the delivery of 20 volunteer tax clinics at local agencies. However, there is a desire to reach more people and to have a deeper understanding of what financial empowerment strategies might actually work to move individuals out of low income. The project has the following main objectives:

• To discover the community-specific barriers to tax filing and the reasons for non-tax filing among people experiencing low income in the Durham Region;
• To use a co-production approach by learning together with people living on low income about their needs related to financial literacy;
• To use participatory action research principles throughout, by involving people with low income as equal partners in the co-creation of innovative solutions; and
• To provide evidence to support those co-produced strategies to be leveraged by other regions across Canada.