Understanding Poverty

Poverty impacts each of us, and each city across Canada, in a unique way. Many Canadians living in poverty face difficult decisions about things most of us take for granted. Challenge your perspective on poverty. Can you MAKE THE MONTH?

Broadcaster Jackie Torrens discovers what it's like to live on welfare for one week.

A short comic gives the simplest, most perfect explanation of privilege.

In this personal documentary, award-winning photographer and filmmaker Nance Ackerman invites us into the lives of a determined family for a profound experience of child poverty in one ...

The notion that poverty stems from a lack of will power and a poor work ethic is as old as America. Why that needs to be dispelled.

Urgent, controversial, and undeniably honest, The Skin We’re In is a wake-up call to complacent Canadians. Racism is here. It is everywhere. It is us and we are it.

This talk focuses on the 4 Blankets of Resilience and the influence one person can have in fostering resilience. This talk will focus on the 4 Blankets of Resilience and the influence one person can have in fostering resilience.

In the first series of RED BUTTON stories, homeless youth in Toronto used camera phones to film their lives. Participants were given audio/video gear and offered a workshop to learn the basics of filmmaking. The homeless youth featured also received one-on-one guidance from professional filmmakers.

In Toronto, Izabel, Bebeth, Natasha, Benoît, Grace and Jean, members of Ontario’s “working poor” talk about having to work multiple jobs to get by, describe the stress generated by financial vulnerability, and courageously explain their strategies for getting out of their difficult situation.

Filmed over a decade, Us and Them is a deeply visceral film about transformation through human connection. Four chronically homeless people reveal the heartrending realities of their lives. The severe challenges of life on the street are portrayed with an unapologetic openness, in both emotive and humorous ways. All are struggling with addiction issues rooted in their painful childhood histories.

Empathy. It’s an unavoidable word in the world of user experience design. Too often it is applied to designs in too narrow a fashion. Your empathy should come from the problem your design is solving, not measured in the level of frustration or delight experienced with your design.

Marnie Webb is the CEO of Caravan Studios, a division of TechSoup Global, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Caravan Studios' collaborative approach uses a theory of technology intervention to allow communities to respond to the issues they care about most. Caravan Studios recently launched SafeNight, a mobile service that allows domestic violence organizations to crowdsource funding for hotel rooms when shelter is urgently needed.

Theater of Life captures the remarkable story of how renowned chef Massimo Bottura, joined by 60 of the world’s top chefs, transformed food destined for the dumpster into delicious and nutritious meals for Italy’s hungriest residents—refugees, recovering addicts, former sex workers, and other disadvantaged people.

Whether you’re at a party, having dinner with your parents, at the bus stop, or listening the news, whenever there’s a discussion about poverty, you will no doubt hear things like “the situation isn’t that bad”, how “the poor are lazy” and they “just need to get a job“, or that “those on welfare are taking advantage of our world-renowned social assistance programs.”