Smartsaver Community

Pathways to Education Canada is a national non-profit organization that works with community partners across the country to help youth to graduate from high school and achieve their full potential.  In order to better understand communities with higher-than-average rates of youth leaving school without a diploma, Pathways created a Community Mapping Tool – an interactive resource that presents community-level information on a range of indicators linked to youth well-being and educational success.  Users can get socioeconomic profiles of communities across the country.

Building on this success, SmartSAVER and Pathways to Education Canada partnered to enhance the Community Mapping Tool by adding data on the 2015 take-up rate of the Canada Learning Bond (CLB). The CLB provides eligible, lower-income children with up to $2,000 into an RESP. With this added perspective, organizations on the ground operating in these neighbourhoods will be even better equipped with information to connect people in their communities with available supports.

The collaboration between Pathways to Education Canada and SmartSAVER was inspired by the idea of collective impact – the philosophy that organizations should build and improve tools and strategies together to solve social problems. Access to accurate, reliable data is crucial to putting this idea into action.  Pathways to Education Canada believes that poverty and access to post secondary education are intimately related issues – solving one requires the ability to understand and solve the other.  With the most reliable, up-to-date information, our ability to contribute to making sure every student in Canada has the opportunity to realize their potential is improved.  SmartSAVER Executive Director, May Wong summed up this idea succinctly, “Families in need depend on community service providers to connect them to the help that’s available. The SmartSAVER program assists service providers by ensuring they have the information and tools they need to help families to access the Canada Learning Bond.” Pathways’ Community Mapping Tool has also been made available through SmartSAVER’s Community site.

Pathways to Education Canada encourages all interested organizations to share the CLB data with their partners as well as reach out to us. We invite you to work with us in improving this already powerful tool.

Steve Richter, MA / Researcher/Chercheur
Pathways to Education Canada/Passeport Pour Ma Réussite Canada

Released today in the Institute for Research on Public Policy’s Policy Options: This new article by Andrew Parkin draws on a more extensive research paper commissioned by the Omega Foundation.

A million Canadian kids missing out on free education money.

Policy Options. October 25, 2016.

Policies designed to get kids into post-secondary education need to focus on early intervention, including early access to savings.

Since the 2015 election, the Liberal government has made two major adjustments to federal programs targeted at children and youth.  First, the uniform payment to every family with children was replaced by the new Canada Child Benefit, a benefit worth more to lower income families and withheld from the wealthy. In a similar vein, the government announced it would phase out some of the existing tax credits for post-secondary education (PSE), which were available to all families with taxable income, so it could use the savings to increase the value of grants for students from low-income families.

Still, the work to improve support to children from low-income families is not done – 1 million low-income children each year are still missing out on the Canada Learning Bond.

Read complete article.

By Andrew Parkin. Dr. Parkin is an independent public policy analyst and consultant specializing in education. He was associate executive director of the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation and director general of the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada.

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