The entire community benefits when its members are housed, fed, clothed, can leave their loved ones in safe and stimulating environments and travel to where they need to go. When the level of poverty in a community declines so does the costs to health care, social services and the criminal justice system. As direct beneficiaries, the economic, education and training and health sectors as well as all levels of government and the community at large have a role to play in this strategy. Believing that reducing poverty is possible, affording it the same attention and importance as any other issue that affects the whole community and monitoring success are key steps in moving this strategy forward.

Giving this poverty reduction strategy the same priority and attention as economic and environmental strategies will allow for a sustained focus on employment and training, affordable housing, food security and transportation. By creating a human services planning and policy development body the CGS Council will be investing in the type of social infrastructure that will allow this strategy and any other social strategy, committees, solution teams, roundtables and/or advisory panels to be a part of a process that could inform the direction of social development in the CGS. It could also become a platform for sustained collaboration between the private, public and voluntary sectors resulting in the type of innovative and creative ideas essential for change. Increasing collaboration between the education and training sectors and access to the labour market with specific outcomes linked to poverty reduction encouraging the health and child care sectors to adopt the community poverty reduction strategy are key to our success.

Implementation of the local poverty reduction strategy needs to be aligned with provincial and national efforts, most notably National Campaign 2000, giving the community every opportunity to advocate both formally and informally for structural change. Finally, opportunities to engage the public in poverty reduction at the local level would be well served by the City of Greater Sudbury adopting a Civic Engagement Framework that incorporates a Public Participation Policy. This would ensure citizens are meaningfully engaged in these and other pressing concerns throughout their implementation, evaluation and communication to the community.