Richard Warnica, Edmonton Journal
November 25, 2009

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When she left her partner, Gyslaine Clarke needed help, and not just for herself.

Clarke is 35 years old and has six children ranging in age from 11 months to 16 years old.

Alone, Clarke couldn't work and care for her kids. Without work, she couldn't pay for their needs.

She reached out, first to the province, to welfare and social assistance, then to the private sector, to the John Howard Society and the Bissell Centre.

Clarke remains functionally poor --what money she has covers the basics--but she also has a plan.

Clarke hopes the situation she is in is "temporary."

If she can struggle through until her children are in school, Clarke will go back to school herself. She will, she hopes, get a good job, with decent pay, one that will eventually allow her to support herself and her children without help.

In the interim, though, Clarke will lean on multiple supports. At times, she'll likely need food and child care and maybe help with housing.

To get them, she'll turn not to a single body but to any of the dozens of organizations that help the poor in this province, organizations that exist on a patchwork of private donations and public funds, and who often don't know from year to year how much they'll have or who they'll be able to help.

Unlike other provinces, Alberta does not have a comprehensive strategy to fight poverty. The result, some say, is a system that is high on good intention but often low on return.

With priorities that can shift from years to year and no overarching goal to strive toward, some who work with the poor feel that for every Gyslaine Clarke they're helping out of poverty, another two or three are falling into it.

"They feel like they're pulling people out of the river all the time and more and more people are coming down the river all the time, and nobody's going upstream and saying, 'Why are people falling the river?' " said Bill Moore-Kilgannon, executive director of Public Interest Alberta.

Moore-Kilgannon's group, along with the Edmonton Social Planning Council and other organizations, hope to change that.

On Tuesday, they released a report that called on the province to adopt an integrated plan that would coordinate and measure anti-poverty work across Alberta.

"What other provinces have shown is that if you put money in one area but don't consider other areas, you can't achieve your original goals," Moore-Kilgannon said. "By taking a comprehensive approach we're looking at how all of these things fit together."

Over the past year, the groups travelled the province, studying the systems that are in place now. Together they consulted almost 400 experts and front-line workers at seven forums from Fort McMurray to Medicine Hat.

What they repeatedly heard that good work is being done, but that it isn't enough, said Jim Gurnett, the former executive director of the Edmonton Mennonite Centre for Newcomers and a member of the project's steering committee.

Gurnett compiled the forum results into the report released on Tuesday. He said the overwhelming consensus was the need for measurable short-term goals.

"We don't want this to become some long-term vague plan," he said.

Governments are elected for four to five years, he said, so their work should be judged on similar time-lines.

The report doesn't call for any radical solutions. More support for the working poor and a focus on the causes as well as the symptoms of poverty are two major themes.

"We don't have to reinvent the wheel here," Moore Kilgannon said. "We know certain things work, we know certain things work better than others."

For Gyslaine Clarke, one of the things she needs most is time. And for one day every week she gets that from the Bissell Centre.

On that day, the centre's child-care workers take in her three youngest kids, giving her a precious eight hours on her own.

"As much as I love them, I need that day," Clarke said. "I need that break to know I'm still an individual, I'm still a person."

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