Igniting Ottawa’s Potential for Equitable Outcomes

The pandemic has heighted our consciousness of systemic inequities and strengthened our resolve to improve community outcomes. Panelists at this session expounded on key capabilities under development that can ignite Ottawa’s potential to achieve equitable outcomes, from the application of equity in health system recovery, to collaborative inter-system data capacity development, to effective community participation in collective planning, and finally aligning funding to desired outcomes.

The session achieved a two-fold objective. First to strengthen OLIP partners’ shared understanding of the capabilities that will help Ottawa reach our collective equity goals, ranging from policy and investments; disaggregated data to make inequities visible and to guide equitable planning; and community involvement in shaping priorities for action and investments. Second, to learn from policy leaders and experts on the nature of these equity capabilities and ideas and recommendations on how we may go about building them.

Speakers and Topics:

• Corey Bernard, Director, Equity, Inclusion, Diversity and Anti-Racism at Ontario Health on Ontario Health’s Framework for Equity, Inclusion, Diversity, and Anti-Racism
• Zahra Ebrahim, Co-founder of Monumental, a non-profit organization specializing in participatory design thinking in public initiatives, on Effective Community in Collective Planning
• Umit Kiziltan, Chief Data Officer Branch at Immigration Refugee and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) on Leveraging Data for Equitable Outcomes through Sustainable Partnerships

Moderator: Faduma Yusuf, Executive Director, Britannia Woods Community House, Ottawa 

Selected Highlights

• During this panel, Corey outlined the key equitable advances made by Ontario Health including a recently launched Equity, Inclusion, Diversity, and Anti-Racism Framework focusing on addressing anti-Indigenous and anti-Black racism. The work underway is two-fold to help embed inclusion, diversity, anti-racism into our health system recovery, including a series of initiatives focused internally within Ontario Health as well as efforts across the health system. Through his insights, this presentation outlined what Ottawa can do to achieve equitable health outcomes, from the application of equity frameworks in health system recovery, an area-based approach to understand how to best target efforts, collection of disaggregated data, and improving health care access and service delivery.

• By moving away from the idea that consultation is the way forward, this session explores ways we can collectively envision processes and design programs and services with community. Our next speaker, Zahra drew on her extensive experience in participatory community planning to outline key strategies to help embed community voices and participation in shaping priorities for action and informing collective planning. There are several strategies we can draw on as a city to centralize the experiences and needs of communities to guide equitable planning.

• Effective collective planning requires the explicit goals of sharing power and working with community to inform better policy decisions and outcomes to promote transparency and accurate documentation of this process. Zahra also discuss the value of a human-centered design process to collective planning highlighting the need for a full understanding of what the issues are and the reasons for the engagement, then community and institutions can share the histories and healing that needs to happen for us to have a conversation, and an honest power mapping conversation about who holds the decision-making power throughout this engagement process. (Zahra referenced Antoinette Carroll’s work: https://www.creativereactionlab.com/our-approach)

• As a policy leader and data science expert, Umit walked us through the active steps taken by the Chief Data Officer Branch at IRCC to advance the role of disaggregated data to guide planning and decision-making, support policy program recommendations, and understand equity related challenges.

• Given the inaccessibility of data collected by institutions to many communities, Umit discussed the importance of data liberation, data partnerships to further enable communities to have an active role in policy and program development. Through his thorough discussion of the potential of disaggregated data, Umit outlined the data capabilities needed to advance equity through enabling data access in Ottawa. Drawing on his work with the LIPs, Umit presented the value of a collaborative inter-system data capacity development improving immigrant outcomes.