Sharing Neighbourhood Profiles

One year ago, United Way Halifax released our United in Poverty Action Report, a follow up to our Building Poverty Solutions Report from 2018. While doing the work for our latest report, we put in extra effort to build out neighbourhood and population profiles using census data. This is the same data we used to develop our key indicators. We committed to share the neighbourhood profiles publicly, and we are pleased to do that now. You can view them here.

These neighbourhood profiles are much more in-depth than the neighbourhood profiles developed alongside our 2018 Poverty Solutions Community Report.  The data is much more granular, giving us insights on smaller geographic areas. In many cases, it means small neighbourhoods aren’t lumped into bigger communities. This can be very helpful for neighbourhood hubs, community centres and advocacy groups. They can use this data to help back up anecdotal evidence they see by serving their clients’ every day.

Lessons Learned

Through the engagement process for this data, we learned some very important lessons. The first lesson was that since the census data was collected, things have changed very rapidly in parts of HRM. In many cases, the data is likely underreporting the market basket measure poverty rate, and the percentage of those in core housing need. It also doesn’t necessarily reflect the diversity of some neighbourhoods. This we expected and were interested to hear about what that looks like on the ground.

An example of one page of a neighbourhood profile.

After consulting with community partners, we realized we needed to design these in a way that made the data more easily digestible, with maps and graphics. Our community partners gave great feedback and highlighted which information was most important to them. We also consulted with African Nova Scotian organizations in the Preston area. Their cultural identity, neighbourhood boundaries and community issues are not well reflected in the census data for a number of reasons. As a result, when you read the Prestons/Westphal profile, you will see we’ve added a special community note that highlights some of their concerns.

Data versus experience

Another lesson we learned is that numbers don’t always reflect the true experience of residents. This is especially true in rural communities, where poverty numbers are underreported. In some cases this is because some communities are so small that data is supressed in order to avoid identifying community members.

Overall, we believe these profiles are important and can be very valuable for community organizations, elected representatives, and our own work in communities throughout HRM.

Going forward

Since we have amalgamated with six other United Ways across the Maritimes, we have received questions about whether we plan to duplicate these efforts in every community. The 2023 United in Poverty Action Report, completed before unification, covered the Halifax and East Hants Central Metropolitan areas. Therefore we are publishing neighbourhood profiles for only those related areas.

Now that we are operating in three provinces with seven separate locations, we’ll be re-evaluating how this could support the critical work underway in each community we serve. We may decide to use similar data in other communities to inform specific initiatives or projects we undertake.  It is important to note, United Way strives to be a data-driven organization in everything we do. While the baseline data and analysis of data is informative and useful, it will never replace the importance of community, agency and lived-experience consultation.

If you have any questions about the neighbourhood profiles, please reach out to our team. If you know an organization that could use this data, please share with them. And finally, I’d like to acknowledge that we’re able to make this information available thanks to the generous support of our donors. Thank you!

• Sue LaPierre, Executive Director, Nova Scotia & Affordable Housing