Making Ends Meet is a peer-led, multi-year participatory action research project that aimed to gather data about the experiences of Vancouver parents who are living in poverty while working and raising children.

First Call Child and Youth Advocacy Society has been studying child and family poverty in British Columbia for over twenty-five years. Each year, we publish the BC Child Poverty Report Card using tax-filer data provided by Statistics Canada. We know from this data that the majority of poor children in BC live in families with parents who work in the paid labour force.

While the data tells us something about who is living in poverty, we wanted to hear directly from parents about the economic, health, and social effects associated with trying making ends meet in low wage and/or precarious employment.

This project is a partnership with Dr. Kendra Strauss, Director of the SFU Labour Studies Program and the SFU Morgan Centre for Labour Research. Bonnie Koehn is the research coordinator and report author.

Report Summary

Read the two page report summary here.

Multi-Language Fact Sheets

The Making Ends Meet research report fact sheet is available in seven languages: English, Filipino, French, Persian, Punjabi, Simplified Chinese and Spanish.

Click here for the English Fact Sheet (PDF)

Click here for the Filipino Fact Sheet (PDF)

Click here for the French Fact Sheet (PDF)

Click here for the Persian Fact Sheet (PDF)

Click here for the Punjabi Fact Sheet (PDF)

Click here for the Simplified Chinese Fact Sheet (PDF)

Click here for the Spanish Fact Sheet (PDF)

Media

Read the media release here.

About Participatory Action Research

Participatory Action Research (PAR) is an approach to research – a set of principles and practices for designing, conducting, analyzing and acting on research.

The Making Ends Meet PAR is a way of learning and doing work in community, that

• is community driven and puts the perspective of those experiencing working poverty at the centre of the research;
• seeks understanding about communities and issues identified by participants.
• recognizes participants as “experts” on their experiences; and
• uses findings to take action on issues identified as important to participants.
  allows participants to take action within their communities and beyond their communities.

This project would not be possible without financial support from the Vancouver Foundation.

Funder