Part of the U.S. trillion dollar infrastructure support initiative is directed to nonprofit organizations.  Unlike the Canadian initiative that supports affordable housing and some arts and cultural capital infrastructure, the legislation in the U.S. includes such areas as:

• Education and internet access,
• Arts and humanities,
• Employment and job training,
• Housing and community development, and
• Human and social services.

It seems that in the U.S., the government understands that it can’t pull out of the recession without supporting the services that help the population survive hard times.  It understands that the new jobs that will be created will need different skills than the ones from which so many people are being laid off – and that means there needs to be a focus on employment training.  Here, the employment training is limited to the minority of the unemployed who qualify for employment insurance.

Wake up Canada.  The nonprofit sector in Canada needs your support.

The Province of Ontario has set up an interesting dilemma for itself. The Ministry of Education has launched a web-based search tool which allows the public to compare elementary and high schools along a number of criteria.These include ones you would expect, like performance on standardized test results, but they also include such indicators as the percent of low-income students and the immigrant population.

Socio-demographic data is always value-laden – and the values we attribute to the information depend largely on our own values. Some people will criticise this search tool because it allows the public to compare the educational success of schools along the variables of income and immigrant populations. Do “better” schools have fewer low-income or new immigrant students? Others will praise it because they want their children to attend schools with diverse populations. Are “better” schools the ones that are richly diverse?

Education is about more than learning facts and figures.It is also about learning to live in society – and society today is diverse. It is also about learning that the value of a person is not determined by her/his background or her/his family’s income.

I have no doubt that some groups will loudly criticise the Province for this initiative, but providing information is one thing, and what the public does with it is another. I use socio-demographic data constantly in my work. I’m in favour of making as much information as possible available to as many people as possible at no cost to the user. If a debate does arise over this initiative, that’s not a bad thing either. It’s much better to debate policy and practice than to not have that debate at all.

“Last month, the Nova Scotia Culture Action Network (NSCAN) released its report Building the Creative Economy in Nova Scotia. It estimates that the cultural sector in Canada now employs as many people as the agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining, oil, gas, and utilities sectors combined. In Nova Scotia, the culture sector contributes an estimated $1.2 billion to the provincial GDP and employs some 28,000 people.”

“Homeless people living within 2010 Olympic security zones will be removed by police during the Games in Vancouver.

But deputy police chief Steve Sweeney said Thursday the homeless will be offered space in shelters or given help to go wherever they want, and only arrested if they refuse to move. Sweeney’s comments came at a packed community forum on Olympic security held in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.”

“When it comes to their importance, there’s so much more to small cultural magazines than their circulation.”