Connecting the dots: Neighbourhood House and institutional accessibility

Abstract

Accessibility to public resources has been a major challenge to many service users. The fragmentation among different organizational stakeholders in social service generates a ‘wicked problem’ that creates an institutional barrier for service users in the community to navigate the maze of service networks. However, this institutional barrier has not been fully discussed and articulated in the social service literature. Based on the findings of a study on Neighbourhood House in Metro Vancouver, Canada, we argue that as a place-based community service organization it has successfully generated an institutional accessibility for service providers and service users to reach each other.

Keywords

Accessibility institutional accessibility Neighbourhood House service network settlement house wicked problem

Introduction

Neighbourhood House is a place-based community service organization (CSO) which provides services to meet people’s needs. Different from many other CSOs, Neighbourhood House has a place-based focus and a strong mandate to serve and advocate for the well-being of residents living within a close geographic area. Embedded structurally in the web of social services which can be intricate and difficult for people to navigate, neighbourhood houses (NHs) connect local residents to many services within and outside the neighbourhood. Such connection can be conceptualized as a form of institutional accessibility that may help minimize the impact of ‘wicked problem’, that is, the fragmentation and silo of stakeholders, on public policy. In this article, we report the findings of a study of NHs in a city in Canada which indicate that, as a place-based CSO, Neighbourhood House enhances its service users’ accessibility not only to their own services but also institutionally to the complex service networks.

Accessibility in social service: A perennial challenge

The existence of social services as a public resource supports people who are in need to resolve some personal and social challenges. Providing access to resources not only makes a significant difference by improving the life chances and living conditions of people, it is also a necessary condition to achieve social inclusion and social justice (Bristow et al., 2009). An individual’s ability to access services they need – their ability to enter, navigate, secure and exit from resources – has been a major obstacle for people with personal and social challenges (Hernandez et al., 2009). This obstacle is amplified by how a public resource is organized and delivered geographically and institutionally (Farrington, 2007).

In the literature, accessibility is a very versatile concept. It has always been used interchangeably with other concepts such as affordability and availability. In a nutshell, we define accessibility as the ease with which people can obtain and use a public service that can meet their needs. Service accessibility is impacted by many factors, including their proximity, affordability and acceptability. Urban planning scholars have pointed out that the spatial distribution of public resources is a common barrier for people, particularly those who have mobility challenges and those who rely on public transportation, to access services (e.g. Apparicio and Séguin, 2006; Farrington, 2007). Proximity is an enabling condition that facilitates access to service, particularly for the old, the sick, the poor, and single parents with young children. However, governments tend to distribute public resources equally across different districts based on the size of population. Following this equality principle is a one-size-fits-all approach that often ignores the unique needs of local residents. For the most deprived neighbourhoods where social needs are much higher, the equality principle towards the geographic distribution of services may unjustly further deprive a community of the resources that are needed, but only available to its residents in less accessible locations (Apparicio and Séguin, 2006). The unavailability of service in the neighbourhood has forced the most deprived groups of people, who tend to rely on public transportation, to access services away from home. They have to bear the extra financial cost and time.

As reflected in the Canadian Community Health Survey, service accessibility is also affected by affordability and acceptability (Elliott and Hunsley, 2015). Affordability is not merely about the financial cost of accessing service; it also entails the cost of temporary support for caring for their young child or sick family member and the opportunity cost of losing work hours. For instance, for many low-income immigrants who need to work long hours to support their family, it is too costly for them to spend their work hours upgrading their English language. Availability of service is affected by how the service is delivered. Regular 9-to-5 office hours can be an access barrier to low-income service users who work long hours with a rigid schedule. Regarding ethno-racial minorities, particularly new immigrants, the need for language and cultural sensitivity poses barriers for them to access services (e.g. Hernandez et al., 2009; Hurley et al., 2013). For other socially minority service users, such as LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer or questioning) youth, societal discrimination and stigmatization and service providers’ lack of awareness and knowledge of their needs can be a deterrent to accessing services (Acevedo-Polakovich et al., 2011).

The accessibility of services can also be limited by the users’ awareness and knowledge of its existence. Despite criticism of inadequacy, there are undeniably numerous CSOs providing a myriad of social services for different groups of people. The problem is that these services are not delivered in a coordinated manner. In a study of how African immigrant youth accessed services, it was found that while the service providers agreed that there were many services available to young people, the youth and parent participants found it hard to find and to identify a suitable programme (Francis and Yan, 2016). Indeed, the lack of coordination issue is beyond the control of individual organizations. Instead, it is a wicked problem in public policy.

The wicked problems

Accessing formal services can be daunting and frustrating, particularly to the marginalized groups of people who lack time, mobility, knowledge and skills to navigate through the maze-like public service system. Resource allocation and programme delivery through this system involve multiple layers of stakeholders. But often these hierarchically positioned stakeholders operate in a silo both vertically and horizontally. This generates what public policy scholars call the ‘wicked problems’, which is a concept originated from the planning discipline and articulated by Rittel and Webber (1973). According to Rittel and Webber (1973), a wicked problem is hard, or even impossible, to delineate, define and resolve. Wicked problems are social situations or social needs, such as poverty and social exclusion, that are beyond the capacity of any one organization, including government, to understand what the causes and solutions are (Ferlie et al., 2011: 308). As Roberts (2000) suggests, wicked problems tend to ‘engender a high level of conflicts among the stakeholders’ who cannot even agree ‘on the problem or its solution’ (p 1). Some people (e.g. Bradford, 2005) argue that wicked problems are the consequences of institutional disconnection and the silos between different layers of public service organizations which are hierarchically immutable. They generate institutional barriers for people to access the public resources that they need in order to resolve their predicaments.

In many countries, social services are largely provided by CSOs and funded by the government. Many CSOs are set up for a restricted mandate that limits its scope of services to a specific target group, for example children, family, seniors, immigrants and people with a particular illness or disability, just to name a few. Often a family may have to seek services from many CSOs in order to meet the different needs of its members. How to coordinate among different services to provide better support for people to meet their comprehensive needs is important. The unilateral top-down nature of government funding programmes typically focuses only on imminent problems related to their specific mandate. This funding regime generates competition among service providers rather than valuing or encouraging concerted efforts to address factors that led to the existence of wicked problems in the first place. Service provision in the neoliberal era has increased these challenges. The constantly changing and fragmented social service landscape is already hard for service providers, not to mention service users, to navigate. The shrinking of public resources and the rise of a new public management mentality tend to destabilize the availability and continuity of social services even more (Yan et al., 2017).

To minimize wicked problems, a place-based framework for public policy has been advocated and experimented on in many parts of the world (e.g. Börzel and Heard-Lauréote, 2009; Bradford, 2005; Ferrie, 2008; Humphries and Gregory, 2010; Ladd, 1994). All these initiatives point to the importance of networks between organizations in minimizing wicked problems in public policy. The place-based public policy emphasizes the importance of networks as connections and ‘interactions of many separate but interdependent organizations which co-ordinate their actions through interdependencies of resources and interests’ (Börzel and Heard-Lauréote, 2009: 136). As Roberts (2000) contends, through meeting, interacting and informing about one another’s actions among stakeholders, the network can evolve into a complex adaptive system that may minimize the wicked problems. This echoes the very essence of Neighbourhood House’s place-based tradition in connecting public resources to residents’ needs.

Settlement house as a mechanism of connection

Dating back to the late 19th century, settlement houses, or today’s NHs, were established as the prototype of place-based initiative that serves the function of organizational mechanism that connects people (Ferris and Hopkins, 2015). As Rev. Samuel Barnett, the founder of Toynbee Hall, the first settlement house, envisioned, settlement houses are ‘a mechanism of connection’ (Meagham, 1987). By bringing in the wealthy students from the universities as settlers residing in the deprived community, Toynbee Hall connected people from different social classes. The success of the Toynbee Hall made settlement houses a social movement in the Progressive Era, spreading all over the world (International Federation of Settlements and Neighborhood Centers, n.d.). In North America, under the leadership of many pioneers such as Jane Addams, settlement houses became a major place-based CSO that connected and served local residents of immigrant-concentrated poor neighbourhoods (Fisher, 2005; Yan and Lauer, 2008).

Riding the ebb and flow of the Settlement House Movement, at least in North America, today’s settlement houses are mostly named as NHs or centres (Landers, 1998, cited in Koerin, 2003: 55). The emphasis on neighbourhood better reflects the place-based tradition of settlement house. As reflected in the studies of NHs in North America (Hirota et al., 1997; Koerin, 2003; Yan et al., 2016; Yan and Sin, 2010), situated in an urban neighbourhood within walking distance to most residents, most NHs are largely governed by local people. They are operated by a small team of paid staff in collaboration with a large number of volunteers who are mostly local residents. Together, they offer multiple services with low costs to cater to the needs of different groups of residents.

Like many other CSOs, they have also experienced a disproportional reliance on government funding, which has caused serious concern about their autonomy to maintain the social reform tradition of settlement houses (Fabricant and Fisher, 2002). Nonetheless, studies have also found that NHs have maintained a strong role in community building in many local communities (Hirota el al. 1997; Yan et al., 2009, 2016), particularly by connecting local residents (Yan and Lauer, 2008). As a place-based CSO, Neighbourhood House is part of a web of social services that tend to be institutionally isolated and fragmented. So far, little is known about how NHs work with other social service organizations within this web to meet the needs of local residents. As a stakeholder of public policy embedded in local community, what roles, if any, have NHs played to minimize the impacts of wicked problems in public policy? With these questions in mind, we conducted an exploratory study in Metro Vancouver (hereafter Vancouver) of British Columbia, Canada, where 15 NHs operate, the history of which can be dated back to 1938 (Association of Neighbourhood Houses of British Columbia, n.d.). Vancouver, which covers 21 municipalities, is a highly diverse metropolitan area in Canada. Almost all these NHs are located in ethnically diverse community.

Methodology

This article is based on data collected as part of a 4-year interdisciplinary mixed methods study of all NHs in Vancouver. Other than being an academic researcher, both authors have also actively engaged, as consultant or board member, in the NH movement in Vancouver. This experience provided us an emic perspective to the findings. The findings presented in this article were generated mainly from four qualitative data collection activities. Table 1 reports the data collection activities, and the nature and number of participants of each activity.

Table 1.

Data collection and samples.

Activity	No. of participants	Nature of participants
Community resource mapping focus groups	15 NHs, 72 people (15 groups and 4–6 people per group)	Board member, senior management, frontline staff and volunteers
Community network mapping interviews	15 NHs, 61 people (15 groups and 4–6 people per group)	Board member, senior management, frontline staff and volunteers
Community partners focus groups	14 NHs, 53 people, 8 (groups, 4–7 people per group)	Staff from other organizations who have worked with NHs extensively
Service users focus groups	14 NHs, 54 people (8 groups, 4–7 people per group)	Service users of NHs who have actively taken part in NH activities
Service users survey	15 NHs, 675 respondents	Service users of NHs

NH: neighbourhood house.

Participants of all these four activities were recruited from the participating NHs using a purposeful sampling strategy. Direct and extensive experience in NHs was the major criterion for all participants. In the community resource mapping, focus group and community network mapping interviews, we deliberately recruited participants from board members, senior management, frontline staff and experienced volunteers to ensure a diverse range of perspectives and experiences. Our analysis was informed by both thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006) and the constant comparison strategy of grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss, 1967).

We first conducted thematic analysis to identify the themes from different data of each data collection activity. Then we compared themes across these different sets of data and looked for their similarities and differences. Informed by grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss, 1967), we particularly looked for a conceptual framework that may help us explain how NHs help tackle the ‘wicked problems’. The research team compared the emerging themes (in this case, institutional proximity, psychological proximity and network proximity) and identified a key variable to conceptually (in this case, institutional accessibility) connect these themes, which can provide answers to the research question. A computer-assisted qualitative analysis software, NVivo^©, was used to assist the analysis. For this article, we also use survey data collected in February and March 2014 from all 15 NHs in the area. Our target population was all NH users in Vancouver (N = 675). No sampling frame exists for this population, nor could one be reasonably constructed. Instead, we recruited respondents from the 15 different NHs operating in Vancouver at randomly selected times and days in order to reach our target population. Questionnaires were completed by respondents at the time of their selection, and respondents could choose among six languages to complete the questionnaire: Chinese, English, Farsi, Punjabi, Spanish and Vietnamese. Ethical approval was received from the university where the authors are affiliated.

Findings

Findings of this study indicate that as a place-based CSO, Neighbourhood House has enhanced the institutional accessibility for local residents to access public resources embedded in the fragmented and uncoordinated web of service providers inside and outside the community. The institutional accessibility facilitated by NHs is made possible by their geographic proximity to local residents which allows them to have the institutional proximity, a capacity to respond to the collective needs of the community that other non-place-based CSOs lack. While meeting the local needs by providing multiple types of services, NHs generate a sense of psychological proximity that fosters a sense of ownership among local residents. To overcome its resource limitation, NHs are connected in a multifaceted manner with many other stakeholders of social services, including government organizations, other CSOs and local businesses. As trustworthy and credible members of many service networks, NHs have effectively taken advantage of their network proximity, a capacity to be an access point for local residents to secure services and resources from other social service providers while bridging these providers with local residents. As such, in taking advantage of these different forms of proximities, NHs have improved the institutional accessibility of the maze-like web of social services that most people find hard to navigate.

Institutional proximity: Accessible to local residents

NHs are geographically close to where the needs are. Most of the 15 NHs serve an area of three to four census tracts. According to Statistics Canada, each census tract has a population between 2500 and 8000 (Statistics Canada, 2015). Meanwhile, the City of Vancouver, where 11 of the 15 NHs are located, has the highest density in Canada. In 2016, the population density was 5493 inhabitants per square kilometre (Statistics Canada, 2017). Thus, to most local residents where there is an NH, they can access the NH within walking distance. This geographic proximity has allowed NHs to tap easily into local knowledge. A community partner who worked with Kiwassa NH recalled,

[we] know where to come when we need specific information about the neighbourhood. As much as we like to say we base decisions on evidence, a lot of the evidence just comes from the knowledge that’s present in these organizations because they are the neighbourhood, they know the neighbourhood from a place-based perspective; they’re perfectly situated to have that knowledge.

The institutional proximity allows NHs to see and respond faster to the emerging needs of the community than other non-place-based CSOs. As a place-based organization that has a holistic mandate of serving all members of the community, they can also respond flexibly to the collective needs, in particular the emerging ones. For example, a community partner credited Alexandra NH for setting up a youth café programme for at-risk youth who hang out in local coffee shops and fast food restaurants in downtown South Surrey.

As an institutional asset, NHs provide a variety of services to local residents. They design and offer programmes to different groups of residents responsibly according to the local needs. As shown in Table 2, NHs provide a variety of services for different groups of residents. Most services are not remedial in nature and are frequently used by the respondents.

Table 2.

Categories of activities accessed by respondents.

	Used in last 12 months (%)
Festival, celebration or other special events	58
Recreational activities	55
Arts and cultural programmes	45
Food programmes (community kitchen or breakfast club)	43
Health education	34
English language and literacy programmes	31
Leadership and volunteer opportunities	31
Drop-in services, such as computer use	30
Settlement assistance (information, referrals, counselling)	28
Self-help and other support groups	28
Early childhood (0–6 years) programme for children	27
Committee and interest group	26
Parenting education and support	25
Dialogue, community consultation and other civic engagement	23
Financial and legal services	18
Interpretation and translation services	16
Employment counselling/training	15
Family services including family counselling	15
After-school programme for children (6–18 years)	11
Youth mentorship programmes	10

Source: Service User Survey (N = 675).

NHs’ responsiveness to collective needs also earns them a word-of-mouth reputation as a place in the community where people can always go and ask for help. A service user of Burnaby NH described how she referred people to NH:

if somebody is with a child looking for day-care I would say, ‘go to the NH, go to the drop-in program so your child starts to speak English and feel more comfortable’. If somebody needs to do their tax return, I would also tell them to go to the NH.

For many participants, NHs are a community asset that they are very eager to share with other local residents.

Psychological proximity: NHs as accessible welcoming spaces

Psychological proximity is a sense of ownership in that many service users felt strongly that NH is their home, a place that they care deeply and involve actively. Due to a restricted mandate, many CSOs only open doors to a specific group of users, whereas NHs are known as a social hub in the community where everyone in the community is welcome. As a community partner of Downtown Eastside NH (DTESNH) observed,

[DTESNH]’s open to everybody; that is one of the wonderful things about an NH. You’ve got folks coming from all different places, different levels of income, different ages, ethnicities, backgrounds.

For many service users and community partners, NHs are a trustworthy place where people can feel understood and accepted by the staff, who share similar lived experiences with them. As a service user of Burnaby NH shared,

[NH]’s a trusting place, so you can come here and feel safe. It’s like home. It’s a warm feeling when you walk in the door. . . . It’s just very comforting to know that you can come somewhere and your kids can hang out together and meet new people in the NH. (Authors’ emphasis)

Many service users want to be involved because they feel they are part of the NH. Their involvement is also a reflection of the success of NHs as a place-based accessible social asset in the community. To maintain and to grow, a social asset must yield results that can satisfy the stakeholders. As indicated in Table 3, among the 675 respondents to the NH service user survey, a great majority are pleased with NHs’ performance. Echoing what we have discussed so far, most respondents agreed that NHs are a safe place with trustworthy leaders (board members, staff and volunteers) who can motivate and inspire them. In short, to many stakeholders, NHs are a place that is psychologically close, that is, trustworthy and safe, to them. Many service users also felt strongly that NHs are empowering, having positive effects on solving community problems, raising resources and, more importantly, improving their access to services.

Table 3.

Survey respondents’ perspectives of neighbourhood houses’ functions.

	Strongly disagree (%)	Somewhat disagree (%)	Somewhat agree (%)	Strongly agree (%)
1. The neighbourhood house has had a part in solving at least one problem in this community.	2.84	7.19	44.31	45.65
2. Leadership in the neighbourhood house has been able to motivate and inspire.	2.51	4.18	44.98	48.33
3. In general, people at neighbourhood house can be trusted.	1.51	4.01	32.27	62.21
4. In general, I feel safe at neighbourhood house.	1.00	3.51	22.74	72.74
5. The neighbourhood house has been able to successfully raise resources to run programmes.	4.01	5.85	40.30	49.83
6. As a result of the neighbourhood house’s efforts, the community has access to important information and resources.	1.67	3.34	37.46	57.53

Source: Service User Survey (N = 675).

Network proximity: A centre point connecting multiple networks

However, the success of NHs is always hampered by the limited resources they have had. Its limited resources have hampered NHs to meet the large unmet needs in the community. Shortage of funding limits what NHs can do. A service user of Alexandra NH noted,

[m]y impression over a number of years is that funding for ANH is so important and I think they look for anything that is going to generate revenue, such as day-care, renting out the cottages or facility here to groups. That’s their primary focus and I think other things like doing the community stuff has become secondary because the funding to keep it running is the main thing.

Despite this limitation, as indicated in Table 3, many service users agreed that NHs have done well to raise resources to run their programmes. In view of the shortage of public funding, NHs have actively sought extra resources from other sources to meet the myriad needs in the community. Most of these extra resources are secured through the vast networks that NHs have strategically nurtured throughout the years, the use of which has improved local residents’ access to the hard-to-reach public resources.

Networking is a part of the Settlement House Movement tradition that has passed on to NHs. Indeed, due to their own resource limitation in meeting the myriad needs in the community, NHs have actively connected with a multifaceted group of institutional partners. With their geographic and institutional proximities, they have also assumed the role of coordination among their institutional partners at the local level, which helps break down the siloing and fragmentation of the formal service system and achieve community involvement, take collective action, raise funds, and diffuse and perpetuate information. These networks have therefore been instrumental in tackling wicked problems that hamper local residents from accessing public resources.

In the network mapping study, we invited a total of 61 executive directors, board members, mid-level managers, frontline staff and volunteers from 13 NHs (on average 4–6 per NH) to map out the community partners that they linked to their own NH. Together, they reported 955 links, with an average of 16 (SD = 4) links per person. Some of these links (N = 197) were listed by more than one participant of the same NH. Close to half (N = 335, 44.2%) of the links were reciprocal. They shared projects with 224 (29.6%) of these links. Many (N = 233) of the links were classified as long-term by the participants. Table 4 shows the classifications of the 758 links.

Table 4.

Network links of NHs.

Classification	No. of link	%
Government	136	18
CSOs	214	28
NGOs – nonservice	42	6
Business	61	8
Churches	19	3
Coalition/alliance	160	21
Education	59	8
Individuals	51	7
Others	16	2
Total	758	101

Source: Community Network Mapping Interview (N = 61).

NH: neighbourhood house; CSO: community service organization; NGO: non-governmental organization.

The networks of NHs are beneficial in a bilateral way. On the one hand, through these partners, NHs actively mobilize other public resources from inside and outside the community to serve the local community. On the other hand, effective use of functional networks can help integrate and coordinate the unevenly and inequitably distributed public resources and improve the accessibility of people who need these resources.

Multi-level and multidirectional connections

The web of networks, in which NHs are situated, is multi-level and multidirectional. These multi-level and multidirectional networks are built by the concerted efforts of board members, senior staff, frontline staff, volunteers and service users who are positioned in different social positions within a larger social space. As a manager from Frog Hollow NH pointed out, each network is connected to many other networks through the different connections brought by its members. In their unique position, they have their own stock of social relationships in which they become involved and social capital that they can access and mobilize. The structural differentiation in position and work creates a natural division of labour within the NHs. While frontline staff are active in building networks with local service organizations, leaders of non-profit organizations, such as board members and executives, are in a position to invest in funding organizations for funding purposes.

As Table 4 indicates, CSOs and government units (also including public libraries, health authorities, community centres and members of parliament) are two important groups of partners, particularly in terms of funding and public resources. In addition, NHs have also proactively tried to solicit resources from the business sector. For instance, many NHs received food donations from local bakeries, grocery stores and supermarkets. Other than soliciting tangible items, many also reported that they have actively engaged with the local Business Improvement Association (BIA) in community programmes. For instance, Collingwood NH partnered and engaged with the local BIA to study sex workers in the area. Similarly, Mount Pleasant NH also reported that they tried to engage the BIA with local community development projects:

We collaborate, we might participate in their festivals. They [BIA] support us with letters when we do a joint festival in June with the community. They have been extremely active with our community development project . . . to get residents engaged in revitalizing Broadway East and in trying to get people connected with the implementation of the community plan.

Institutional accessibility in action

As a place-based CSO, Neighbourhood House takes advantage of geographic proximity to respond promptly to the local needs by providing multiple services. The institutional proximity has won them the trust of local residents, who feel a strong ownership of and become involved actively in NHs. Through connecting to multiple networks of stakeholders inside and outside the community, NHs have become the central access points where residents, service providers, local business, governments and funders meet and through which resources and local needs are matched.

Bridging services with local needs

Apparently, seeking extra resources is an ongoing effort of NHs. With proper connections, there are abundant resources in the community. To meet the diverse and large amount of collective and individual needs in the community, NHs have strategically developed and made use of their networks to connect resources inside and outside the community to the local residents. As a service user of Little Mountain NH said,

[t]he NHs connect with other centres, like community centres, and businesses, like Vancity [local credit union]. And through these connections we get a huge network of support and pretty much being able to access any program you can imagine because they are all networked together through the NHs. And every section of the net gives you access to other parts of the net, so it’s a network.

Embedded in multiple networks, NHs are a local hub that connects with numerous public and private resources inside and outside the community. Using their networks, NHs improve the access of local residents to the inequitably and unevenly distributed public resources provided by other stakeholders. Remember the youth café that Alexandra NH initiated. As a community partner said,

. . . thinking what do we need to do to have a place where kids can come and just hang out. So this youth cafe was developed and it would encompass resources – RCMP [police], Alexandra House, all different support services, employment, crisis assistance – you know kids don’t want to be told ‘come next Tuesday’, they want a counsellor now, they live in the here and now, so that would be a place where they could go and at least talk to someone and get support that way.

NHs bring resources from different partners together and provide one-stop access points integrating different services and resources to serve the local needs.

Meanwhile, the connection function of NHs also benefits other social service organizations that may not have the geographic and institutional proximities to their service users in the local community. Through the connection with NHs, they can detect the unmet needs in the community and effectively deliver their services to the targeted population whom they may find difficult to reach. In this way, they reduce the distance between those who need services and the service providers. As a community partner of Burnaby NH echoed,

[w]hen we need something or there’s a problem or an issue that somebody brings to the table, BNH with their connections will tell us, ‘oh you should be going here’. It’s that connecting, the network and that’s the whole point . . . Our programs go through BNH because they are so well connected.

As a hub of the network, NHs not only bridge different stakeholders to the local residents’ needs, they also bring stakeholders together.

Network for advocacy

Other than tapping and connecting resources from the networks to serve the local needs, NHs have also actively engaged in the network of advocacy. All NHs reported that they have actively participated in many coalitions and alliances, members of which share some specific interest and mandate, particularly in advocating for the well-being of local residents. A staff member of Cedar Cottage NH explained why the NH joined the Cedar Cottage Area Service Network:

We can learn from each other about neighbourhood-based services and how they’re connected. Get to know people, faces, get to know the different work that people do, and get a sense of how we can collaborate.

NHs use these networks to bring like-minded organizations together to advocate for their service users. As praised by a community partner of Kiwassa and Frog Hollow NHs,

[w]hat the neighbourhood houses have done for us is sort of allow us to network into the community; and brought us into projects that we wouldn’t necessarily have been involved in; and allow us to get to know more about who is this community and who lives in this community; and how we as an organization through the Business Improvement Association (BIA) and through the businesses can be of assistance or help or advocate partner at City Hall when we need to advocate for certain things. When we are trying to advocate for certain things, they come and support us.

Indeed, as part of the efforts of community development, members of NHs have actively taken part in various coalitions and alliances (e.g. Networks of Inner City School, Literacy Table) for service coordination and advocacy work. For instance, the North Shore NH has been a long-time member of the North Shore Homeless Task Force:

It’s been around for about 12 years. Started out because the community saw the issue of homelessness becoming more serious on the North Shore and how was the community going to address that. So they created a steering committee and North Shore NH was one of the original members because we saw a lot of homelessness in this specific area.

Trustworthy local partners

However, people come and go, particularly in NHs that tend to have a high turnover of staff due to the short-term programme-based funding. It is therefore unreliable for NHs to depend solely on their individual members to create and maintain their networks. As one community partner of Burnaby NH worried,

[h]ow do I make sure that when I leave, the relationships don’t come to an end? It’s a huge challenge, especially in organizations that are very lean, like the NH, there’s not a lot of people at senior level . . .even front-line workers build relationships in communities and when they go, what happens to those relationships?

Since many networks are connected to different individuals working and volunteering at NHs, there is always a risk of losing this connection when these individuals leave. Thus, past success, reputation and commitment of NHs are also crucial elements for them to successfully nurture and maintain functional and stable relationships with other organizations in their networks. A community partner who worked with both Kiwassa and Frog Hollow NHs has explained why organizational partners are keen on working with NHs:

Someone like Kiwassa or Frog Hollow or you know, a lot of places that lead the work credible, you know, their credibility, so when we invite them to something, there is trust that’s already there and we can access and without that it takes way longer to be able to try to help people, right? . . . They build the credibility for the other partners. (Authors’ emphasis)

Trustworthiness and credibility of NHs, not simply individuals’ involvement, have made them reliable allies to community partners as a form of organizational social capital. Trust and credibility of NHs constitute an accumulated asset, and take time and many people’s efforts to foster, earn, maintain and grow.

Discussion and conclusion

The findings of this study indicate that NHs in Vancouver have been recognized by local residents as valuable local institutional assets serving their needs due to their physical proximity, availability and affordability which, as shown in the literature, are three main criteria to determine service accessibility. More importantly, these findings also indicate that NHs are also appreciated by local residents for their efforts in raising and generating access to important information and resources for the community. They have strategically and institutionally connected different stakeholders of public resources that are often so fragmented that the general public find them hard to access. As a member of many service networks, NHs help coordinate these different partners and bring them to the local residents. The place-based nature of NHs makes them the one-stop shop via which people will be referred and connected to the proper services that they need without getting lost in the maze-like service networks. NHs have improved the institutional accessibility of the scattered public resources that are inequitably distributed across different geography and institutionally controlled by stakeholders in different public domains.

Other than the local residents’ recognition of their services, NHs geographic, institutional and psychological proximities have successfully established them as trustworthy and credible local partners of many different social service stakeholders who are connected to NHs through different networks created by the staff and volunteers. Many of these stakeholders are not place-based and do not have direct access to and trust of the local residents. NHs in this study have become hubs that bring stakeholders from different networks together, facilitate their interaction and coordinate a concerted effort to resolve local problems. One good example is the youth café initiated by the Alexandra NH. Prior to this initiative, the local police and businesses responded individually to a group of youth hanging out in the public area. Alexandra NH successfully mobilized these partners to provide a safe space for the young people and resolve a potential problem in the community. Knowing the needs of local people, NHs have also proactively joined and used their networks to advocate for policy changes that may benefit the local residents, for instance the Homeless Task Force of the North Shore NH.

Findings of this study also contribute to the conceptual understanding of service accessibility which tends to assume a passive recipient role of service users and their access to services provided by individual service providers. The idea of psychological proximity has indicated the importance of service users’ active role in shaping the availability and delivery of services that they need. More importantly, we propose the concept of institutional accessibility to broaden the current understanding of service accessibility from individual service provider to the network of service and resources embedded in the community or even larger society.

As Börzel and Heard-Lauréote (2009) suggest, in order to minimize the impacts of wicked problems, we need networks that can coordinate the resources and interests of separate and independent stakeholders to work interdependently. Taking advantage of their geographic, institutional, psychological, and network proximities, NHs have established a trustworthy and credible position in the web of networks to facilitate this coordination. They have nurtured, maintained and focused the ‘co-presence and meetingness’ of various stakeholders at the local level (Farrington, 2007).

As an exploratory study, our findings are largely limited to the experience of NHs in Vancouver. Meanwhile, despite their prevailing optimism, many participants of this study also pointed out that NHs and many of their stakeholders have faced numerous challenges that weaken their capacity to serve the local residents. The neoliberal funding regime that limits the capacity of settlement houses in New York City in the early 2000s (Fabricant and Fisher, 2002) is still very much alive and weakens the accessibility, affordability and availability of resources in social services. The wicked problem phenomenon may have even been hastened. Indeed, among our research participants, funding instability has seemed to be a major challenge to NHs in Vancouver. However, at least in what we found, they have tried to do their best to cope with the neoliberal challenges, particularly by mobilizing the resources from their networks.

To conclude, NHs in Vancouver have demonstrated their success in bringing many siloed stakeholders together in meeting local needs and resolving local problems. While it is too bold a claim to say that Neighbourhood House is a place-based CSO, particularly under the challenges imposed by the neoliberal funding regime, which may help minimize wicked problems in public policy, the findings of our study have enriched the concept of accessibility by bringing in an institutional dimension.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: Findings reported in this paper were generated in a study funded by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, grant number: 435-2012-1276.

ORCID iD

Miu Chung Yan

Author biographies

Miu Chung Yan is a professor at the University of British Columbia, School of Social Work. His research interests include immigrant settlement and integration, youth from immigrant families, and place-based community development.

Sean Lauer is associate professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia. His recent research examines community-based organizations and community building – shaping local interactions and developing social capacity.

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