By Deborah Arellano
Deborah is a cooperative student at Focus Media Arts Centre. 

The Regent Park Social Development Plan, also known as the SDP, is a community-wide initiative aimed at fostering unification and community collaboration. The social development plan is constructed by four areas of priority each represented by a working group. The working groups are community building, the safety network, employment and economic development, and lastly the communications working group. The working groups are guided by a SDP Planning Committee that meets weekly.

This week’s Planning Committee meeting took place online on March 30th, 2023, from 1 pm–3 pm. The primary agenda of the meeting was a request to use SDP operational funds to resource the Evaluation and Benchmarks Committee as well as a discussion about the Regent Park Legacy Funds and who may apply to it. The meeting was facilitated by Walid Khogali Ali, who is a resident and the co-chair of the Community Building Working Group.

The first part of the meeting centred around a presentation facilitated by Michael Rosenberg, who is a local resident of the Regent Park neighbourhood and discussed matters of funding requests for the different working groups of the SDP. The second part of the meeting was facilitated by Daniella Castello, a City of Toronto staff, she unpacked the funding request to provide $400 to  the champions,  as well as the trustee administrative fees, the Evaluation Benchmark Project, food, and child minding. Despite this request, many questions arose from the other participants on the call.  Questions arose  regarding  why more funding is necessary for the Evaluation Benchmark Project.

Daniella Castello argued that there are still existing funds from 2020 and wants to ensure these funds are used before requesting more. Daniella said, "My perspective is making sure we use pre-existing resources, so the funds that I'm referring to were requested in 2020 and have not really been fully used, so I think there's really more value in using those funds that exist."

This suggestion proved to be a good one, but it brought up other concerns, such as whether using previous funding would cut into the funding of other projects.

Deany Peters says, "Well yeah, you know, if we had the foresight to know that this project needed to be supported, we would’ve built that in, but we didn't. I think if you have a project like the Evaluation Benchmark Project, it should have a budget line; it shouldn’t be that there’s some money there in the barrier reduction. This is a project that needs to be funded, so I feel a little differently about how it's actually supported."

Lastly, the members agreed upon the request of making use of the pre-existing funds from 2020 in order to fund current projects like The Evaluation Benchmark.