A Community Safety and Well-being Plan has been approved by Bruce and Grey Counties and a second public engagement survey has been launched.
The plan now has five priority areas of risk for improvement: Addiction and Substance Use, Mental Health, Crime Prevention, Housing and Homelessness, and Poverty and Income.
The Community Safety and Well-being plan is being put together by over 50 local groups including Bruce and Grey Counties, 16 municipalities, eight police services, 14 police service boards, three boards of education, and more than 30 health and social service agencies and community committees.
The whole initiative is mandated by the Province with an aim to better coordinate community institutions to help curb crime by addressing problems before they get to the point of police intervention.
This latest survey asks about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on resident perceptions of safety and well-being.
It is open now until May 16th at cswbp-brucegrey.ca
To request a hard copy of the current survey, contact your local municipal office.
After the 2019 community safety survey, the Committee spent 2020 analyzing the data, reviewing community assets, and understanding resident perceptions of risks to safety and well-being.
That survey asked how safe people feel, for example, walking around at night alone, or being at home alone at night in your community. It asked people to rank issues like housing affordability, mental health, addictions, poverty and others in order of importance in tackling the issue.
In the next few months, the Advisory Committee will be working with Action Tables to ensure the people and places who are impacted by these risk factors are engaged in the plan.
Grey County Warden Selwyn Hicks notes in a statement, “This is a good time to connect with residents and gauge perceptions regarding community safety and well-being. Using a regional lens, it will be interesting to learn from the data and understand how the pandemic has impacted our communities. Having the baseline from a year ago will help identify who has been most impacted so we can focus our efforts on strategies to meet people where they are at.”