 really good okay we're about to begin you guys let me know when you're good what's up you know you let me know when okay good morning everyone thank you for coming as you all know today's will be a tech briefing followed by a news conference be on the findings of a study conducted by help seeker technologies what's going to be going around right now is an embargoed report there are three documents whoever would like one can have one go ahead for you again this is embargoed information we asked that nothing be reported on tweeted on photographs etc until after 11 a.m. and the same goes for any of the video that's going on here we will have our team monitoring social media and if we do see anything unfortunately we'll have to ask you to leave so again it's embargoed and please respect that speaking today we will have Dr. Alina Turner she's the co-president and co-founder of help seeker technologies we will also have our staff sergeant Eugene Lum from Vancouver Police operation command they will be speaking during the technical briefing also a part of the technical briefing and that will be here to answer any questions is Jesse Donaldson he's executive sorry she's the executive vice president growth help seeker technologies and we have Camilo S. Camila research and policy analysis for help seeker technologies we'll also have Simon Demiris he's the director of the PD planning research and audit section they those three will be here to answer any questions after the tech briefing we will have Dr. Alina Turner and staff sergeant Eugene Lum speak we ask that you hold the questions for them until after the tech briefing we'll have a little once 11 hits we'll have a little break and then we'll begin with our news conference and again if you have any questions where you want sound bites of certain clips you're welcome to ask questions during then as well again and I just want to reiterate and harp on that this is embargoed information till after 11 so we do ask that you respect all that okay so we'll get right into it I'm gonna ask Staff Sergeant Eugene Lum thank you for police operational command to come up and begin hello everyone my name is Eugene Lum I'm a staff sergeant in the operations division and we're here today to talk about two reports one of which has been put out in the media the first report is help seekers technology report it's called the social impact audit and we're gonna have Dr. Alina Turner speak to that report in just a minute the second report is a VPD report and it's entitled rebuilding the broken the VPD report is based off of some information data and speaking points in the help seekers report so I will turn it over at this time to Dr. Turner to talk about the help seeker social impact on it good morning everybody I'm just waiting for my slides to come up so thank you so much for having me I'm honored to be on this land I'm respectfully acknowledging the traditional and seated Coast Salish territory the Musqueam Squamish and Slewa tooth nations so thank you very much for welcoming me here today our team at help seeker is across this beautiful country so we're always honored to to be supporting communities including Vancouver's so a little bit about us we are a social impact technology B Corp or B Corp operation we build solutions that empower leaders on the front lines of solving the world's most complex social challenges through data software and insights and if you're curious you can find out more about us and our work across Canada at help seeker org so let's go to the next one purpose of this project so when the Vancouver Police Department reached out to us we had been deeply enmeshed in analysis on data that showed us that across the country social challenges were accelerating and this was during the time of COVID as well one of the things that we saw is that the increasing fault lines of the social safety net were emerging at faster rates and with deeper complexity and it was impacting individuals and families and in novel ways or in deeper felt ways as well so with that one of the types of analysis that we take on is to understand what the supply of the social safety net looks like in a community and why we need to understand supply is pretty obvious you need to know what you have you need to know what you need and then you need to figure out how to calibrate the two how to find the gaps and how to build a path forward that's based on the available data and so with that the collaboration between us and VPD started to dig into what the social safety net looked like in in Vancouver so that we could start that analysis of supply alright next slide so defining the social safety net this is a an interesting question that academics are have and continue to be debating how do we define a social safety net the social safety net of Canada is actually quite complex and if anybody has ever tried to navigate it you'll uh you'll uh agree very likely with the statement as well in different analyses comparing Canada to other countries majority of that analysis draws on financial benefits to individuals so it will include things like you know pension social assistance benefits that go to for those that are experiencing unemployment that's how Canada tends to get analyzed in the OECD nations to see how we fare compared to other countries Nordic countries is is a good example of of those types of comparisons but what's missing and only looking at those benefits is that we're not seeing how the actual service delivery components come into play there so that's where we need to dig into you know how do flows of funds come through various programs different nonprofit or charitable organizations public services to actually deliver the social safety net in practice so it's not good enough to only look at direct benefits we also need to look at organizations and their delivery mechanisms to understand this so that's the the bullets there about social infrastructure needing to be a much more comprehensive than than payments so that's where the complexity of the work comes in because data on the social safety net there's no one awesome data set that researchers can tap into and and believe me I've tried for the last 20 years working in this sector to understand exactly where where this funding is is coming from and where it's going but we luckily we do have some data right so here's what we do know I think that's the next slide all right okay let's get into the next one never mind I was like and here's the reveal but actually there's another rationale here why focus on social safety nets so the social safety nets of Canadians this is like one of our hallmarks of our democracy right it's it's what makes Canada the best country in the world is when we when we're really proud of our of our country we talk about how we take care of our most vulnerable how we build the social infrastructure where our communities can thrive so to do that of course we have to invest in that social infrastructure so this is this is by no means a a critique of of taking taking away from the social safety net something to be proud of but it's also something that we need to calibrate as new challenges emerge we have to right size and right mix how those expenditures are allocated and to figure out are we spending too much in one area and not enough in another we need to calibrate that the other challenge that we have in Canada and we can trace this back to our colonial roots is that we've borrowed a lot of the practices around devolving responsibility for the social safety net from public services into private nonprofit charitable civil society organizations now that's an that's an amazing and effective component because it brings us nimbleness and flexibility but on the other side it makes our social safety net really really complex so we've estimated that there's about a hundred thousand different entities that are operating simultaneously in the social safety net so you've you've probably experienced this as well trying to understand well how is this organization services different than this other organization and the truth is if you've ever tried to navigate it from a lived experience perspective you always hear that it's so complex and it's so difficult to navigate that is also a part of this challenge of understanding the overlapping components and then the gaps right so if you don't have a good sense of what's out there then how can you make it more effective so with that layering we've also got these these accelerating social challenges as well that I mentioned before these worsening systemic inequities that we need to deal with as well so this suggests that there's work to be done on optimizing our social safety net and this should be a question we're all asking are we getting the collective value out of our investments and our efforts it's not about one entity it's about all the entire ecosystem of supports next slide okay so what leads to deoptimization we've done work across this country like I mentioned before everything from northern rural communities and remote communities indigenous First Nations communities large small medium all types of cities and the themes are pretty consistent right there's different flavors local flavors I don't want to take away from from that but deoptimization is is the theme that emerges and it applies to Vancouver analysis as well so we've got overlapping and uncoordinated funding and by all means if somebody has this magic data set where all the funding that's coming in is is there I would I would love that we haven't found such a data set the data set comes from all over the place and we we have to try to make sense of it there's also a lack of coordination across systems right so there might be pockets of service coordination that are trying to get us better outcomes but as a cross systems initiative we have huge huge challenges there on coordinating impact that's not that's nothing new this is not going to be in your news story right this is all theme that many many before me have also highlighted we've also got this undeniable duplication yet massive gaps tension so on the one hand we don't have enough of this gaping resource let's say detox treatment recovery supports mental health supports yet you know we've got an overabundance of other resources that are underutilized and we don't know which is which and we don't have a mechanism to right size and right mix and optimize that in that entire infrastructure as a whole we've got ineffective referrals right we've done many many analyses on this and again it's not it's not help seekers thunder to steal but there's much research on the inefficiency of the referral networks that we have where end users have to go to five six seven different spots to finally find what they're looking for and even when they do find it there's a long wait list in that part of the ecosystem yet you know another peer on the other side of of the street might have a zero wait list and nobody knows right nobody knows that that's the case these are systemic issues right these are across the country and it's it's no different in Vancouver structural racism and discrimination any data set that you pull will reaffirm this I know there's been so much call for disaggregated data this disaggregated data needs to be applied to these numbers as well we didn't have the ability to mine for the flows of funding into indigenous led organizations we know that reconciliation calls for indigenous people to have sovereignty over there the funding and supports that are being provided to their members but we don't have a mechanism right now to even analyze where these flows of funds are going and to what extent indigenous people have sovereignty over that investment that's important and that will challenge some of these structural racist systems if we start to disaggregate the data further high barrier systems and service policies so we we again it's not about pointing fingers these are systemic Canadian problems we have challenges where the only shelter in town has a list of 200 people that are barred from that service and we're heading into minus 40 right so we have these challenges of of high barrier services that sometimes are the only option in for some members and unfortunately and I'll say this as a former service provider and as a funder is we have poor transparency around outcomes we might have good outcomes at a program level but as a system as an ecosystem can we say how all of these services how the hundred thousand organizations roll up into impact and unfortunately we we don't have that line of sight currently that's also important so that inconsistency is a challenge you have one organization that might be audited every year where all their financials is out and ready for scrutiny and that's so important right to democracy and and to getting our investments the public eye on our investments that's what keeps keeps everybody on their toes and keeps us accountable to the public because ultimately these are public funds these are taxpayer funds these are philanthropy funds so these these are our collective resources but that accountability is not consistent unfortunately and that's some of the some of the critique you're you're probably going to hear about this is well why why is this data here and not that data well I would I would love this data right every researcher obsesses about a complete data set the truth is we don't have a complete data set what we have is bits and parts and then we try to bring them together and start making sense of them so that we can start the dialogue right important part is that we start this conversation okay because when we start the conversation new data sets can be found new analysis can be brought in but that is going to take the entire community to look at look at this issue and look at these numbers and no one organization can figure this out on their own and help seeker definitely is not it's not the be all and all on this work we need everybody to to chip in the academics the researchers the front line providers the end users as well so point being there the optimization will continue to worsen with this increasing complexity of social needs the low morale that we see in frontline delivery and that's a cross systems challenge so I mean just ask a teacher a nurse how they how they feel about the effectiveness of of our support networks right now an expected recession I guess we wrote this before it was formally announced that we're we're heading into this economic situation and this increased media and public scrutiny on social issues I mean you're all here three years ago when we would release these reports and nobody cared right no it was not a media story so there there are absolutely other reports in other communities that just you know the numbers are there and and it didn't cause this this type of interest and I'm encouraged by that because that that tells me that Canadians are ready to have this conversation next slide please okay so understanding social impact audits with all the caveats that come with them so in the ideal world we would have this magical data set where we understood every organization every public sector department every ministry and how the funds flow and we can we could trace that money to an end user to a client and then we could trace that client experience with that service and the outcomes they get and then we would be able to look at that as a whole that would be you know the dream social impact audit of course that's not the reality of what we have right so what we have is these partial data sets so we have to start somewhere though right because we can't wait for this perfect data set to emerge we have to start working with what we have and we need to start digging in and prompting these questions so that new data comes to light as well so for us when we develop this work our first our first first first baseline analysis looked at let's just take a look at what's available publicly what's out there right and what can we get our hands on I mean being a small startup tech company we're gonna need to use the resources that are already available out there we're gonna need to leverage open data we're gonna need to leverage public data and lucky for us there are governments and departments that are starting to make this data available which is fantastic not all but some the challenge with these data sets to is that they're like I said they're partial so they don't go as deep as we would like them to so every critique you have we probably have as well of the data sets but it's a place to start so with the public data that we collect and I have a list of all of the ones we were able to locate we start to to dig into them as much as we can and say okay well how can we make sense of this data is this actually doing social community well-being work is this doing work in the alleviation of poverty is this doing work in mental health and addictions is this doing work in the safety realm right because we're looking at the social safety net so that includes social infrastructure as well as safety components so crime prevention programs that are supporting folks that are reintegrating upon exit from prison or jail so we're looking at this as holistically as we can because that's the purpose of the social safety net it's not just for one target group it's for all of us and then we start to analyze deeper to understand what might be missing it for a particular group so it's a first step it's a it's I want to say it's unfortunate that it was leaked before we could do the next step but we got us it was you know it's all good it's all good but the next step is to do the work with the community partners to actually look at their perspective on their classification within it too so there's there's some work in their report that references this additional phase of work hopefully we can still get to do that piece but it gives you a bit of a starting point on who might these organizations be that we need to do that deeper work with so the public data sets are a great great place to start to that end all right let's see next one okay limitations if if you didn't pick that threat up we can't analyze a bunch of really really really important themes from the data that we have as much as we would we would love for us to be able to respond to these requests currently so one performance and impact the public data sets don't give us you know out of all these thousands of organizations we don't have a data set that says here's the number of clients unique clients right because clients are moving across organizations so we don't know how many unique clients are using services in the social safety net and we don't know what outcomes they're experiencing as a whole now each organization might have a little bit of data about that client but I'm talking about the ecosystem right the social safety net ecosystem we don't understand there's a bunch of good reasons for that as well around privacy but if you're asking for my take on the performance and impact I don't I don't have that answer for you all I have is is what's what we know from the public data we don't know the quality of service delivery we don't know that because we obviously don't have the client's perspective on the quality of service that they've experienced with these supports as well we don't know specific service gaps and duplication so if you're gonna say do we have enough detox right or do we have enough treatment facilities do we have enough emergency shelter beds that's really important work we it's just out of scope for this analysis right and the user experience and access to support it I reference that as well so a couple of other cautions as well as you read through take caution when it speaks to financial allocations to a particular issue area so let's say homelessness or a geographic area of or neighborhood so the financial data that's available only tells us about the financial flows right we don't know anything about the client flows and it doesn't provide insight into the relative impact of that organization program or system compared to its revenues so that's an important one too if you're if got a system that might be or an entity that might have a budget of a hundred a million dollars and one that has a budget of a hundred thousand dollars but their end user relative to revenue shows us that the one that's that's the hundred thousand dollar organization has way better outcomes I'd love to be able to do that analysis we don't have that data currently all we all we know is that there's organizations and they're receiving funds and they're serving or they're declaring to the Canada revenue agency that they're serving a particular theme or target population as a whole the other piece that we can't account for is we don't know again because we don't know where the clients come and go we don't know that just because an organization reports to Canada revenue agency that their address is in a particular geographic location we don't know if their clients are coming from all over a broader geographic reason and vice versa we don't know if an organization that's outside of the boundary of analysis so let's say the city of Vancouver we don't know if there's any organizations and the Metro van region vice versa that receive and service clients from Vancouver that move back and forth right so that's a that's another limitation of the data it doesn't give a service catchment information so with all of these caveats and they're they're all over the report so I'm not gonna belabor them further because you can read them at your leisure with that all in mind there's still things that we can discern next slide okay so a little bit about the financial analysis in Vancouver like I said you've got access to the to the full report let's go to the next slide okay so here's the data sets that we were able to get our hands on for this analysis so the best and biggest and and really thank you thank you Canada revenue agency I don't I don't know how many how many times we've used this data set in the last couple years but it's a really really important data set that CRA has made available to Canadians and I actually encourage everyone that's interested to take a look at the CRA's website because it's it's available to anyone out there that's interested in in doing this type of analysis as well because you guys might see something that we might not see as well so we need more more people using this data and analyzing it further so that CRA data set on registered charities is a really important one for us the next one is the government of Canada's proactive disclosure grants and contributions so we've got grants that come directly from the federal government and they go into a community directly there's a data set that gives us access to how much the federal government granted to organizations we can take that into account as well we've got the city of Vancouver budget now it's it's limited to what's publicly available like I said so we definitely can get more detail on the specific programs and clients served if we if we choose to go deeper into this as well but that's another data source the same as the feds the BC government has a grants database as well that we were able to bring into this there's some BC budget estimates so information on proposed spending and they do give some categorization so we can see from which ministry what's being allocated out again not as deep as we would like it to be but it's a again we try to find as much as we can Vancouver Coastal Health Authority financial statement Vancouver Coastal Health as you guys know very well is not just the city of Vancouver proper so it wasn't as we weren't able to dig into the specific catchment area so some of their data wasn't didn't lend itself to that really local analysis but we know we did capture it in the report as well vpd of course because we're looking at well-being and safety Canadian Institute for Health Information kaihai for short this is another great data set that we can get some estimates around mental health and addiction spending that we wouldn't have caught in the CRA data as well so that's another another really important one and Statistics Canada because back to the social safety net point around comparisons of Canada to the rest of the world majority of social safety net analyses really look at this government transfers only and so imagine only looking at that government transfers and missing all this other stuff above how much we would be missing but that's another another great one unfortunately it was 2016 we've got 2021 estimates you guys know that COVID made spending on across categories higher we're just taking a look at that data now to understand to what extent but the general just is that you know 2018 and 2019 were pre-pandemic numbers so keep that in mind as well and then we've got some of our information as well that we were able to layer into the analysis just to to get a better flavor for what the organization's services were that they reported on their on their websites for example okay next one okay so what we were able to estimate thus far right and it's always a it's always a moving target but what we knew is in that 2018 2019 on and relatively similar numbers in both of those years we're looking at about five billion dollars per year that we were able to to estimate based on these data sets going into the social safety net related activities in Vancouver so that's what we know so far I'm going to tell you also what we what's missing and what we underestimated as well so that you can interpret this with with caution next slide okay so the biggest component like I said before kind of single biggest component is that 40 percent that just goes directly into end users from government sources so that could be anything from social assistance pensions unemployment insurance the hallmarks of a social safety net are those direct benefits right that's what that's what we talk about and when we compare Canada to other parts of the world is how comprehensive is are those benefits when somebody falls on hardship does the government step in and support them with these benefits and we should be it should be there right it should absolutely be a component of our social safety net and no not surprising nothing new there the next the next bucket though are foundations and charities and then you've got a kind of a smattering of other sources that we were able to locate what's not in here though is a really really important bucket and this is an unfortunate limitation to the CRA data set is it only includes charities that have a registered charity status and so any non-profit that that might exist doesn't necessarily have a charitable status so a non-profit doesn't necessarily show up in the charities data set and that's a huge limitation we know that that's a big limitation but with that being said we we know we're capturing capturing some but not all we grabbed a couple non-profits from some of the federal grants and provincial grants but we know those those just happened to be the non-profits that received grants those years so we don't know in Vancouver that anything that's a non-profit systematically haven't been able to capture non-profits that are doing work in this area that may not be charitable revenues and we just need to acknowledge that this is a big missing component and it's going to you know continue to to make this number not as not as accurate as it should be okay next one okay we also wanted to obviously include the vpd component lots of our crisis response systems are that are delivered through obviously policing fire transit safety etc protective services by law i'm not sure if you guys have covered this before but a lot of them also provide social responses as well so we see this mobilization all the time as fire or ems ambulatory care is brought in for not just medical but also for social or mental health addictions challenges as well overdose responses so it's important to to include when we talk about community safety and well-being safety is a you know it's a it's an important component of our social safety net and so that's why we've obviously included the Vancouver department expenditure as well in other communities we were some of these were crisis responses were done in collaboration with the fire and ambulatory care or ems and so there's lots of communities across the country that are doing that collaboration differently with the social sector as well where you have you have these integrated crisis response teams that recognize how integrated protective and and social supports need to be next slide please all right charitable funding so in 2018 and again by all means uh you can peruse the most recent i think we've got 2020 data now in up on the CRA website but in Vancouver in the catchment area of Vancouver there's 2,600 registered charities and that were there in 2018 when we pulled this data for this report and they registered a total of $14 billion that year now again a limitation to that is it doesn't include the assets that those organizations hold so we don't know we don't I mean we could know but in this particular analysis we didn't analyze the assets so for instance if they own property or had an endowment fund we just looked at revenues in this analysis so that's the 14 billion now not every single charity is relevant to this conversation right so what we try to then do is dig deeper into that and start to kind of tease out okay well is this charity relevant to this analysis is why should we be including this and not this charity that's a really really really tough thing to do especially when you're working like us across the country where you need to have a consistent methodology so that's another consideration here but just to give you an idea on the sources of funding for the charities which are I always think is super super important is provincial government is a huge huge contributor to this as you can see not surprising federal government and then to a lesser extent municipal government the other bucket is philanthropy directly charities might do their own fundraising they have events some of them have some social enterprise work that that they do so we bucket that that and other but Sierra actually breaks down everything quite quite in a detailed fashion let's put it that way all right so again a reminder that this doesn't account for the COVID funding that happened after this analysis that we took on next one okay community social service charitable funding so what we then wanted to do like I said to you before is let's try to tease out of that 14 billion what are the ones that are doing really really relevant work because if you recall phase two is actually engaging with the ones that are doing this work in in depth and going deeper with them so we need to create a list of these organizations and and understand their you know their size their revenues their expenditures etc their funders to understand the ecosystem so you can see there some of the the ones that that are in this deeper bucket that are closer to what we're looking for so community and social service charities again the the best thing to do from here is actually to you know engage them in in a self identification process which we're we do in other communities as well as part of this work when we look deeper at their revenue sources pretty consistent so again we see the provincial government the federal government municipal and then this philanthropic mix so pretty consistent we can see a little some changes over time as well between 2018-19 obviously I would love love to update this with 2020 and and 2021 as well because we need to understand the impacts of of COVID next one all right mental health and addictions charitable funding so revenues and the mental health addictions charities more specifically so again this I'm sorry about the caveats doesn't doesn't include the COVID work because it was outside of the scope of of analysis as well and again these are organizations that self identified to the CRA as doing something in the mental health addictions space next one all right in the same breath we also took on some initial systems mapping of the Vancouver landscape of social supports so this is where we we say okay that's that's interesting here's a financial financial data that's awesome but now let's see what the what the kind of public sees when they open up the internet and look for social supports so through one of our technologies we can actually start to mine the the internet the unstructured data that comes from from websites and start to analyze you know organizations and services and programs that are delivering social safety net related activities and so you can you can see there this is the initial data set that we pulled again this is a couple years old now but you can see the basic needs the health emergency disaster families and parenting just to give you an idea of of what's available and also gives you an idea of the value of having a consistent data set when you can start to look across jurisdictions as well all right i'm sorry if i'm boring here i was told this was a technical briefing so i'm being technical okay so key findings we do have a lot more mapping that's currently happening across the country i'm just giving you a glimpse of this this gets better and better all the time part of our work at help seekers to map as much of Canada's social safety net as possible the social safety net changes all the time though so you have to have a mechanism that's constantly drawing this data in and makes tries to make sense of it it makes it better and better all the time and of course as you all know just because it's on the website doesn't mean it's accurate so this is again same as the financial analysis do step one and then go deeper by deploying some of these deeper analysis tools directly with the organizations and the clients as a as a phase two so hopefully we get to do that in Vancouver as well and next slide okay this is one that's i think a really important slide it's a really important one these are Vancouver charitable funding organizations and and you can see their their revenue in total and these categories that you see on the left hand side this is their self described categorization to the Canada revenue agency so when an organization files their income tax to maintain their charitable status they have to select who do you serve what do you do right they have to kind of click on a bunch of categories so these categories is what they click on and so you can see there by far out of that 1.4 billion of charitable revenues that are working in this kind of complex social needs area majority of them are reporting through the CRA relief of poverty okay so that's that's interesting the next most common one is community resources we've got youth programs low-cost housing and so on it goes what's interesting is what doesn't show up here is is the important thing the important stuff things like indigenous led organizations or indigenous supports what else is not on here right and is there are there things that are happening within the relief of poverty that we just it's too big of a category we need to dig deeper so the point with this slide is okay that's interesting we're relieving poverty but what does that actually mean in practice and that's why we need to do that deeper next step is to actually understand the service elements specifically being delivered at that front line level next slide so considerations from us to from us to the VPD as they were thinking about how they might help the community move forward so this enhanced coordination of services I mean we're going to be broken records and and reaffirm this piece data-driven approaches despite these limitations you don't sit on data and not use it if you're collecting the data we have a responsibility to actually start start using it and and look at performance look at equity look at effectiveness in relation to service capacity and demand and the social safety in in general as well community engagement and collaboration I mentioned that this is phase one of two phases of work so that next step is okay we've got a starting spot here we can have a conversation but let's dig deeper and understand exactly what the services are that are being delivered to clients and what the gaps are and how we might calibrate the two and then measurement and accountability so as a as a person that's been in the system from you know basically from almost from birth I can't tell you how important mutual accountability is so that's the only way we're going to be tackling these inequities over time is that is through transparency and and hopefully this is a small step I know I acknowledge it's a disruptive step but it's a it's an important first step towards that conversation I think that's me there's a couple more analyses to to do we did mention that there's additional phases of this work that we might undertake as a community ultimately though none of this stuff is going to work if the community doesn't come together right because it requires all of us to put our data on the table and you know park our organizational hats at the door to have a conversation about what we need as a community so with that I think I will I think that's it for me I think I've said enough for now but I'm I'm happy to pass it back to to you Eugene if you wanted to say something about your guys's report okay hi everyone so just to give you a bit of a timeline of how this progressed VPD reached out to HelpSeeker and we commissioned them to do the study in August of 2021 in November 2021 HelpSeeker produced their initial draft of their report and they delivered to us in March 2022 the final version from that report there were significant data sets and pieces of information starting points also known as recommendations that we found really interesting so what we did was we produced an internal report it was confidential it was confidential up to this time and still remain so and it was it was entitled rebuilding the broken and basically we wanted to put some context into some of the data that was produced some of the financial statements that was produced in the HelpSeeker social impact audit one of the other reasons and the the reason why we did the our own internal report it's listed in our the copy that you have but one of the important things was our frontline members are seeing the effects of these complex social issues they're dealing with it every day our members who have to deal with that person who has mental health issues and is we're constantly going to calls to deal with them taking them to the hospital only to see them out on the street or at another call a day later and sometimes multiple times we know right there that there's a gap in the system that this person isn't receiving the assistance that they need they don't they're not receiving the support that they need so from that we wanted to make sure that our report outlined these issues because as Alina Dr. Turner mentioned one of the key things that we wanted to emphasize was the coordination aspect we feel that these gaps need to be coordinated at all like they need to be addressed at all levels and that starts with coordination so when we're talking about coordination at all levels when our frontline officer is dealing with someone who's substance addicted and they're telling our officer you know i really want to get into a treatment program and we're trying to help them get there they're telling us it's really hard to navigate the system there are a lot of things that we can't there's a lot of delays programs aren't available so right there that coordination piece at a community level is missing and that works its way all the way up you have a myriad of ministries that are that are trying to help but we're just not coordinating and because of that we're not being effective so that's the other reason that we had the internal report done we're in the midst of our community consultation process because we felt that in order for us to follow through with the next steps we needed to reach out to community to get their input and feedback not only on the help-seeker report but also on some of the issues that we were trying to raise we also came up with several calls to action that will be addressed a little bit later but in our report we reached out to approximately 10 over 30 organizations and 80 individuals were contacted so we're still in that process we're still in the process of reaching out and unfortunately with the release of the the report to the media we just wanted to make sure that the context was there for why we did the report as well as the accuracy that's pretty much it thank you does anybody have any questions for either a staff sergeant lum or dr turner and if you could just state who your question is addressed to go ahead jolly you want to go first i was just making sure okay jen um yeah my question is for alina um so some people have been pointing out that your report included two billion dollars of direct transfers like things like social assistance yeah you know income basically that people need to survive um that's not very high at all so when you put it all together in this big number and then the police are saying like well look at this big number surely some like bad things must be happening um i mean you could never are you suggesting that we need to reform that that system and maybe take money away from people like what is the purpose of putting putting that two billion in there so uh the purpose is to understand the social safety net right so we want to understand whether it's adequate or not if if the community of Vancouver feels that they're they're getting their best value and that's that's the best we can do for vulnerable citizens and by all means ignore that i don't think we are right i think uh the way we're keeping people in poverty with these low rates is completely inadequate so if we have to rejig for instance but this is not my conversation to have this is your guys's conversation to have but you might say is does it make sense to have this split between direct to end user right so basic income for instance comes to mind for that might there be a better way to support these individuals other than kind of keeping them in poverty with these low incomes might we actually recalibrate out of that five billion to say hey do we do we need x amount of programs that nobody's using maybe there's a better way to actually up those incomes so that people can have a livable um livable income so it's a it's a question of how do we want to we're spending this money right now this is the is this how we want to spend this money i mean i i come from a family that's you know with refugees i lost my brother in in east Hastings two years ago so um by all means it's not a it's not a dig at poverty it's if anything it's uh is this really the best we can do well governments governments and nonprofits are arguing that by adding this two billion dollar figure right old age security canada pension plan that it's misleading like look at the cover of the report that you that's at the front here we're talking about Vancouver social safety net and it's a picture of the downtown side so this when you're when you're mentioning this two billion dollars that it's misleading when you look at the issues of homelessness of the opioid crisis of crime mental health issues so is it really relevant how we treat our most vulnerable and the types of transfers we're making to to them i think is absolutely relevant and should be considered so is that is is it an adequate amount of transfers is the direct government transfer adequate or is it keeping people um in poverty right but this captures this two billion dollars would capture someone who's living in a 10 million dollar house that's getting that's getting old age security or getting cpp so how is that relevant at the social safety net it doesn't include just people that are the most vulnerable right we have to think about our folks that are right are actually living in in parts of Vancouver that are not in these tastings we have to think about experiences that are not just the ones that we always report on as well right so we need to think about poverty social exclusion much more than than what comes to mind when you think about Vancouver and Hastings right there's there's much much more out there when it comes to social needs and if if we miss that we're missing the big picture again because our response is going to keep repeating or keep focusing on one one really really complex and and rightly acute situation but this this situation is is a symptom of a much bigger structural decay in our social safety net and that comes from how we structure our low income and our poverty reduction programming to ensure that these things get prevented from the get go right so mental health prevention all of the work that that could be done with youth as well so if you look at the first experience of homelessness it's actually in our in our early years as youth well if we are if we don't talk about low income and social assistance and we don't talk about that the mom with the kid or the senior that's in in living in poverty or only gets cpp as their only source of income then how are we going to prevent what's happening here in the next generation right so we can all agree we need to move upstream well that means we need to look at all the data and analyze what's happening upstream currently and what's not working i'm very confused about why you've included what appears to be the entire Vancouver police budget from 2019 in this report how is giving of traffic tickets for instance part of the social safety net i i just don't quite understand just to add to that as well Vancouver fires budget why why is that included in there this seems to be conflating a whole lot of things under social safety net we're talking about pensions and and fire suppression like how do you include all these things in there mm-hmm yeah i know it's uh it's uh the first blush right first cut of the analysis released to media da da usually we do a bunch of work with the community to actually go through this stuff in more detail what we do with fire in other communities is we actually go and figure out which components of their of their budgets are to do with social issues more specifically right and it's the same with the vpd so how many percent of your calls are social disorder calls do you have specific teams that are dedicated to mental health and addictions for instance do you have a pack team same as fire fire in some cities has programming that's specific to social issues so abandoned buildings that are derelict and and become encampments for for instance so the step of stepwise because the same thing with the you could say this this argument about any of this or these organizations because all we know is that they're getting money right so any of the organizations in the charitable sector that self-identified as relieving poverty well what does that mean right so same same argument there we need to dig deeper to actually understand what is being serviced what is being provided as a resource and as a service in that case but again it's you have to keep it in context that this is his first step it wasn't meant to be a you having here um the st george's school foundation this is one of the most exclusive private school in the country and that foundation i just looked it up they definitely know the money goes back to supporting the school it doesn't go out into the wider community so is your is this not an accurate number perhaps so which foundation sorry uh the st george's school foundation and can you can you see what table that came out of because we have the bag i don't know maybe this isn't included in your analysis exactly list of it is that's right there's some appendices that are just the vpd asked us to pull can you just give me the top 10 foundations here's a top 10 foundations so you yeah you need to actually take a look at the methodology to make sure they're included now if there's things that where they said they relieve poverty and you're telling me actually that's an exclusive school and okay we should probably i mean it's not up to me to talk to them about their c r a classification that's that i'm not the decision maker on that was this pulled into your to the number or not i'm saying depends on the appendix that you're there's a one table that pulls into the number but the other ones are just top 10s yeah yeah in the interest of transparency how much did the vpd pay you to to do this report for them uh 142 thousand dollars 142 thousand dollars yep and was that taxpayer money do you know that went um assuming anything that publicly funded through the it's i they don't have any other sources of funding right but i'm not here to say that yes it was from the vpd budget yeah dr turner yeah can you maybe clarify what we're all trying to get at here i think is that how much of that five billion dollar calculate calculation is related to social services housing et cetera so that's a i mean we try to narrow in on that so there are there is a a part in the in the report that goes into the organizations that have addresses in in that postal code but as as you heard me say before do we know that they're only servicing people from that specific area or do people from other parts of of the downtown come there to get service vice versa do downtown east side residents go to other outside of their neighborhood so it's a there's a number but there's a billion reasons why it's problematic to uh to do that because we don't know the client flow within within those so yeah so yes it's only possible to some extent i'd like to ask a question for someone from the vpu there's that sergeant lawnmower someone um we're seeing some people including politicians making the claim that this five billion dollar number and these findings are evidence that money's being wasted in the downtown east side that's being improperly allocated that we need more money for police and less money for other services uh that you know repeating this long-standing thing that there needs to be audits and a czar or a commissioner to oversee this funding um i just want to know how does the bpd feel is that a fair conclusion to draw from these findings is that an unfair conclusion or would you disagree or caution against that kind of characterization from what we have so far because certainly some people are using that grabbing under the five billion dollar number some people are saying this is proof of what i always suspected that money is being wasted or even worse than being wasted is going into corruption or being misappropriated how do you feel about that characterization is that reasonable um i think with that with that question um you know we're not going to comment on um what they they feel about it i i think this is the first look at the social safety net in a broad sense we realize that there are limitations but for us the help seeker sia is a starting point for conversations conversations at all levels and these are the things that maybe need to be discussed amongst government amongst community amongst organizations in terms of how much money is going where how does a confidential report start conversations or was the plan to release it at some point the plan was to release it at some point but you're absolutely right it was confidential and then it was leaked and brought out to the to the media so it forced us to respond because we wanted to be accurate we wanted to make sure that everything was uh provide some context around why we did it when was the plan to release it publicly if it hadn't been recorded we are still in the process of consultation so i can't ask i can't answer that but what i can say is we we plan to continue reaching out to community um community groups organizations government community individuals um to try and get their feedback and input that's the phase two that's the phase two help seeker has already been retained for phase two no not as yet okay but how comfortable are you starting a conversation with a document that you know includes pensions citywide but does not seem to include providence healthcare which runs st paul's hospital and is a huge like these numbers you know there's too much here there's not enough there like how comfortable are you standing behind starting a conversation with numbers that don't make a lot of sense lumped in together well i would say that it might not make sense to some people but i think the methodology that help seeker is employed across municipalities for different municipalities as well as police agencies has been consistent um it's something that they are able to compare across uh across canada uh they've been retained by um i believe it's a cmhc to do some work for the federal government um so we're confident in their methodology yes could we have a deeper look absolutely but at this point we've got to start somewhere we can't just keep talking in circles about things that you know we need a starting point for information to look at financial data to start and then we can start talking about conversations to coordinate services to achieve better outcomes what kind of a foundation for conversation is that though when caution should be taken when interpreting a neighborhood-based financial analysis for the nantani side but then it's also given us 13 percent of these expenditures like how are we having that conversation when we're saying here's a number but also don't look at that number because it's not reliable well i don't think that's saying that i think it's just saying take caution this is a starting point right so we're we can still get more information we can still reach out to community to uh see if they want to participate in in further conversations about that so in edmonton we saw the edmonton police use a very similar report by the same company um use and use that report as an argument to kind of safeguard their budget and i see the bankkeeper police doing the same thing frankly here so is this just you know is this just a pr exercise to to argue that you need to keep either getting more money or keep the money you have in the city budget no can you tell can you tell me more about that like that because you do say in the report you talk about your own budget you talk about how you know the narrative should you know around it is is wrong that a lot of other organizations get a lot more money so how is it not just about the budget then well i think if you look at the help seeker report and some of the things that they look at they're looking at a at the social safety net from a from a bigger picture and some of their starting points measurement and accountability enhanced coordination of services effective partnerships um collaboration with community all those things are just as important as budgets all those things are going to lead toward better outcomes not just budgets so if you look at when we started this process back in august 2021 um it's been a long process it's been a thorough and involved rigorous process and as i said we're we're still in the middle of consultation it's just this got out and we wanted to address it our report got out and we wanted to message in these materials like these infographics that you put out all of your messaging is look at this enormous number it's you know this times as much as the fairy budget it's you know you're sort of indicating that it's this horrific number that there's something wrong with it i would disagree with that i think we point out multiple issues we're talking about mental health issues we talk about the opioid crisis we talk about um the need for a better community and individual outcomes so it's not just talking about the five billion dollar fee but we all know those things like and the police have done reports before you know and in the in the the document one of the documents you're talking about the fact that for every dollar the police gets the social safety net's getting 15 so is the motivation to get more money for police no so what's the point the point is to provide context for the figures um we have some examples further on in the uh in the document that outline not just the police budget but other the total budget as well as some of the other numbers that were significant to us in terms of what we need to look at things we need to consider in order to make the the outcomes better i think that would still throw in a lot of people for a loop is the fact that was the vpd that commissioned this report and it wasn't something that was done through the city through the province so can you further clarify why it's beneficial for the vpd to be the ones paying for this report it's so sorry i'm gonna so we're gonna we're gonna keep all questions for this technical briefing about the technical portion of it the data there will be an opportunity at the end of the press conference the official news conference that will be hosting that you can ask those specific questions and and ask um you know officials from the vpd those questions are there any more technical questions about i'll get a question in just in terms of sorry we're gonna we're gonna hang on to the phone lines for a sec we also have people on the phone so if we can maybe move to the phone lines and again there will be an opportunity to ask questions after dr lina turner is staying and there will be officials from vpd so those on the phone you can press star one to be placed in the queue oh was it i'm so sorry sorry jesse okay i'm getting confused i'll point to the clarification for the state george's school foundation and you can see that in the appendices in table eight three that's how grind says foundation's advancing education which are not included as a five million dollar total so that's for a few just referencing top 10 foundations do you mind if i just get a question in related to uh the authors of the report so who specifically are the chief authors of this report and uh and what are their uh backgrounds academically or their qualifications okay so that would be me i would be the chief author on it and you can take a look at my credentials online can you when you mind just going through just the basics in terms of like what's your area of expertise yeah sorry homelessness and systems planning is my area of expertise um 20 years in the homeless serving sector implemented Calgary's first homeless management information system developed the housing first system of caring Calgary consulted across the country for various systems and governments and community based groups and fellow at the school of public policy at University of Calgary phd and housing and homelessness at u of c thank you mentioned your remarks that the report shows kind of misalignment there's some areas where there's massive gaps treatment rehab there's some areas where there's overabundance of some resources that are underutilized what are the areas where there's an overabundance of resources that you identify that was a general remarkable what we're seeing in Canada as a whole so um we haven't done that level of analysis it's a phase two type of thing okay so you haven't you haven't identified areas where you've overabundance no no nationally though what are the areas where there's overabundance and social safety and resources well i'll give you a example from my hometown Calgary we did an analysis on the mental health ecosystem there and looked at referral networks and saw that there's for the exact same service which was therapy and counseling in one part of the ecosystem there was 300 day wait list and in another organization offering the exact same thing there was a zero day wait list so it's a it's stuff like that where you're like well could we just not could we make a referral over there because these guys are waiting 300 days so that's what i meant about misalignment so when you have transparency around that you can get people help quicker yeah we don't know that we don't know that yet because we had that's a phase two yeah sorry and so can you just clarify Providence health was that omitted intentionally or can you just explain yeah i'll tell you about that so the budgets for health are tremendous right they're they're massive and it doesn't seri doesn't give us a breakdown on on who does what within that budget so all we know is this charitable foundation that is Providence is receiving x amount of money so that would have made the number massive massive massive because health budgets are really significant so what we did is actually went to the chi-hi data set that i mentioned before and said okay what was publicly reported as mental health and addictions to to chi-hi and then that's where we can get the Providence but there's also other other health organizations health entities so that we wouldn't we were trying to like not have such a big number and to narrow in on the mental health and addictions once so we got that number through the chi-hi data set so i'm just wondering then like with all these gaps and you're saying that you know like there because like i can see like and from my own experience try to get data from these governments it's very difficult yeah have you warned the vpb who hired you that how that the utility of these numbers may not be great and and you know like absolutely yeah absolutely absolutely what was your caution like and you what was that discussion like it's exactly the same questions that we gave you guys today right so we we go through the the pros and cons the data is only so good as good as we can get our hands on there's been other um kind of examples where folks have said well can't you just foyp government to get some of this data and and i think you can probably tell me more than i can tell you about how long that takes as well so we said hey let's first blushes just see what we can get our hands on right away let's see how far we get to it and then we can make a decision you know sometimes it's a it's an invitation to to governments to participate and say look this is what we were able to get um would you like to contribute your data set to this same thing with other organizations to say would it would you see value in making this better right this is something that just should live in the community long term and i mean i appreciate it's it's an awkward thing for the police to start it but somebody's got to start it have to start the conversation and um let's see where you let's see where vancouver takes it and had you had you asked atira phs like the top three social housing providers atira phs rain city have you asked them yet to in phase one um to open their books for you if you have any questions about how they're spending their money no this was the phase one was just the financial stuff that i showed to you guys the community consultation is in the phase two component and it wouldn't just be those three right it would be all of these um and what else are we missing so the other pieces that we don't know is any civil society organizations that are not even registered like informal networks of people helping each other or um like i mentioned before the nonprofits we we missed a whole bunch of stuff um that we need the kind of crowd sourcing to help us complement but then this gives us a starting spot to say hey we're doing this do you want to participate did we get this right did we get this wrong there's always more right but behind these numbers so we need that context but imagine fanning this out and we we've done this in smaller communities and i'd love to do this in vancouver but we can we get the frontline uh service providers engage we get the clients engaged and we map the system together right so we and we start with this as a base and kind of fan out the the questions to mine the hive brain of the community to understand what's really going on and then you can layer that data to say well from a client perspective this is who provides me with this but from a service provider perspective this is what that lens looks like and you can start seeing the the different perspectives and where some of these opportunities might be so do you expect that once you get it to clarify right the development of the only individual analysis we did of individual organizations was expenditures and revenues for charitable and that's all publicly accessible so we didn't contact any organizations and that's the only analysis you'll see from that from us in the individual organization given just you know how much is missing here and you're acknowledging the various gaps that exist and the numbers we do have seem to be so muddled in terms of various money being included here that's not relevant to really what we're talking about given all of those factors there are going to be some people that say this report is so vague and so muddled that it adds no value at all what would you say to people who will pose that question i know it is going to come oh totally i would say make it better right absolutely let's go make make this analysis better right what what should this analysis be let's let's go like we need to know this stuff which bodies specifically like your organization was hired to do the analysis so which organizations need to give you the information needed and is your organization the the best organization to do something like this in terms of analyzing this issue i mean who is the best position to to do this whose position in vancouver to do systems planning work that's a that's a really good question and that that's not it's not my community to answer that for but there should be um the infrastructure in place to do systems planning so that we can have this type of analysis and we can all feel confident about right so yeah how likely will it be that once you get into phase two we're going to see you know you're going through the police budget you're going through fire rescue services but you're going to go through the government federal transfers that we're going to see this five billion dollar actually shrink i don't know if i can make a prediction on where that's going to go i think you're i think what we'll see though is we'll see different bubbles emerge to say here's direct transfers to at-risk populations here's bubbles that are for deeply complex social needs we don't know right now so you can have an organization that actually does all levels of acuity of care but we don't know to what percentage the revenues are allocated so you know do is a is one organization's budget primarily for the kind of primary preventative care for at-risk youth or and 10 percent goes to complex needs if we have that type of data though you we can start saying that because then we can see we have a massive gap in specifically complex care mental health addictions and treatment sorry that's what we're trying to get to is a really precise supply demand gap but i mean we can't we we're not going to get there until we start digging into this stuff is is the point and sorry jesse you were going to jump in in the visual so that's the americanox just to clarify in phase two you mentioned so the 142 000 was to produce this report so you're retained to do another like a phase two of this report or what's that hasn't been discussed we were we said we would we would take on this analysis gather the data sets there's a bunch of you know the actual data work behind the report to get to this phase and we've always said there has to be that next then the next component but i mean we we also know that when this type of stuff starts to emerge sometimes the technology company is not the best position to do that consultation so that's really up to to the community to figure out is this the extent of this report i heard you mentioned consultation is just a snapshot what the vpd is doing we can expect a bigger more comprehensive report yeah it's possible that it could be longer or more more in depth it just depends on the consultation process and how that goes that's happening now yes that's probably about leaked in terms in terms of the the report itself what's the timeline here like how how long did it take to actually do this research and put this together as i mentioned in the timeline i think it was uh june let me see was it july 2021 august sorry august 2022 where we had the first draft and that's when we began the community consultation process so it's only been three months um and we're still ongoing we're still reaching out obviously um i'd love to give you a final time but it could be weeks it could be months we don't know at this point dr turner are you working have you aside from Edmonton and Vancouver have you created any similar reports for other police agencies or are you in the process of doing reports lots of our reports actually are done with municipalities municipal governments tend to be the our most kind of most common clients yeah police agencies engage you directly and independently has happened in this case about before uh yeah it's happened like Edmonton's as an example um yeah yeah they were directed by city council though this as a police agency independently initiated such a thing we've had that yeah we've had that we've also had nonprofits or charity uh charity groups take this on can you know language police agencies um some of them it's kind of like Vancouver where we can't say um but um Edmonton's one that's that's been public for sure um there's also like you can just give it a google as well for the municipal ones the municipal ones don't get as much attention so I don't I don't know why I mean I guess yeah I mean I think it gets attention because there are people there are advocates community advocates who have been pushing back against police you know what they maybe see as an over as police going into the social service kind of arena and that might be why it's controversial um what's what's your sense why is it valuable for your company to do these kind of reports for police um well why it's valuable for us to do them for anybody honestly like well we'll work with prevent we've done this work with provincial governments we've done we've done some of this work with human trafficking for instance in Alberta um mental health and addictions it's you can't you know you can't make a statement about what what you need if you don't understand what you have and you can't um you can't take a really solid step forward if uh if you don't have all the all the facts as as difficult and limited as they are it's kind of behooves us to use what what's out there especially this public data it's it's sitting there for us to to use and leverage in our in our decision making so um yeah it's what's important to us and we're a data technology social for social impact um we're also okay with being a little bit disruptive and that's our role in the ecosystem there's there's lots of consultants that will you know produce reports that might sit on the shelf or we're uh clearly not those but when you pitch your services what what do you pitch as the you know ideal outcome like you know when you see the vpd spend six figures on my work and you should get x out of it what what should they what do you think is a measure of your work being impactful and being successful for them I say that um it'll it'll change the conversation in the community and hopefully that conversation leads to better coordination better transparency um and ultimately better outcomes right gc your services best suited though to to be providing that analysis for police agencies there's a more for municipal governments or provinces I mean the provincial expenditures shouldn't they be the ones looking into this stuff I would love to work with provincial governments especially because majority of the funds comes directly from provincial governments it's not always it's not always where there's interest in this type of work has the leak impacted the report at all or the work you were doing on the report having to release it early to the public um what it impacted my my personal well-being and travel um I mean I mean the report it was the report right it's uh you can't really make too many changes at this point but I mean yeah of course it it changes the it changes how we position ourselves in in the world right because it's it's has so many legs right now that we can't obviously control the the narrative of of what happens but that's okay awkward silence all right okay no if there's uh no questions we'll naturally take a break right now a little a few minutes I know there are people on the phone um but you know we're going to ask you to stay in the queue and we'll hold your questions till after the official news conference all the key players will still be here so we'll take a a five five minute or so break right now