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Prosperity Gateways

Are you looking to make real impact on reducing poverty in your municipality? We can help.

Prosper Canada partners with municipalities nation-wide to design and embed tailored financial empowerment services such as one-on-one financial help, tax filing supports, and benefits access support, into your existing municipal programs.

Services

Our goal is to provide a tailored approach to meeting your municipality’s poverty reduction goals, through the lens of financial empowerment (FE). We are partners in your journey, and provide the following services:
  • Learn together: Learn about what FE is and how it can help you achieve your goals. Build your municipality’s internal capacity to design and embed human-centered FE programs, learning with a community of practice.
  • Quick wins: Get tailored support to help you identify ways to strengthen your existing FE services through strategy development and coaching.
  • Deep dive: Prosper Canada guides you through an intensive 3-year process to research, design and embed sustainable FE services within your municipality.
  • In with the new: Access design support for a specific FE service you already know you need. For example, if your residents have been asking for a free tax-filing service, we can help you design it.
If your needs require an alternate perspective, don’t hesitate to reach out. We would be happy to create something that will work for your situation.

 

Approach

We use a powerful, human-centred design approach to create programs that respond to people’s real needs.

Prosper Canada’s phased approach creatively engages all levels of decisions makers within your municipality. This helps us develop buy-in, provides us with clear decision making, and ensures the service has been developed to meet both the needs of residents and the strategic priorities of your municipality. Our approach builds on foundational primary research with stakeholders, and guides us through the design, pilot and implementation of the service.

 

Impact

Through the City of Toronto’s Poverty Reduction Strategy, we worked with the Toronto Public Library to embed an exciting new service: One-on-one money help is now provided by expert community agency staff at two library branches. In the first year, some of the impact includes:
  • 1,021 people met one-on-one to solve a money challenge (like filing taxes, accessing government benefits, etc.).
  • An additional 504 people connected with agency staff to get a quick piece of information, ask a question, or attend a group program/workshop.
  • Over a six-month period, clients of this program accessed an additional $825,000+ in tax refunds and government benefits.
  • 94% of people who responded to a survey about their experience with the service said they were ‘extremely likely’ to refer a family member or friend.
 

Tools and resources