November 15, 2018
Building the Canadian evidence infrastructure for social policy
Canadian governments and their service-provider partners are tackling increasingly complex social problems. Effective solutions will depend on how well they can identify what initiatives are and are not working, and how well the most promising ones can be adapted and scaled up.
In response, we recommend investing in supports for building evidence across social policy. This includes establishing a clearinghouse of successful initiatives and organizations, providing technical supports to decision-makers, and redesigning services to be more people-centered. We also recommend ensuring collaboration across all three levels of government while encouraging local leadership of multi-jurisdictional initiatives. Systematically identifying and collating what we already know in Canada about what works in social policy, understanding more granularly what evidence means for decision-makers, choosing areas of social policy to prioritize next for evidence-building initiatives, and identifying local partners to lead the way, are useful starting points on this path.
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Canada’s Evidence Institutions
Alongside this paper, we also compiled a number of examples of Canadian capacity-building organizations and multi-sector partnerships that are successfully learning and sharing what works to help improve outcomes for people in their communities. We present this initial listing to help advance the effort of mapping Canada’s evidence landscape, and welcome additions and corrections to it.
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Authors
Anne White
Release Date
November 15, 2018
ISBN
978-1-77259-078-4
Mowat Research
No. 176
Innovation in Evidence
The Community Safety Knowledge Alliance and Mowat NFP hosted a two day event that brought international leaders and innovators in evidence-informed policymaking together to share emerging trends, discuss lessons learned, and provide fresh insight into the challenges facing policymakers, practitioners, researchers and academics in their quest to determine ‘what works’.
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