Photo: EverythingGP Staff

By Emily Keller

INTEGRATED COORDINATED ACCESS INITIATIVE

City enters second phase of public engagement for changes to social issues and services

Feb 13, 2020 | 4:38 PM

The City of Grande Prairie will be presenting proposed changes to how social services are provided to and accessed by the community next week.

As part of the City’s Integrated Coordinated Access (ICA) Initiative, service workers, providers, frontline workers, are being asked to attend engagement sessions that are being held next week.

Forrest McGregor, Research & Evaluation Analyst for the City’s Homeless Initiative, says the proposed changes come from engagement sessions with service providers and workers, as well as community members, held this past January.

“In between then and now, we’ve kind of taken that information and combined it into an actual, sort of more concrete proposal for changes that we might want to make in Grande Prairie to improve our system of access to programs.”

McGregor adds that there are a few things that did stand out at last month’s engagement sessions.

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“One thing that we really took away from it is that the community is excited about this kind of initiative, and it seems like people are hungry for a change that’ll make it easier to provide and to access services, so that was really encouraging.”

“Grande Prairie, actually, we have a lot of services and a lot of really good services, and so, I think potentially something that will get talked about next week is just looking at how we can get more out of that and communicate better with each other about services.”

McGregor says after the engagement sessions are done, the City will start to work on implementing the changes.

The first session takes place on Wednesday, February 19 from 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. at the Teresa Sargent Hall in the Montrose Cultural Centre, and the second one, which has an Indigenous focus, goes at the Ernie Radbourne Pavilion on Thursday, February 20 from 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.