Ontario Basic Income Pilot is Cancelled!

Our guest speaker at the September 19th meeting will be be Deidre Pike, Senior Planner at the Hamilton Social Planning Research Council.   Deidre was a candidate for the Liberal party in the recent provincial election.   She is a columnist for the Hamilton Spectator, and frequently writes about issues of equity and inclusion.

 

Deidre will be speaking about the Ontario Basic Income Pilot Project which is to be terminated prematurely next March 2019.   Hamilton was one of the sites selected for this new project in social assistance, and Deidre was one of the key researchers on the project.   This will be an extremely timely presentation, given recent news. Those who attended Supercrawl this past weekend may have seen the posters created about individuals who had benefited from this program.

 

Speaker Biography
 

Deirdre Pike's fascination for sharing stories drives who she is and what she does as both a Senior Social Planner for the Social Planning and Research Council of Hamilton (SPRC) and columnist for The Hamilton Spectator. In both roles, Pike sees it as her responsibility to facilitate conversation and to improve community engagement.

 

Working closely with Hamilton Organizing for Poverty Elimination (HOPE) and Hamilton’s Roundtable for Poverty Reduction, Deirdre is assisting the community to understand the impact of income inequality on individual lives and the life of the community as a whole.

 

As a voice for the LGBTQ community, Deirdre explains that she is not a representative for the community as a whole, but rather one voice from this distinct community of communities. Through this leadership position, Deirdre wants to let the voices of marginalized people to be heard and to encourage others to accept being counter-cultural.

 

She lives with her partner, Renee, in Hamilton’s Strathcona Neighbourhood where she cooks, cycles, gardens and plays tennis.