KENORA — An updated plan slated to guide how Kenora deals with matters of community safety and the general wellness of its residents is scheduled to go before city council this month.
The new community safety and well-being plan has been under development since 2023. That summer was when the Crime Prevention and Community Well-being Advisory Committee started its work on one of its goals of developing the new plan, said Eric Shih, the community safety and well-being coordinator for the City of Kenora.
The province requires communities to have updated safety plans and Kenora’s was due for a refresh, Shih said, but he added that the exercise was done for many more reasons that to just fulfill legislative obligations.
“It's not a plan that we want to … live on a shelf,” he said. “It's something that, really, it's designed for the whole community to be proud of in terms of the work and to use to start to be able to work on some of the actions.”
The committee has been working with a consultant with expertise in crime prevention through social and community development. Shih said that the whole process has been done in a way to ensure robust data collection and input from a wide range of stakeholders.
“It really is about making something that's rigorous and evidence-based,” he said. “Making sure that we reach and get to a point where … everybody had the opportunity to be able to participate and answer questions.”
The process has involved data collection from publicly-available sources like Statistics Canada as well as sourcing information from individual organizations and sectors, a community survey (which Shih said had over 1,000 respondents, which he added, given Kenora’s size, showed very strong engagement), as well as conducting focus groups, round tables and one-on-one interviews with a wide range of stakeholders from the business community and residents (including youth) to social services providers, law enforcement and more.
Indigenous sharing circles were also held, he said, to help solicit feedback from First Nations and Métis respondents.
The result of all of these efforts, he said, is scheduled to be a plan that lays out a series of recommendations and actions, with some recommended be done quickly and others over a longer term.
“I do know that the committee, the advisory committee that that led this process, really took all that information that was shared … and made the best decisions in terms of prioritizing, or made what they thought were decisions to prioritize what can be done within the plan,” Shih said.
Kenora city council is scheduled to receive and vote on the plan’s adoption at its March 18 meeting.
