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One of the most daunting tasks that governments are faced with today is how to make the best use of limited resources. Within the vast array of calls upon the public purse, the provision of income support for those who have no other financial resources is surely one of the most pressing and expensive programming demands governments face. Reform of social support programming is one of the primary strategies that governments are following to try to make the best use of resources available to them.

In Canada, federal and provincial governments have pursued a number of approaches to the reform of social support programming. One of the most substantial and comprehensive endeavours has been the joint federal/provincial Strategic Initiatives (SI) program. This is a multi-faceted program composed of several innovative components that have been developed and piloted across Canada. As the background documents for the SI describe it, the program:

...is to provide a funding mechanism for the federal government to work in partnership with provincial and territorial governments to test new and innovative approaches in high priority areas of employment, education and income security. Projects supported by SI are funded on a 50/50 basis between [the respective] governments.

The word “strategic” has great import in this Initiative because of the context in which the partners at federal and provincial levels are operating. That is, there are five closely related and major conditions that must be addressed these days in publicly supported social programming. These are both “structural” and “societal” conditions. Three can be seen as challenges to support of programming, and two can be seen as opportunities to be considered in programming. They are:

Challenges

Structural

• Constrained budgets; i.e., fewer financial resources upon which governments can draw for support of social programming; and
• Increased levels of need for social programming; i.e., increased proportions of those who fall below poverty lines or are otherwise economically vulnerable (displaced workers in resource and traditional manufacturing industries, etc.).

Societal

• A diminution in the degree of public support for social programming, with less tolerance for this support and a concomitant demand for more precise targeting of any support that is provided.¹

Opportunities

• A number of existing programming approaches that are sufficiently effective to provide solid building blocks for future programming within the current context of challenges; and
• A greatly increased expectation, based in policy and memoranda of understanding, for collaboration between levels of government and among these levels and the community — for the design and co-management of programming.

Faced with these challenges and opportunities, the key to effective social reform has to be strategic thinking. Programs that are currently in use must be assessed for effectiveness, and lessons learned from them should be applied to future programming. These future programs must be very carefully constructed, implemented and evaluated to make sure that they reflect the best use of limited resources. Central to that program design is identifying what has been effective and building upon it, wherever this seems to be a promising approach. In turn, these newer programs must be assessed for their effectiveness and efficiency and for what can be learned from them for subsequent programming. It is an iterative process and one that must be increasingly focused, increasingly strategic in conception and application.

One such program conceived and supported through the SI is the pilot testing of 11 enhanced Assessment, Counselling and Referral (ACR) pilots across British Columbia.² We emphasize “enhanced” because these functionshave been an integral part of federal and provincial programming for individuals on provincial Income Assistance (IA) and those who are on federal Employment Insurance (EI).³ Thus, the objective of the ACR/SI was to:

...test and demonstrate an enhanced assessment, counselling and referral system for people on income support. It is expected to improve the linkages within and between employment programs, the individual on income support, and the labour market. (from the background documents provided for the Request for Proposals (RFP) for the evaluation — emphasis ours).

The ACR/SI pilot projects were to incorporate up to five key program components, depending on their local service needs assessments and assessment of their client profile. The key components from which they could choose, and those they could modify as they felt best, were:

1. Starting Points group assessment process to assist clients in developing a “First Steps” action plan towards employment;
2. In-depth group assessment/orientation (especially for multi-barrier clients);
3. Diagnostic assessment for those whose barriers to employment exceed the capacity of standard services provided by the funding partner staff or contracted agencies (especially for clients with specific physical, psychological and/or learning disabilities);
4. Group career planning building on recognized best practices in this process; and
5. Learner support to reduce personal/social barriers for those clients who require this service to increase their capacity to meet their employment goals.

The content of the ACR/SI was innovative in that it called for enhancement rather than duplication or the establishment of hitherto untried programming. But it was also distinctive in the means by which it was to be developed and managed. Again, turning to background documents we find that:

The ACR/SI is unique because it was conceived within a broad framework of partnership between the Government of Canada and two ministries of the Province of British Columbia....it was intended to function as an inter-governmental process that extends well beyond the usual level of joint funding and mutually exclusive responsibilities of separate governments. The ACR/SI featured a delegation of joint planning, design, service delivery and accountability responsibilities to the government partners with an equal opportunity for input for each...

...it was at the local level where much of the responsibility for planning [etc.] of enhanced [ACR] programs and processes was intended to take place. Nine local Committees were established to create 11 pilot projects in various communities. The Committees were not required to deliver the same services in the same way.

The partnership program...was...to bring together...[the partners] to address the common goal of moving individuals on income support from dependence to independence and long-term attachment to the workforce. (from documentation in the Request for Proposals).

In sum, the ACR/SI was to be a model of strategically placed, innovative, collaborative programming. It was proposed and supported at the highest levels of provincial and federal government, yet was to be largely locally designed, co-managed by the government partners, and delivered through contracts with community-based service providers.

Terms of Reference for the Evaluation

Integral to the planning and implementation of the ACR/SI has been the requirement that there be “program-wide evaluation at appropriate intervals.” In keeping with this approach there was a formative evaluation completed in 1997. A summative evaluation, including collection of baseline data was to follow, with completion scheduled for the end of the 1998/99 fiscal year.

The overall objective of the summative evaluation was stated in the Request for Proposals as being:

...to examine issues associated with program delivery, effectiveness, and outcomes, as well as ongoing performance monitoring. [And it] will evaluate the early outcomes of the Initiative. A baseline data component will be required.’

A multi-dimensional methodology was set out in the RFP and its final form is described in the chapter 2.

A Note on the Organization of the Summative Evaluation Report

The terms of reference for the ACR/SI summative evaluation also spoke to the way the report itself was to be organized. There is to be one volume that contains a summary of the findings from the various study components, and a second volume that is the Technical Report. The latter contains the full report of the findings of the baseline surveys, as well as other descriptive background materials on the pilot projects, lists of respondents and copies of data collection instruments, etc. The remainder of the present document comprises Volume 1.

Footnotes

1	This may seem to be a rather harsh statement, and the reader may wish to have some substantiation of it. In a series of other studies we have done, we have had occasion to interview a wide range of stakeholders in social services across the country — government, educators, social service providers — and to conduct comprehensive literature reviews on the status of public support of social service programming. This research confirms what we state here, though we must say it also confirms our own perception as observant members of our society. We would be pleased to provide some of our reports. Most notable would be the pre-sectoral study of the profession of social work (for HRDC/HQ) and the follow-up sectoral study that is currently under way. We have also had occasion to research this topic as part of workshops we have developed and delivered for the Ministry of Human Resources in B.C.
2	As the pilots evolved, one of the original 11 developed two other service centres, and another already had two service centres, making 14 service centres — all of which were reviewed as case studies. But we continue to refer to 11 pilots in all. Others did follow later, but this report deals with the 11 earliest pilots, including their additional service centres.
3	There is a kind of overlap of these two types of recipients, as the reader will know. That is, the 1997 changes in Employment Insurance legislation allow for persons who are on IA but who have been on EI in the previous three years (or five years in the case of parents who left the workforce because of responsibilities for young children) to access federally funded programming. These are called “mutual” clients.