COMMUNITY ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: A FORCE FOR NEIGHBOURHOOD RESILIENCE

Abstract

Despite long-standing, complex challenges facing Winnipeg including poverty and social exclusion, communities within this city are creating multifaceted, innovative, and holistic solutions. This is often understood as community economic development (CED). This approach can be difficult to define and includes a multitude of examples, each with very different characteristics. This is primarily because the approach focuses on community-leadership and local development, resulting in models that are tailored to the unique characteristics of each community.

In Winnipeg, there have been three evolutions in CED over the past twenty years. First, there was a coalescence around this approach with a number of key organizations created explicitly using CED as their guiding methodology. After that, place-based development where CED principles were put into action to revitalise struggling neighbourhoods emerged. More recently, social enterprise is developing as a model with significant promise for creating healthy, community-owned, local businesses and good jobs for people who struggle to gain employment.

This article details this development, the political environment that has either restricted or enabled this approach, and some key organizations utilising community economic development in Winnipeg.