The Council collaborates with other strategic partners and coalitions in an effort to achieve a critical mass of voices calling for actions that would help address the needs of all the communities.
Raising Sexually Healthy Children (RSHC) African Canadian Coalition
After a Raising Sexually Healthy children (RSHC) training for front line workers from agencies serving African in the fall of 2003, the AfriCanadian Workgroup was formed to develop a culturally sensitive RSHC program for the African communities. From the consultation meeting with these communities, it was acknowledged that there was a need of addressing Sexual abuse in the African communities in the Greater Toronto Area. Stigma, traditional beliefs, literacy, income and immigration status were identified as the major impediments in disclosing sexual abuse. During the RSHC training, the participants, some of whom are sexual abuse survivors, expressed that this was a non-threatening program which would empower the participants, usually mother, to revisit their sexuality. It was agreed that this was an opportunity to develop a project that would address sexual abuse and therefore the evolvement of the “African Sexual Assault Victim Support and Prevention Initiative” The group was renamed RSHC African Canadian Coalition composed of Eritrean, French Speaking African, Ghanaian, Somali and Toronto Public Health Sexual Health Team representatives to identify funding to support sexual abuse victims in the African communities.
In 2009, the group come together again to look into the needs of African immigrant women. As the RSHC program was well received by the African communities, a project was developed using existing resources as a tool to empower immigrant women from four African communities to take leadership in sexual education within their families and their communities.
Coalition Partners include:
African Canadian Social Development Council
Africans in Partnership Against Aids
Eritrean Canadian Community Centre
Toronto Public Health
Alternative Planning Group (APG)
The Council has been a full member organization of the Alternative Planning Group (APG) since 2002 The APG, comprises the coordinating councils in four of the major ethnocultural communities in the Greater Toronto Area, namely, the African Canadian Social Development Council (ACSDC), the Chinese Canadian National Council-Toronto Chapter (CCNCTO, the Hispanic Development Council (HDC), and the Council of Agencies Serving South Asians (CASSA). The APG works to ensure a space and voice for the perspectives, needs, interests, and visions of ethno-racial communities within current social planning processes.
The APG as a unit and its individual members do this by working to engage these communities themselves in defining their challenges and offering solutions to those challenges in ways that help advance the common good in the context of diversity.
Applying its model of social planning to the challenge of achieving social inclusion, the APG members, in collaboration with the Community Social Planning Council of Toronto, engaged various stakeholder communities in the African, Chinese, Hispanic and South Asian Canadian communities in 2003-2004 to identify the various obstacles hindering the attainment of social inclusion in Canada for racialized communities. This engagement process resulted in the development of an alternative model for achieving social inclusion, which was released as Driving Social Inclusion, Turning on a Paradigm: An Alternative Model for Social Inclusion.
The alternative social inclusion model developed served as a platform for further explorations into community social planning. In 2004, when the City of Toronto decided to undertake a review of the social planning function in the city, the APG was able to make a seminal contribution on locating equity of participation, support and benefit at the heart of the planning process. This contribution (see Alternative Social Planning – A Paradigm Shift: Developing An Inclusive, Healthy Toronto). The ongoing work of the APG, continues to inform planning thinking across the city of Toronto in particular.
The Council has also worked with APG partners in the effective mobilization and support of immigrant seniors across Canada. To this end, it has undertaken advocacy for specific legislative and policy changes that would make a real difference in the lives of immigrant seniors.
Links to APG Members
| Chinese Canadian National Council-Toronto Chapter |
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| Hispanic Development Council |  |
| Council of Agencies Serving South Asians |  |
Hotel Workers Campaign
The Council was also a key community partner to a broad coalition of labour and community groups organizing to push for better living wages and employment conditions for workers in the lucrative hospitality industry in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), many of whom are the parents in the area’s immigrant communities.
We are proud that the contributions of the broad coalition to which the Council belongs has indeed resulted in unprecedented advances for all hotel workers in the GTA, and we intend to continue to support the attainment of similar decencies for more workers in that industry.