AIC's Recent and Ongoing Projects

Financial Literacy and Asset Development

AIC is currecntly expanding our financial literacy and asset development program. We have built on the success of our FITS Project (free income tax sites) which involved creating storefronts and a community presence for financial literacy training.  In 2007 and 2008, AIC collaboratively ran FITS free tax preparation centers in both Toronto and the Greater Vancouver area that were open six days a week at times convenient for working people, this past tax season. We prepared taxes for low- and moderate-income families, linking them with unrealized benefits such as the GST credit, CCTB and the Canadian Employment Credit.  The cornerstone of this work is our targeted outreach campaign, for which outreach staff and trained community leaders went door-to-door talking with families and asking a series of questions to determine whether families filed taxes, met the criteria for other benefits eligibility, and/or used a commercial tax preparation service or a rapid refund loan, and at what cost. 

We are now modeling formal financial literacy and asset development classes on this approach by engaging low income people on the doors and in their neighbourhoods.  We feel this is a groundbreaking approach to building community wealth and economic capacity in Canada's low income neighbourhoods.  We are currently looking for funding for expand this program, please follow this link to contribute - Donate Now >>>

Community Leadership Schools

Over the past few years AIC has gained extensive experience and built a tremendous knowledge base on how to develop leaders and engage communities. We have used this experience to develop our Leadership Schools.  Leadership Schools are full day trainings to give community members and leaders the skills necessary to build a local community organization.  As leaders are developed locally, they take over the facilitation of leadership schools to ensure they are organically connected to the community in which they take place. 

AIC’s leadership school program engages the community with the goal of creating local organizational structures (chapters) that are open to community-based ideas about how best to address the socio-economic challenges that affect all low-income people.

Tenant Working Groups

	Tenant Working Group members give a press conference after winning a $250,000 rent abatement

The tenant working group model of civic engagement arose after participants in our workshops, trainings and meetings identified negligent landlords as their single largest concern affecting their community.  This model calls for graduates of our leadership schools that have identified landlord issues as their primary concern to establish working groups with other concerned tenants in the neighbourhood.  Working with other community stakeholders, the tenant working groups can leverage change in their community and tie their efforts together with the other tenant working groups to move towards a larger, more structural change.  AIC has experienced great success with this model, with groups in over 50 buildings across Toronto.