Community Organizing

One of WBCO’s core responsibilities is to ensure that governments, developers, property owners, organizations, businesses, and facilities are keenly aware of community priorities when making decisions that affect West Broadway. To maintain a clear sense of neighbourhood priorities, WBCO facilitates regular community consultation and planning efforts.

WBCO incorporated in May of 1997, and has since spearheaded numerous consultation and planning processes on issues ranging from neighbourhood safety to community gardening and greenspace development. Our most substantial efforts include the development of ‘Neighbourhood Housing Plans’ and overarching ‘West Broadway Community Plans’ every five years. Creating these plans requires months-long consultations and research processes that document the values and priorities of community members along with up to date data, statistics, and critical evaluation.

Our community’s most recent plans can be found here:

• West Broadway’s Five-Year Community Plan (2023 -2027)
• West Broadway's Five-Year Community Housing Plan (2021-2026)
• West Broadway Background Study (2018)

Other consultations and West Broadway-specific research:

• West Broadway Community Methamphetamine Strategy
• Divided Prairie Neighbourhood: West Broadway’s Story of Hope, Challenge, and Resiliency
• Winnipeg's Vanishing Rooming Houses: Change in the West Broadway and Spence Neighbourhoods

In order for social, economic, and environmental development to benefit all community members equitably, it is critical to establish a clear, achievable ‘theory of change’. This is a wide-ranging description of how and why a desired change is expected to happen. It is focused in particular on mapping out or filling in what has been described as the ‘missing middle’ between what a program or change initiative does (its activities or interventions) and how these will lead to desired goals being achieved. It does this by first identifying the desired long-term goals and then works backwards to identify all the conditions (outcomes) that must be in place for the goals to occur.