2010 Deprivation Index

In early March, the Kingston Community Roundtable on Poverty Reduction released its 2010 Deprivation Index. The development of this index came from the originally mandated task for the Roundtable to establish a baseline for measuring poverty in our community. As we discuss in the report and, as we determined as a group, establishing a ‘poverty baseline’ is a very challenging task. Simple statistical measures and graphs often hide a lot of detail and reduce peoples’ life circumstances into arbitrary divisions – how much money they make, do they rent or own, are they on assistance, how many children do they have, and so on.

While this information is crucial to our understanding of poverty, we realized that most of the reports that we reviewed lacked context. Being poor in Kingston, is different from being poor in Sudbury, or Ottawa or Vancouver. We also realized that geography is most often the defining pervasive force in discussing poverty and in fact, measuring deprivation.

With this in mind, we made the decision to move away from measuring ‘poverty’ and instead to measuring ‘deprivation’. The notion of using deprivation rather than poverty to describe the circumstances of people living on low income was pioneered in post-war Britain. There, as in here, poverty was, and still is, defined in absolute terms. We were looking for a way to communicate the things that we knew anecdotally, for instance, stories of teenagers being unable to find work until they changed the address on their resumes from Rideau Heights to a better neighbourhood.
Changing your home address on a resume is most certainly an indicator of social deprivation but it is not readily quantifiable or therefore measurable.

In the late 1970s, the UK was moving towards describing poverty in more relative, rather than absolute terms. What that meant was people could be said to be poverty stricken when their income, even if adequate for survival, fell markedly below that of the rest of their community. This means that people who lack the resources to eat the kind of diet, participate in the kind of activities, and have the living conditions and amenities which are customary, or at least widely encouraged, or approved of in the communities in which they belong, are living with some level of deprivation.

This approach does not see poverty as a subsistence level defined by individual need but as relative to the general standard of living of the community as a whole. Now, don’t get us wrong. There is still absolute poverty in our community and in our country. The ever increasing number of shelter bed stays in Kingston and increasing food bank visits attests to the extreme levels of deprivation and exclusion experienced by members of our community.
What the deprivation index can help us see more clearly than looking at income levels alone is how a community can provide for low income members in other ways. For example a low income family who lives in a community with easy access to such things as good schools, clean, safe, affordable housing, healthy, fresh foods, affordable and safe child care, meaningful employment, will not be as burdened or deprived by their lower income, than another low income family with less or little access to such services.

The Roundtable's 2010 Deprivation Index looks at 6 domains of possible deprivation – including Education, Food, Geography, Health, Housing and Income.
When you consider all of these domains together a startling trend appears – the lowest income members of our community –some of them individuals, children, adults, families, older adults – appear to be deprived of the resources to fully participate in community life in Kingston. These members are less ready to start school, have lower levels of education attainment, are more likely to live in areas with high concentrations of affordable housing and where unemployment rates are higher. They are also less likely to own their own home and face significant shortfalls in being able to purchase the basic Market Basket of goods – which includes such things as food, shelter, clothing, and transportation.

The living conditions that our low income community members must endure are not conditions that they have chosen. It is not due to lack of effort of individuals, but rather these conditions are created by such things as the marketplace, and governmental policies and allocation of funding for resources. By extension individual effort alone is not enough to change the circumstances and access to resources necessary to lift people out of poverty. That is all of our responsibility.
The Roundtable’s 2010 Deprivation Index is available on our website at: www.kingstonpovertyreduction.ca