Community resilience is at the heart of a document focused on the social well-being and quality of life of Okotokians.
The Social Wellness Framework was developed and approved by the Town toward the end of 2010, and came before the current council for a 10-year progress report at its Sept. 28 meeting.
“We still have a ways to go, but we’ve also made some significant progress towards some of the recommendations in the Social Wellness Framework,” said Debbie Posey, community wellness manager for Okotoks. “We have some areas we will continue to focus on.”
One of the major undertakings under the framework was to have the recommendations included in it integrated into other business centres and documents, including the recently-presented Municipal Development Plan and future budgeting.
“We are working to make sure that there is a bit more integration of social wellness priorities across corporate priorities, whether that’s triple bottom line or just making sure we look at all of the master plans and looking at priority areas across the board,” said Posey.
Triple bottom line budgeting for projects was an aspect included in the MDP update, which requires each Town initiative to be evaluated based on the actual cost to complete as well as environmental and social impacts.
While integrating the Social Wellness Framework into other Town departments is an ongoing endeavour, she said other recommendations from the plan have seen progress, such as addressing housing issues by bringing on the Affordable Housing Task Force.
“We know we’re getting closer to addressing some of those concerns around affordable housing and highlighting the need for affordable housing,” said Posey.
She said the Town has also made great strides in helping people with transportation issues, which was identified as a main priority in 2010, and has now been addressed with subsidized transportation and Okotoks Transit service.
While some people tap into the free and low-cost recreation opportunities, she said it’s an area the Town will continue to work on to engage the community more and ensure residents are using the service.
The next update on the plan will be done in 2023 rather than waiting another five years, she said, in order to align with the next round of Statistics Canada census data in 2022 as well as the Town’s household survey, and provide input on resident well-being post-COVID.
“We’ve got a pre-pandemic snapshot here that we did in 2019,” said Posey. “We’d like to do a bit of a post-pandemic snapshot.”
She said in 2019 there was a low response rate on public participation, likely due to other engagement surveys being conducted at the same time.
“This was another reason we thought let’s do this post-pandemic and work harder at getting those numbers of resident responses back so we have a clearer picture,” said Posey.
It’s anticipated responses will look different after COVID as people who have been affected by the pandemic respond to survey questions on wellness and satisfaction with Town services, she said.
