Abid Jan has 17 years of extensive work experience with social services practice in Ottawa for high need populations (children and youth, seniors and low-income demographics, individuals and families in crisis) in diverse communities, including Ottawa Community Housing.
Since April of 2010, Abid Jan has been working as the Director of Capacity Building with United Way East Ontario. In this role, he had the opportunity to lead the Children and youth portfolio for three years and oversee building safe and strong neighbourhoods with key partners across the eastern Ontario region.
For the past 12 years, has been managing the Healthy People Strong Communities focus area at United Way. The experience has helped him understand Youth Mental Health – addressing mental health through a place-based approach; working with diverse communities; lead community safety initiatives; youth homelessness, and various other initiatives.
Overall, Abid has more than 22 years of experience managing community development and community safety initiatives. Abid played a key role in developing and implementing several collaborative initiatives with Ottawa Police Service, which required multi-agency collaboration, community participation, and successful relationship building. These initiatives include the following:
o No Community Left Behind (NCLB): Abid conducted best practice research, designed the NCLB approach, engaged OPS in the conceptualisation phase and engaging diverse stakeholders in successfully implementing the crime prevention through social development approach in five at-risk neighbourhoods.
Besides successful trust-building with OPS and neighbourhoods transformation, the initiative was well recognised and won several awards.
OPS was one of the lead partner in replicating the work in Vanier as “Together for Vanier“; in Lowertown as “Lowertown our Home,” and in the West-end as “United Neighbours.” All these community safety initiatives are still serving the community despite 12-14 years since their inception.
Abid Jan prepared a detailed guide for replicating the NCLB initiative (https://nocommunityleftbehind.ca/Archive/implementing_nclb_complete_eng.pdf) that includes: NCLB strategy of crime prevention through social development; implementation guide; coordinator’s guide, community policing and law enforcement and evaluating the NCLB process.
o Community Development Framework (CDF): Following the success of the NCLB initiative, Abid Jan served as a non-positional leader to rally the City of Ottawa, the United Way of Ottawa, and other key community organisations behind the idea of replicating the NCLB throughout the City of Ottawa. Abid served as the primary point of contact to the City of Ottawa to support the Coalition of Community Health and Resource Centres in developing a collaborative Community Development Framework (CDF) for citywide replication of the NCLB approach.
o Creating the Change We Want: Abid Jan moved from the City of Ottawa to join United Way to secure United Way’s support for the neighbourhood capacity-building. At United Way Abid was able to ensure collaboration between the City and United Way, which has led to the development of a standard community leadership development program called Creating the Change We Want.
o Strong Neighbourhoods Initiative: Under the Strong Neighbourhoods Priority Goal, Abid was able to convene the Ottawa Neighbourhoods Social Capital Forum (ONSCF) to build safe and vibrant neighbourhoods. As a result of this multi-agency collaboration, the ONSCF has been able to develop a shared measurement system that is being used by all neighbourhood-based programs throughout Ottawa to measure progress on common success indicators.
o United for All. Since 2017, Abid has convened a Coalition of more than 100 partner organisations to work for overcoming hate and violence in Ottawa. Ottawa Police has been one of the founding partners in the work of United for All.
o Neighbourhood Equity Index (NEI). Abid closely worked with the City of Ottawa and Social Planning Council to complete the first iteration of the Ottawa Neighbourhood Equity Index in 2019. I have recently worked with OPS and SPC to populate hate crime data into the portal to inform and facilitate prevention strategies.
o Partnerships and building trust relations: At United Way, Abid Jan has been overseeing the development of several successful partnerships, programs and initiatives between the service providers and the community that assist the organisations in building an inclusive delivery model that reflects the identified needs of the community, city services, and the police service.
Working at UW also provided Abid Jan with the opportunity to sit on various coalitions and collective impact initiatives such as the Ottawa Black Mental Health Coalition and the CDF partnership for developing and implementing a place-based approach to mental health and community wellbeing.