Community Safety and Well-Being Plan

​​The Safer Ontario Act, 2018 requires municipalities to prepare and adopt community safety and well-being plans in partnership with a multi-sectoral advisory committee. The Windsor Essex Regional Community Safety and Well-Being Plan has been developed in accordance with provincial legislation and with guidance from area municipalities and community stakeholders with the goal of re-imagining how to address local crime and complex social issues through preventative and collective action. To achieve this goal, the Plan is designed to bring together municipal governments, sector leaders, local service providers, and local community groups and organizations to identify, contextualize and prioritize local and regional risks.

Benefits

The Plan aims to take advantage of the community’s existing strengths, resources and best practices to create proactive approaches to address identified local risks. The benefits of this approach are:

• Enhanced communication and collaboration among agencies and organizations.
• Increased understanding of and focus on priority risks, populations and neighbourhoods.
• Ensuring services are provided to individuals with complex needs.
• Increased awareness, coordination and access to services for community members and priority populations.

How the plan was developed

Building on a foundation of regional collaboration and recognizing that safety and well-being is a shared responsibility of all members of a community, the municipal leadership in the City of Windsor and County of Essex have come together to create a regionally focused plan that respects the unique identities and context needs of each area municipality. The Plan was developed under the guidance of the Regional Systems Leadership Table, made up of leaders from across multiple sectors, the Enhanced Sector Network comprised of community organizations and committees working with historically underrepresented groups, and in constant collaboration with community members and municipal partners.

The development objectives of the Plan were to identify priority risk factors in the community, identify strategies to reduce those risks, and set measurable outcomes for the success of those strategies. Through consultations, the following three key Community Safety and Well-Being (CSWB) risk categories were identified: Housing and Neighbourhoods, Mental Health and Substance Use, and Financial Security. However, through the development of the Plan an additional priority was identified: Improving overall governance and data collection and sharing between multi-sectoral partners responsible for delivering on community safety and well-being priorities.

Looking forward

By establishing strong systems to support governance and information sharing between sectors and services, the Plan aims, among its primary goals, to build a foundation of silo-busting systems and structures that will support ongoing initiatives and priorities well past the scope of the specific goals and initiatives presented in the document.

Resources

Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design: A Guideline to Designing and Building a Safer Community (brochure)