Extracting lessons from coping with COVID-19 in St. James Town, Toronto: identifying and strengthening the community’s social capital assets for responding to, mitigating, and preventing harms, and for preparing for future inter-related crises.

Project Overview

This project seeks to identify and strengthen the social capital and knowledge held by residents of St. James Town, Toronto, and the personnel of agencies that serve them. St. James Town is an ethnically diverse, lower income, high-rise based neighbourhood in the downtown east of Toronto, Canada. The study regards the pandemic as multifaceted, and as having wellbeing impacts not just from contracting the virus, but from everything that goes into preventing the transmission. A starting point assumption is that there are multifaceted impacts of the prevention efforts on people’s physical and mental health, their social lives, and their economic situation, all of which are intertwined. The goal is to inform the best possible responses to the needs in the community that are exacerbated by the pandemic, mitigating harms of the pandemic going forward especially as these interact with additional stressors, and being maximally prepared to respond to future crises of the same or similar type.