Defending Against The Myths Of Poverty.

Before there was an NCAP, there was an earlier incarnation organized when Deb O’Connor (the group’s founder) ran the Help Centre (a non-profit organized to help the unemployed), which was before there was a legal clinic. The community legal centre in Cobourg is a sister organization to The Help Centre. It really started with the Poverty Forum in April 1988, which was the first piece of work that Northumberland did with John Clarke. He was organizing poverty forums all around Ontario and NCAP worked with him to organize one in Cobourg. One of our group members, Carolyn Hamlin was a speaker at that Forum. After that there was a fluid group of low-income people in Northumberland who began to meet regularly, and who were very active in the 1990 provincial election campaign that unseated the Peterson Liberals. At the same time, John was assembling the people who formed the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty in 1989, and Deb O’Connor was one of those founders. She was also on Mothers Allowance through all this period and got onto the board of NAPO in ’91.

The Help Centre had a project called the Darcy Elgin Residents Association in the early 90’s and Deb co-ordinated and headed the group until she began working at the Legal Centre in 1993. The two other women in that group, which included Kim Goebel (a present NCAP member) and Christine Kelsey, worked with her on low-income issues during that time. When Deb started at the Legal Centre there was a community group who started the Northumberland Community Coalition, which was funded in 1995 by The Trillium Foundation, just in time for the Tories to get elected and start slashing services. There was an informal group of low-income people who were already meeting from the fall of ‘93 on, and when the NCC was funded, the group began calling itself NCAP and got some financial support from the NCC.

So the beginnings of NCAP were the result of work done by Deb O’Connor at the Legal Centre as a community development project, and staff at the Northumberland Community Coalition, most notably one Richard Shapcott. NCAP is a creature created by those two organizations. The NCC is long gone now, since the Tories made sure that Trillium did not continue funding social justice groups. That has not changed under the Liberals.

The group is now funded by a combination of private donations, funding from the labour council and through small grants, notably from the Public Service Alliance of Canada and from KAIROS in previous years. Deb has since retired from the Legal Centre and has resigned from NCAP to focus on family. The group is now run by Christine Watt, Paula Fillion, Kim Goebel and Cindy Buott. The group is beginning to grow and is constantly looking for fresh new faces of all ages and ethnic groups.