Shoestring Services

A message from Elaine J Laberge, Shoestring Founder and Director

Canada is one of the few, if not only, Commonwealth nations that doesn’t have any initiatives to support people from poverty to obtain a university education even though decades of research demonstrates that education lifts people out of poverty and mitigates poverty across generations.

Because social class is a taboo subject in Canada, we don’t know how many poverty-class students (PCS) enrol in taxpayer-funded universities, transition into and through an undergraduate degree, and into successful and sustainable careers. Universities do not track the social class demographics of their students. PCS live in the shadows and margins of university landscapes because of the stigma of poverty, profound ignorance of what causes poverty (beyond blaming the individual), and a general sense of unbelonging in these places that were built and are maintained for the middle- and upper-classes.

I knew that I needed an education to escape poverty but like many people from poverty, I didn’t even know university existed. Childhood teachers assumed I would become a teenage mother drop out. In high school, I was pipelined into college. After college, I was living in poverty with no way out. While trying to finish my first undergraduate degree I was living in abject poverty and began to wonder if my fate was the same as the generations before me. Then I began to question systems, structures, and cultures that play an integral part to perpetuating poverty. Drawing on my lived experience expertise, I started conducting research and making visible the lives of poverty-class students. Eight years of research culminated in the creation of the Shoestring Initiative which is the first-of-its-kind social enterprise to create communities of advocacy, mentorship, support, intercultural connectedness, and deep equity change for poverty-class students in Canadian universities. This initiative and its offerings are evidence-based and draw on the social innovation model we (research participants and myself) created in my doctoral program.

Shoestring Initiative Model

Our non-deficit-based and decolonial model has four components:

1) Build community,

2) Educate multiple stakeholder groups about poverty,

3) Engage in and teach advocacy, and

4) Create institutional structural/cultural change including policy shifts.

Our target markets are:

1) Education (students, families, and education communities at the post-secondary and K-12 levels),

2) Industry (advance social class diversity, support students to build careers, and deep equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) work that includes social class),

3) Organizations that address poverty, and

4) Politicians to address the lack of supports for poverty-class students and to advocate for the inclusion of poverty as prohibited grounds of discrimination.

The Initiative was built upon an iterative model of collaboration, local-level engagement, institutional change, provincial and federal human rights changes, and societal shifts. Through regional, national, and international activism, we added to this model: practical supports, global engagement, student advocacy, and creating alternative futures. We have challenges.

We can’t afford to register as a non-profit so we can’t apply for funding. As a result, I have been funding this social enterprise while working multiple jobs to survive. Addressing classism in this colonized nation is challenging as this is not a “hot” topic even though the pandemic made visible the social class divide. Poverty-class students are not a lucrative demographic for universities; these students are not included in budgets and strategic plans. The markets we want to target will require a phased approach and connecting with allies who want to see changes at individual and structural levels. The people who will make all of this happen are lived experience experts of (the gendered nature of) poverty and allies.

With a focus on EDI and decolonization, the Shoestring Initiative is poised to deliver ground-breaking services and products to address education equity for social good.

How our social enterprise is changing the game in the post-secondary, non-profit, and business sectors

There is a history to education inequity and poverty discrimination in Canada and its taxpayer-funded universities. After WWII, when universities expanded their enrolment to include the working-class, there was a huge outcry for fear that expanding the class demographic to include the “lower” classes would dilute higher education and hurt international rankings. Fast forward to 2023, and there remain echoes of these sentiments that shape university policies, procedures, curriculum, and strategic plans. However, this is overlooked in EDI mandates and plans and starts at the federal level with the exclusion of poverty-class people as an equity-seeking/deserving group and the exclusion of poverty (“social condition) as prohibited grounds of discrimination. Moreover, there is a lack of research in Canada on the lives of students (and faculty, administrators, advisors) from poverty in universities. We only have rough estimates to go from: Around 65% of Canadians are denied their right to access higher education. These facts alone are not enough to make this a pressing issue. If we want to tackle our social problems (homelessness, housing precarity, food insecurity, climate crisis), then we need all hands-on deck and education plays a critical role.

How Shoestring is addressing these intersecting social injustices is by drawing on the rich mosaic of knowledge systems of people who are lived experience experts. Knowledge democracy, for the Initiative, is defined as drawing on 99% of the world’s knowledge instead of the status quo 1%. In this way, we create in-the-meantime solutions to build capacity in community members and shifts at the institutional level to create long-term sustainable solutions. In addition, Shoestring aligns the human rights with business. That is, we remain cognizant of the role of existing university business models and how the Shoestring mandate and service offerings need to mesh with the reality of how universities are run and funded.

Over the last eight years, as Founder and Director of the Shoestring Initiative, Elaine has mobilized my research and our offerings across this nation and globally. Multiple target audiences want what we have created. Up until Shoestring, people just didn’t know where to start or how to go about building their own systems and structures to support students from poverty.

This innovative social enterprise model is not only the first-of-its-kind in Canada based on evidence, lived experience expertise, and allyship, but it is shaped by case study exemplars internationally. We not only are/will teach how to develop widening access and participation initiatives for students and much needed policy change but do so from the department to the faculty to the institutional levels. Shoestring will be instrumental in K-12 to stop the pipeline of children in poverty into further poverty sans-high school diploma and without a chance to realize their dreams. The research is also clear that post-secondary students from poverty (often generally referred to as first-generation) have a significantly reduced chance of fulfilling and sustainable careers post higher education. Thus, the Shoestring community will build relationships with industries to support the successful transition from school into career positions and further lifelong learning.

To support students from poverty we also teach how to address poverty discrimination that creeps into policy, pedagogy, and curricula. We are spearheading a campaign to destigmatize poverty by debunking social class myths (bootstrap dogmas, rags-to-riches tropes, and American Dream fallacy). Part of this campaign is learning to honour our cultures and ancestral knowledges—people whose lives are shaped by the injustices of poverty are not less than and this is central to the work and advocacy that Shoestring undertakes.

We know that all of this requires radical imagination but this is what the ground-breaking Shoestring Initiative social enterprise is built upon.

In the next year, our business goals include:

Within the next year, The Shoestring Imitative, at a minimum will be provincially if not federally registered as a non-profit with charitable status. This will allow us to meet the following business goals that will support our vision of ending poverty discrimination and class-based educational inequity in Canadian universities.

Develop and implement a fund-raising campaign.
Fully develop the social innovation model.
Create a 2-day and intensive poverty knowledge programs, the latter of which provides certification for attendees.
Develop and deliver webinars to teach university communities the importance of creating and implementing widening access and participation mandates for poverty-class students.
Design and implement a poverty destigmatizing communications and educational strategy for audiences internal and external to higher education.
Hire contract lived experience experts to help meet the business goals.
Conduct outreach with families and family-support organizations to educate on the importance of K-12 and post-secondary education.
Design and implement a client relationship management database.
Create a social media campaign to raise awareness of Shoestring and its offering based on evidence.
Identify areas that require further research such as how social class affects homeless.

How the Shoestring Initiative makes a positive impact in our local communities

While the Shoestring Initiative is being built nationally, it is intended to support regional efforts. For instance, as mentioned previously, there exist regional disparities in how the housing crisis is experienced (Sydney versus Edmonton, for example). Our regional universities have similar mandates in terms of EDI but diverge in terms of who their demographics are and how to best support them. Each region is unique and our approach to delivering services and products must represent these regional differences and be responsive accordingly. A region that has historically relied on the automobile industry which no longer exists, is much different than say, for example, Calgary that heavily relies on the oil industry. The challenges that each region experiences will be part of how the Shoestring’s program offerings are developed.

In my research, the region that students grew up in played a huge part of how their university experiences were shaped. There is a vast difference between growing up in poverty in rural Alberta than urban Toronto.

In order to make an impact regionally, we must be connected to the region’s industry to fully develop programs to support students to successfully transition into jobs where they can fully utilize their talents and education and realize their career dreams. In short, each region has industry partners that are essential to the success of programs we design and teach to implement.

Each region’s university success with our programs and educational initiative will be leveraged at the national and international levels. Our research (including case studies), programs, and advocacy have shown us the power of regional efforts to create fulsome supports for students from poverty locally and nationally.