What is the Be Yourself, See Yourself pilot?

Be Yourself, See Yourself is building off the learnings from the first pilot by providing capacity building on social identity data collection and the opportunity to test the survey tool developed in the first pilot across the community and social services sector. The project’s aim is to assist the social services sector in furthering their learning on best practices, so that they may better support equity-seeking communities. Additionally, this pilot will support the sector to determine what changes are needed to implement social identity data collection more broadly. This pilot is being funded by The City of Toronto, Ontario Trillium Foundation and United Way Greater Toronto and is being implemented from October 2021 to December 2022. Findhelp| 211 Central is hosting this project. It is an organization that acts as the front door into the community social services system and looks to champion this work across our sector colleagues, partners and allies. Agencies are invited to join a movement of local agencies working together to collectively learn how to collect and use social identity data. The goal of this collective learning journey is to increase our voice as a community social services sector, and together enhance individual agencies’ capacity around social identity data collection. It is our hope that this data will also provide an opportunity for the people you serve to have new ways to be heard and seen.

The Be Yourself, See Yourself Pilot is designed to test this data collection tool.

The objectives are to understand how to best support agencies in:

• collecting sociodemographic data
• providing input on social identity data they collect
• using this data to advance better outcomes for equity-deserving communities

Community agencies will be provided with:

• a supportive environment for all levels of learners and user-friendly place to
• practice data collection with an equity lens and get ideas – whether you already collect social identity data or do not
• capacity building that you can actually use
• tools for making choices in data collection that align with your equity goals
• the chance to align on social identity data collection to support your collective action
• an opportunity for you to help co-develop emerging best practices in data collection and reporting in Toronto

Who is this second pilot for?

Any social service agency working in Toronto is invited to participate in this pilot. We are looking to recruit 60-70 community social service agencies working and operating in the Greater Toronto Area.  If you are an agency that would like to participate or if you would like to suggest an agency for participation, please complete this expression of interest form.

How will social demographic data be collected?

Part of this Be Yourself, See Yourself pilot is to develop ways of collecting social demographic data in a way that works for agencies like yours. You can collect social demographic data on paper or digitally. You will also learn the privacy requirements necessary to collect social demographic data. During this pilot, agencies will use a social demographic survey tool that has been adapted from the City of Toronto adaptation of the TC-LHIN tool. This is a survey tool that will collect information such as race, gender identity, sexual orientation, and income. Agencies do not have to use all of the questions in this survey, just the ones that make most sense for your context, and are not required to share results. 

What will be done after this second pilot?

Recommendations from the second pilot will assist with implementing the data collection tool across all City of Toronto, United Way Greater Toronto and Ontario Trillium Foundation funded agencies. Recommendations will also be used by non-profit partners to inform programs, services and policies to better support equity-seeking communities.

The purpose of the first pilot was to test sociodemographic questions with service users and to understand challenges of collecting this data from them, as well as challenges reporting the data. This pilot included 11 diverse agencies which varied in size, types of programs and services offered and communities served.