The following newsletter went out to subscribers on Thursday, June 18 with the headline Here’s What the Latest Data Tells Us About Child Poverty in Toronto. Sign up for our monthly newsletter.
Social Planning Toronto has released Advancing the Promise for Toronto’s Children: Child and Family Poverty Report Card, Toronto 2026 (Municipal Election Edition)c. This report draws on the latest available taxfiler data from 2023 and highlights the growing and deepening experience of child poverty.
2023 marked the third consecutive year of rising child and family poverty rates in Toronto, with 25.7% of children (more than one in four) living in poverty. The depth of poverty is also increasing among low-income families, with median incomes across some family types falling to $16,899 below the poverty line.
Since 2023, the City has introduced and expanded a number of poverty reduction initiatives—including TTC fare capping, an expansion of the student nutrition programs, supports for renters, and creating purpose-built affordable and supportive housing—but responding to this crisis will require income supports and investments in social infrastructure at a scale only higher levels of governments can provide. The report contains detailed recommendations to all three levels of government, with a particular emphasis on asking the provincial and federal governments to do more.
The report has been covered by The Toronto Star, CBC’s Metro Morning, Toronto Life, CTV News, 680 News, and a number of multilingual community outlets.
2026 is an election year. SPT is encouraging candidates to present clear visions for reducing poverty and strengthening social infrastructure. We’ve created fact sheets that highlight specific municipal-level policy recommendations, with questions voters can use to ask council candidates how they plan to address child and family poverty in our city.
In this issue:
- Learn More About Child and Family Poverty Rates In Your Ward
- Event: Webinar, Child and Family Poverty
- Recap: City for All Community Summit
- SPT Staffer Honoured for Work in Previous Roles
- Event: TTCriders to Host Transit Summit
- Supervised Consumption Sites Forced to Close
- New Report from UWGT Examines Impacts of Funding Cuts
- Ontario Nonprofit Network's 2026 Sector-Wide Survey Now Open
Learn More About Child and Family Poverty Rates In Your Ward
Along with this report, SPT has launched an interactive tool that Toronto residents can use to better explore child and family poverty rates in each of Toronto’s 25 wards.
Child poverty affects families in every ward, and significant pockets of concentrated poverty persist. Nine out of Toronto's 25 wards had a child poverty rate of 30% or higher, and 43 neighborhoods within those wards had extremely high rates of child and family poverty—ranging from 40.0% to 61.3%.
Event: Webinar, Child and Family Poverty
On June 22 from 6:30 - 8 p.m., SPT will be hosting a webinar to share key findings from our latest report, Advancing the Promise for Toronto’s Children.
In this webinar, we will explore:
- Key findings from the 2026 report and what they mean for communities
- Recommendations for all levels of government
- How residents, organizations, and advocates can make child poverty a key issue in the upcoming municipal election
Recap: City for All Community Summit
Ahead of this fall’s municipal election, a coalition of community organizations will be working in collaboration with communities across Toronto to build a city-wide platform. The platform, City for All, will address the growing crises in health, poverty, housing, safety, and climate across the city.
Last Saturday, SPT welcomed 80 community members to a summit to help shape the platform through a lens of racial justice, reconciliation and disability inclusion. SPT would like to extend our gratitude to everyone who shared their invaluable insights and experiences. We also want to thank all our speakers, facilitators, notetakers, and volunteers for helping make the day possible. A special thank you to Brianna Olson Pitawanakwat and Nanook Gordon, who opened the gathering with a land acknowledgment and song, for grounding the summit in Indigenous teachings. We are also grateful to the Parkdale Foli Drummers (pictured above) for their vibrant performance.
Stay tuned in the coming months for more information about the City for All Platform as it is developed.
Photo by Razeeb Chowdhury.
SPT Staffer Honoured for Work in Previous Roles
On June 3 and 4, the Alliance for Healthier Communities celebrated the 2026 Transformative Change Awards. This year’s Jennifer Rayner Research for Health Equity Award went to the community–academic research partnership between Parkdale Queen West Community Health Centre and the University of Toronto. For nearly a decade, this partnership has examined and addressed the experiences of pregnant and postpartum parents facing structural barriers such as poverty, food insecurity, limited social supports, newcomer status, and inequities in perinatal care.
Among the recipients was SPT’s own Stacia Stewart, who spent 18 years leading health programming with Parkdale Queen West CHC before joining us last year as our Director of Policy, Research, and Communications. SPT is incredibly fortunate that Stacia brings so much valuable expertise to this role.
Congratulations to Stacia and the rest of the Parkdale Queen West CHC for their incredible work and this well-deserved recognition!
Stacia Stewart, pictured third from left. Photo via.
Event: TTCriders to Host Transit Summit
Advocacy group TTCriders is hosting a Rider's Summit for Better Transit on Jun 21, 2026 from 11:00am to 4:00pm EDT at the Scarborough Civic Centre (150 Borough Dr). Learn how to get involved in the fight for better transit ahead of the Toronto municipal election, and connect with other transit users and advocates who want more reliable, affordable, fast, and accessible transit.
Supervised Consumption Sites Forced to Close
On Saturday, June 13, two more Supervised Consumption Sites (SCS) across Toronto were forced to close after the Provincial Government withdrew funding. The Local profiled the Moss Park site in its final months. The piece includes an interview with Shannon Wiens, chief executive officer of South Riverdale Community Health Centre (and SPT board member).
Moss Park was Toronto’s first SCS. It began in 2017 when activists opened a tent and started reversing overdoses themselves. Since then, Moss Park joined other SCSs across the country in reversing a cumulative 68,580 overdoses and counting.
Three privately funded SCSs continue to operate in Toronto, but they are facing increased pressures as they absorb more activity from the recently shuttered sites:
Donate to Kensington Market Overdose Prevention Site.
Donate to Street Health’s Overdose Prevention Site.
New Report from UWGT Examines Impacts of Funding Cuts
When the Ground Shifts, a new report from United Way Greater Toronto, examines the impacts of funding cuts on the immigrant and refugee serving sector. The community services sector delivers essential programs and services in areas such as housing, employment, health, education, child and family support, and community development. 44% of sector agencies surveyed for the report anticipated program closures and 56% indicated that they would experience program disruption due to funding cuts. Read the full report.
Ontario Nonprofit Network's 2026 Sector-Wide Survey Now Open
The Ontario Nonprofit Network (ONN) is inviting nonprofits in Ontario to fill out their annual survey. The data collected in previous surveys has supported with sparking collective advocacy, informing funding priorities, contributing to strategic planning and governance, shaping sector research, and supporting grant requests. The survey closes on July 6.