The idea to undertake a demographic survey came from CSI’s IDEA (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility) Committee, which is a Board of Directors governance committee.
Composed of CSI members, DECAs (work exchange participants), Staff and Board – the IDEA Committee’s purpose is to steward and support CSI’s work to become more inclusive, diverse, equitable and accessible. The Committee’s initiatives have included, but are not limited to: developing a vision for our work; developing the demographic survey; programming education opportunities; and driving important policy updates such as CSI’s Diversity, Inclusion and Anti-Discrimination Policy.
The purpose of our demographic survey is to use this data to know who is well-represented at CSI and who is not, so we can address the potential barriers for individuals and communities who are currently underrepresented at CSI. To help contextualize the data, we compare it with the 2011 Census data from the City of Toronto (CSI’s home base).
We’ve gathered data on 10 demographic indicators for 4 different CSI subgroups – Staff, Board, DECAs and CSI Members. The community subgroup is also broken down into 4 further subgroups to reflect our different membership offerings – CSI Annex, CSI Spadina, CSI Regent Park and CSI Online Membership.
