In an effort to gain a better understanding of how people view and feel about poverty, the Central Alberta Poverty Reduction Alliance has been looking for input on an online survey.

Today's your last day to participate and as CAPRA Community Mobilizer Leslee Burton explains, they'll be using the feedback to help establish a poverty reduction strategy.

“We have an advisory council working on a needs assessment that will be ongoing over the next year and then hopefully from that stage we’ll be able to meet and develop a poverty reduction survey in conjunction with our community partners and especially with our community leaders because right now Red Deer does not have a poverty reduction strategy and without that it’s really tough to make some of the hard decisions”.

Burton stresses poverty does not just mean the homeless population.

“One of the things people don’t understand is that a lot of people living in poverty whether it be in Red Deer or in other places in North America, they can be the working poor.  So there are people working 2 jobs perhaps, maybe 3 part time jobs, but because they are working in the minimum wage pay scale, they just don’t have the means to meet the basic needs for their family”.

She stresses a poverty reduction strategy is key to pulling community partners and leaders together to work on common goals.

You have until the end of today (March 20th) to provide your input through the survey, click here.