Connecting with communities

Outreach, education across Ontario

In 2015-16, the OHRC continued to provide training with organizations and communities across Ontario. OHRC staff spoke at 69 public education sessions, reaching over 5,000 people. These face-to-face connections are an important part of maintaining an ongoing dialogue with partners and organizations, and with people who simply want to know more about their rights.

As well, almost 350 people attended Human Rights Training Days in Sudbury, in partnership with the Greater Sudbury Police Service, and Peel Region, in partnership with the United Way of Peel Region and the Regional Diversity Roundtable of Peel. These training days offered a wide range of sessions on topics like mental health, Indigenous peoples and human rights, preventing discrimination based on creed, and human rights basics.

With the aim of extending the impact and reach of our education activities to the widest possible audience, the OHRC works with partners to present “train-the-trainer” sessions. These sessions help equip trainers with knowledge and experience of a specific sector to add Code-related information to their training sessions.

It is an ongoing challenge to offer human rights training and education to people across Ontario – which is why the OHRC continues to expand its online learning resources. In 2015-16, the OHRC hosted live webinars and developed other online training resources that generate thousands of “unique page views” (the number of distinct individuals requesting pages) on the OHRC website. Here are some highlights:

Social media – modern tools for modern conversations

The OHRC’s Twitter following grew over 43% to almost 8,000, and Facebook fans grew almost 50% to over 4,400. Early in 2016, the OHRC added French language Twitter and Facebook accounts to build engagement with Ontario’s Francophone communities.