The City of Lethbridge has developed a variety of community social development reports and studies to help create an inclusive and safe community where residents can access the social services and resources they need.
Community Wellbeing and Safety Strategy
The Community Wellbeing and Safety Strategy, updated in 2024, identifies community needs, gaps in services, priority populations and other strategic actions that contribute to the wellbeing of individuals, families and the community. It's a guiding document for the funding allocation and strategic work of CSD and supports the alignment between the work of the municipality and community stakeholders.
The City of Lethbridge has developed or funded the development of reports intended to support the actions of the municipality in it's role to support the development of housing within the community:
The Shelter Development Strategy outlines the City’s role and responsibility in ensuring there is adequate shelter capacity and diversity, to appropriately house people experiencing homelessness in the Community on any given night. The strategy frames the municipality’s role in reducing barriers to shelter development through land use regulation, land banking & asset rationalization and capital funding.
The Community Safety Action Plan is the City of Lethbridge's updated approach to advancing community safety. Building on previous initiatives, including the Downtown Clean and Safe Strategy and other community safety efforts, the Action Plan provides a comprehensive roadmap for addressing current and emerging safety challenges across the community.
Developed in collaboration with community partners, Lethbridge Police Service, businesses, and residents, the Action Plan identifies priority actions that support prevention, intervention, education, and enforcement. The Plan reflects current trends, community needs, and best practices, while strengthening coordination among responses working to improve safety and quality of life.
The Community Safety Action Plan consolidates and updates previous community safety strategies into a single framework with clear actions, timelines, and accountability measures. Through this coordinated approach, the City and its partners will work together to address social disorder, increase community connectedness, enhance public spaces, and create safer communities for all residents.
Priority action areas include:
Related documents:
A Community Plan is a strategic document required at the start of each Reaching Home program funding cycle that outlines how a community will utilize funds to reduce homelessness through Coordinated Access, data-driven strategies, and community engagement.
The Community Homelessness Report (CHR) is an annually-submitted Reaching Home reporting deliverable intended to support communities in preventing and reducing homelessness through a coordinated response. Within the report, communities self-assess their progress in a number of domains supporting these aims.
Point-in-Time (PiT) Count Reports
Every other year, we conduct a PiT report, which is a count of the number of people experiencing homelessness in the city on a single night. During the count, we also surveyed people staying in shelters, short-term housing or sleeping without shelter to gather self-reported data and their own perspectives. This provides a community-wide measure of homelessness which helps us plan for the requires support systems and services required to prevent and reduce homelessness.
We have also conducted administrative counts, which rely on reported data from service facilities and systems rather than street counts and self-reported experiences of homelessness.
View the following PiT counts and reports and administrative reports from recent years:
The Vibrant Lethbridge Poverty Report profiles the prevalence low-income indicators and factors in our community and the challenges that our low-income residents face. The goal of this report is to examine the impact of poverty in our community, bring awareness to it and determine effective actions that we can take to reduce the impact of poverty in Lethbridge.
We conducted focus group research with various low-income and at-risk groups in our community to help people more fully appreciate and understand their lived experiences.
The Age Friendly Lethbridge Community Profile is a collaboration of community stakeholders working together to shape an age-friendly community. We aim to promote healthy and active aging for our senior community by providing access to the community supports and services it needs.
View the Executive Summary of the Age Friendly Lethbridge Community Profile to learn more about the goals and background studies that helped shape the community profile.
While often thought of as a big-city problem, illicit drug addiction has accelerated in small towns across Canada. The 50 Voices of Recovery: Addressing the Drug Addiction Crisis in Lethbridge study documents how adults addicted to opioids, cocaine, and/or methamphetamines in Lethbridge are finding recovery and putting their lives back together again.
