Strengthening Durham Region’s Community Safety and Well-Being Plan
Community safety challenges rarely sit within one department or service system. Housing instability, mental health, substance use, and experiences of violence often intersect, requiring coordinated responses. For municipal leaders, the challenge is determining where to act, which approaches are supported by evidence, and how partners’ efforts can contribute to shared outcomes.
The Regional Municipality of Durham engaged Blueprint to strengthen the evidence underpinning its Community Safety and Well-Being Plan. Our work supported the Region in refining its priorities and developing clearer pathways from current activities to the changes it wanted to achieve.
The work spanned criminal involvement, substance use, mental health, social isolation, experiences of racism, homelessness and basic needs, and victimization. Across these interconnected areas, Blueprint brought together subject-matter expertise and a consistent analytical approach while recognizing that each required different responses.
We developed needs overview reports drawing on academic and policy research, local data, information about existing services, and input from regional staff. We built on theory-of-change prototypes previously developed with community partners. The reports examined contributing factors, identified populations experiencing disproportionate impacts, and assessed promising responses against Durham’s local context. This helped distinguish broader systemic challenges from opportunities for community action.
Workshops with the Region’s internal subject-matter experts were central to the work. Blueprint helped design and co-facilitate these sessions, bringing research findings into discussions about proposed actions, desired outcomes, and potential indicators. The workshops enabled regional staff to assess and refine these proposals against their knowledge of local services, priorities, and implementation realities.
Drawing on the research and workshops, we drafted theories of change and accompanying narrative reports. These connected existing activities and proposed priority actions with short- to long-term outcomes, as well as indicators to use for monitoring progress. They also made underlying assumptions and potential barriers explicit, helping the Region assess how proposed actions could realistically contribute to change.
Our work was organized around Ontario’s community safety and well-being framework, spanning social development, prevention, risk intervention, and incident response. We also identified further work needed to turn preliminary indicators into an actionable monitoring strategy.
The Region’s updated 2025–2029 plan draws on the needs overview reports and theories of change, bringing the research into its broader planning process.
This work demonstrates how Blueprint helps public institutions turn complex evidence into a practical foundation for delivery. By connecting research on root causes with local service realities, we help leaders clarify priorities, align partners around shared outcomes, and establish a stronger basis for learning whether their actions are making a difference.
Research and resources
The Region’s updated plan draws on Blueprint’s needs overview reports and theories of change.
Our team and partners live and work on the traditional territory of many Indigenous people across Turtle Island. Blueprint’s home office is situated in the area known as Tkaronto, an area that has been caretaken by the Anishinabek Nation, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and the Huron-Wendat for thousands of years. We strive to meaningfully incorporate principles of reconciliation with First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples in our day-to-day work, as is our collective responsibility as treaty people, which requires ongoing reflection and collective action.
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