Islands Trust Council Quarterly Meeting Agenda - Appendix A

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Appendix A – Delegation 
Presentation Material 
Pages 2 - 19
Mairi Welman & Elizabeth FitzZaland, Salt Spring Solutions - To present on equitable engagement with
constituents
 across the Trust Area.
Pages 20 - 21
Jennifer Margison, Friends of the Gulf Islands Society - To comment on the significance of the Trust
Policy Statement.

 
May 2025 
To:  Islands Trust Council  
 
In spring 2023 Salt Spring Solutions published Homes for Islanders: An Integrated Housing Solutions 
Framework for Salt Spring Island to provide decision-makers with an integrated approach to addressing 
the local housing crisis.  
 
To follow up, in the early summer of 2023 Salt Spring Solutions hosted a professionally facilitated 
workshop to review and discuss how to move forward on the five strategies, inviting key organizations 
which have some responsibility for solving the housing crisis. These included the Capital Regional District - 
Salt Spring Island Office, Capital Regional Housing Corporation, Islands Trust – Salt Spring Local Trust 
Committee, Islands Trust - Regional Planning, North Salt Spring Waterworks District, and the Provincial 
Housing Ministry. Everyone attended except the Provincial Housing Ministry. An report on the actions 
agreed upon during the workshop was distributed to all the participants. 
The following year, in 2024, we hired an independent consulting firm with decades of expertise in public 
engagement to design and execute a community engagement project on the framework. While we had 
consulted extensively with housing and community planning professionals, environmental experts, and local 
agencies and organizations while writing the report, we were also interested in learning from the people 
most impacted by the housing crisis what they thought of the proposed solutions in our report.   
 
Due to limitations on funding and organizational capacity, Islands Trust public engagement typically uses a 
limited set of tools and often does not reach the whole community. Ironically, the people in the Trust Area 
community who are most in need of progressive policy innovation are those who have the least capacity to 
participate in traditional public engagement activities such as public meetings, town halls and information 
sessions. In this project, along with gathering feedback on specific ideas on housing, we also hoped to 
demonstrate the utility of using equitable engagement methods which we believe can be replicated across 
the Trust Area to great advantage, and which will increase the diversity of voices heard by Local Trust 
Committees, Trust Council Committees and Trust Council itself. 
 
In late fall 2024 we hosted seven focus groups with 42 participants, conducted 12 one-on-one interviews 
with landlords and developers, and hosted a publicly accessible online survey, which attracted 6

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