Community Service Centres of Ottawa-Carleton: A History by Frances Tanner, 1999 People, ideas and opportunity “The ideas that would justify and enable the establishment of community resource centres in Ottawa-Carleton go back at least as far as the early 1960s. The resource centres owe their existence to the auspicious conjunction of several factors: the enactment, in 1966, of the Canada Assistance Plan with its needs-based approach to welfare and its permission to spend on preventive services a credible Ottawa Welfare Council (later renamed the Social Planning Council) with an established pattern of originating new services and stepping aside when they were ready to stand on their own the growing legitimacy of social work as a profession, and its transformation from a clinical to a citizenship model (some might argue, a return to the earliest concept of the neighbourhood house) a group of "principled opportunists" who adopted a common vision and took advantage of every chance to move towards it. Over the 1970s and 1980s, new themes appear of community development and neighbourhood control. Originally established to serve limited geographical areas as a matter of accessibility and coordination, the centres very quickly discovered, struggled with and then harnessed the power of citizens' identification with and desire for power over their own turf.” (more ...) For full ‘History’ document - please click here:   “The resource centres owe their existence to the auspicious conjunction of several factors ...”