• The database currently contains recommendations sourced from reports based on the project’s inclusion and exclusion criteria. To be included, reports must be published after 2018 and be about human rights issues in British Columbia. Reports published in British Columbia will be prioritized for inclusion in the database, however reports can originate from anywhere if they include recommendations that are specific to British Columbia.
• Findings from each report are not necessarily included alongside the recommendations. For full findings, you can download the report on the report details page.
• We have also not included whether recommendations have been implemented or not. See below for further information.

Please complete this form to submit a report for inclusion in the database. Our research team is always scanning for new and relevant reports, but we can’t catch everything! Submissions are welcome. New reports will be added to the database on a quarterly schedule.

Implementation tracking is subjective. Some recommendations may call for sweeping or transformative change that is harder to measure, and many people may disagree about whether a recommendation has been fully, partially or not at all implemented. For this reason, we encourage anyone wondering about implementation to contact the report authors (or authoring organization) directly and/or contact the duty bearer or body responsible for implementing the recommendation.

• BC’s Office of the Human Rights Commissioner (BCOHRC) does not necessarily endorse any of the recommendations in this database. The recommendations represent the views of the report authors and not necessarily those of our Office or the Commissioner.
• The intention of the database is to allow community organizations, advocates, researchers or passionate individuals working to learn more about human rights issues in our province to more easily see what recommendations have been made across our province. This database is also for all levels of government and decision makers who can use it to see more easily what recommendations have been made in areas they are responsible for. The aim of the database is to serve as a resource that can help these groups evaluate and implement recommendations and take action to move the needle forward on human rights in British Columbia.

Depending on what you’re looking for, you may have noticed that there are very few recommendations specific to the Kootenay, Thompson-Okanagan and Northern regions. Our research team is aware of this gap and working to improve it. We encourage authors with reports and recommendations relevant to these regions to submit reports by completing this form. We will be prioritizing reports from these regions for our next batch of additions to the database.

Discrimination, inequality and injustice are present in every community in British Columbia. While each Community Brief tells the unique human rights story of a specific community, the issues themselves are not unique. This reflects the systemic nature of many human rights challenges and their deep roots across the province.

The Community Briefs offer a snapshot of how various human rights challenges manifest in different parts of B.C. and in different types of communities. They also seek to celebrate community strengths and actions being taken to promote and protect human rights in communities throughout B.C.

For the first cycle of this project, we chose communities that:

• do not typically receive a lot of research attention or opportunities to participate in provincial projects like this one
• are different from one another in terms of population size, geography, economy and demographics
• are located in different regions of the province, including two communities in Northern B.C.
• based on our initial outreach, had community partners who expressed strong interest and capacity to participate in this project

In creating the Community Briefs, our Office aimed to centre the perspectives of people with lived human rights experience and the organizations that support them. BCOHRC worked closely with community organizations and public libraries in the four communities that applied to act as Community Connectors for this project.

Community Connectors received funding and training to hold focus groups and World Café conversations with people with lived human rights experience. Many of these participants had existing relationships with the Community Connectors through their programs and services.

We chose to use this Community Connector model to honour and build on existing relationships, to help us hear from more people with lived experience of human rights challenges and to strengthen the capacity of B.C.’s network of human rights actors.

In total, this project had 11 Community Connectors that conducted 16 focus groups and World Café conversations with over 100 participants. The Community Connectors also played an important role in providing feedback on the initial drafts of the Community Briefs and input on the supplementary materials to make the Community Briefs as impactful as possible for people in their communities.