About me
For the past ten years, Tom Cooper has served as Director of the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction - a collaborative organization formed to tackle the City's unacceptable levels of poverty. Through the Roundtable's work, Tom engages governments -at all levels- to invest in poverty reduction initiatives and works with people experiencing poverty to amplify public policy issues that often go ignored.
Tom has advocated for social assistance rates that reflect the real costs of living, tackled predatory lending in Ontario and is keenly interested in the intersection between the global climate emergency and income inequality, particularly around the impact extreme heat events have on vulnerable populations.
He was involved in the roll-out, advocacy and analysis of Ontario's first-ever basic income pilot: a critical research project testing whether providing a basic income could stabilize housing, improve health and enhance social inclusion opportunities for low-income residents. He is one of the co-founders of the Ontario Living Wage Network a collaboration of more than 30 communities across Ontario advocating to end working poverty; and in 2022 he co-founded the Hamilton Alliance for Tiny Shelters (HATS), an initiative to establish tiny cabin communities for unhoused people.
Tom attended McMaster University and during the pandemic completed a certification in Public Policy Analysis from the London School of Economics. He's an instructor at Mohawk College in Hamilton, teaching civic engagement and resource development in the not-for-profit sector (to anyone who will listen to him).
