211 for Woodstock

Hopefully, Lambton County will get it soon.


WOODSTOCK — A 2-1-1 phone service should be active in Oxford by September.

Oxford County council approved an additional $17,150 from its reserves to ensure the projects moves forward so the three-digit, 24 hours a day, seven-day a week phone service can launch. The bigger picture includes a full launch of a county website — www.informationoxford.ca — that has been operational for some time but is now complete.
The website provides a one-stop referral for 4,100 business in addition to complete listings for social and government services within Oxford, along with a comprehensive event listing.

"Now that this work is done, our systems upgraded, it will make it so much easier going forward," United Way of Oxford executive director and project committee member Kelly Gilson said. "It's not just what's on the website, but what's behind the scenes where there's so much more to this project. The database in this project is the piece that will support 2-1-1 as well…

"There really is a bigger picture— information, marketing and the 2-1-1 piece. We want to reaffirm the two go together, they're not competing services. Each needs the other to be supportive."

When it comes to the phone service, the call centre for those in Oxford will be based in Windsor, where the service has been in place since November 2007. 211 Southwestern Ontario project manager Jennifer Tanner spelled out how the centre there would accommodate the call volumes from the added municipalities later this year.

The service would be able to provide, by phone, the information included in the Oxford-based website, as well as referral to other regional or provincial resources. Tanner said a translation service is also available for almost 150 languages, broadening the populations that can access the service.

Oxford is among the group of regions receiving 2-1-1 later this year as the service moves closer to provincewide implementation.

"We will do everything we can to support the local data work in this community in terms of the data quality issues and standards of data maintenance and building on that great resource that exists in this community," Tanner said.

Staff at the call centre would receive additional training on the lay of the land in Oxford prior to the hard launch in the fall, which Tanner said would take place through a series of test phone calls this summer.

"We're very impressed with what we see here. Council has a good vision of what this county should look like," 211 Ontario Corp. municipal consultant Roger Maloney said. "Staff have also really taken leadership and done an excellent job."