Five years after endorsing the plan to eliminate homelessness in a decade, Calgary council is adopting another ambitious target — to slash the city’s poverty in half to five per cent by 2023.

But the leaders of this new poverty reduction plan don’t expect the goal to demand massive spending, like the millions spent on new housing to make good on the anti-homelessness 10-year plan.

Instead, they envision restructuring Calgary’s existing anti-poverty programs and focusing their efforts — and actual support offices — on communities that need the help.

“Our approach has not been to look for a lot of new dollars for new programs,” said Derek Cook, author of Enough for All, the new anti-poverty strategy.

“It is more about using what we have, doing it differently, and doing business differently.”

Enough For All, if successful, would have to help lift more than 50,000 Calgarians above the low-income cut-off line — a rate 10.6 per cent of Calgarians were living beneath in 2010, according to Statistics Canada.

Cook and Mayor Naheed Nenshi, who made the plan a 2010 election promise, may not believe it’s a costly initiative. But it does come with a major and possibly daunting demand: that the multitude of charities, social agencies and groups working in poverty come together for the new mission.

To help this, the report calls on a new secretariat to help oversee this reshuffling of agencies and community services. This fall, a budget request will reach council to pay for the new oversight body.

“Certainly, that will cause some friction in the transition, because people are doing the work now,” Nenshi said Tuesday in an interview after a council committee endorsed the plan.

“And changing the work that people are doing always has some questions abut whether it’s the right thing to do or not. People have their own turf, they have things they think are successful in their segment, but taking a system-wide view means we have to look at what works overall.”

Creating more “community hubs” for social services and gatherings is at the core of Enough For All. Many of them could use existing community halls, rec centres or other spaces, and could relocate services closer to where people live.

These hubs would also ideally curb the number of socially isolated Calgarians, which Cook said is a key factor in addressing poverty.

If someone has few friends or social contacts and loses a job, or has a sudden illness or marital problems, hardship can hit harder, said Cook, a registered social worker. “If you do have those supports around you, you can move out of that situation earlier,” he said.

As with the 10-year plan to end homelessness, Calgary is modelling its poverty reduction project on what other cities have tried. Cook said both Saint John, N.B., and Hamilton, Ont., have shown some progress with their own strategies — although both cities have had poverty rates substantially higher than Calgary’s.

If more jobs were the simple answer, worker-starved Calgary wouldn’t have poverty now, Cook said. He pointed to the fact that the poverty rate only dropped by one percentage point between 2001 and the last boom’s peak in 2006.