Some stopgap. Some band-aid.
That's all our Out of the Cold program was meant to be when we started it at St. Andrew's on King Street in Toronto 15 years ago. We never dreamed we'd still be at it today; we were sure that by now our governments would have solved the shameful problems of poverty and homelessness that were infecting our city and so many others across Canada.
That didn't happen. If anything, our city, provincial and federal governments seem to have accepted poverty and homelessness as an unpleasant reality of modern life. The facts that our country is so wealthy and our budgetary surpluses so fat haven't made any difference at all. As a result, churches have quietly gone to work. Sharing everything from recipes, budgets and program ideas, existing Out of the Cold programs have helped church communities start new ones in small towns and big cities.
St. Andrew's has worked with dozens of Canadian churches of many denominations as well as with several non-church organizations that have started programs like ours. One of the best examples is Lawyers Feed the Hungry, a hugely successful program run at Osgoode Hall in downtown Toronto by lawyers who prepare and serve several meals every week.
Over the years, our own St. Andrew's program has not stayed exactly as it was when we opened; we have had to learn to adapt to changing times. But our principles have not budged an inch. All those years ago we decided our food would be the very best we could do, nutritious, carefully prepared and delicious: what we would serve our own families. We chose not to accept government money or money that came from gambling revenues. We chose not to use armed security guards. We chose to spend the donations we received on food and services for our guests, not on paid staff or on church repairs and maintenance.
Today we are running a year-round program, with a hot breakfast every Tuesday morning 12 months of the year, serving up to 120 people. Our Monday night dinner program, however, still only runs from November 1 to the middle of April and serves up to 260 people a night, but the services for the program have doubled since we started. We've added, for example, a very popular vegetarian menu to the dinner. Our dinner program has spun a new service we call Meals to Go — meals we send to people we hear about, regardless of church affiliation or income, who are in trouble. It could be a death in the family, an illness or a crisis such as sudden unemployment.
We give out hundreds of books — our guests are eager readers. We still run our clothing service, but we have added haircuts. We've started a Christmas card program modeled on the one run by First United Church in Vancouver's poverty-stricken Downtown Eastside; this involves a group of volunteers helping people track down the addresses of family and friends, helping them prepare a card, adding a picture of themselves to it and mailing it.
And over the last year, under the leadership of volunteer Cal Broeker, we have started offering counselling to get some of the most hardcore homeless off the streets and into decent housing. Cal has built warm and trusting relationships with street people across the city and with the workers in various housing services; as a result, to give just one example, he was able to move a desperately poor couple who had lived for years on a street corner beside our church into a decent apartment of their own.
But one of the most dramatic changes we've made happened last year when we decided to end our overnight sleepovers. Ever since we started Out of the Cold we had up to 100 people sleeping on mattresses on the floor of our church hall. Ending this service was a painful decision but we didn't hesitate. It happened for two reasons.
The first was that our overnight program, in the last year or two, had been constantly disrupted — between, say, 11 p.m. and 4 a.m. — by violent and aggressive men, determined to gain entry to the church. Some of them turned out to be drug dealers. They destroyed the peaceful quiet of the night, started fights and were far too difficult for the average volunteer to manage. Only Cal, a former soldier and undercover agent for the RCMP, could deal with them effectively.
The second reason was that the city of Toronto had opened new shelters, ones that could offer far better security, sleeping accommodation and bathroom facilities than we could.
It was a no-brainer. As our then-minister, Cameron Brett, explained to our volunteers and the media, why should the homeless come to us for a mattress on the floor when they can have better beds and safe, uninterrupted nights at one of the new shelters?
Now, instead of keeping out drug-dealers and violent criminals, Cal and other volunteers are able to work on outreach and housing. He has found permanent homes for about 17 people and made warm and effective partnerships with the agencies that make these work.
Where are we now in our thinking? Where we always have been. We continue to work for our guests who have enriched our own lives and our church more than we can ever describe. We continue to look for better ways to serve them and we are looking beyond our own walls to find them their own homes. And for all of us who work in the program, it is a privilege. – Stevie Cameron is a member of St. Andrew's, King St., Toronto.
