Grassroots effort challenges traditional charity model
Edmonton residents step up, help out and get to know each other in time of need
This year surprised me with stories of generous and original gifts.
There were the huge ones, such as the anonymous donor who pledged more than $1 million to cover an Edmonton child's life-saving drug treatment, and smaller, creative ones, like the man who buys white running shoes and gets kids to decorate them with hopeful messages for hospital workers.
Or William Johansen, a Mill Woods restaurant manager who lost his job when COVID-19 shut food kiosks at NAIT. This year he set up a Santa's mailbox in his front yard for the neighbourhood children. He's written and delivered roughly 100 personalized replies to encourage them and keep a bit of magic this year.
Some people really let their creativity shine.
But to feel humbled by how consistently some people show up and give, even from a place of having very little themselves, I turn to the group YEG Community Response to COVID19. There's something new and yet ancient happening on this loosely organized Facebook group — it's a return to community-based care.
For Renee Vaugeois, executive director at the John Humphrey Centre for Peace and Human Rights, it's one more step toward decolonizing charity work, or at least understanding how a new approach can strengthen it.
It's about people helping each other, not top-down handouts. It's taken the creativity and flexibility of one-off efforts, organized those and brought several big institutions, such as the Edmonton Food Bank, alongside to sustain it.
Vaugeois created the page on a Friday night in March, just as the spring lockdown hit. By Saturday morning, 3,000 Edmonton residents had joined. By the end of the day, the count was 11,000 and the messages and requests were flying. “It was crazy. I needed help,” she said. She recruited a dozen others to help moderate and used all her John Humphrey connections to bring in support.
Now it's a free-flowing system where needs get submitted, posted on the page and people step up to donate or deliver meals, food hampers, clothes and other basic necessities multiple times a day. In nine months, 35,000 needs have been met.
People give what they can and get to know each other. It's fluid, with many ethnocultural groups involved, and sometimes those in need become those who give. One Indigenous grandmother who needed help because she was living in a hotel and taking care of six kids when the first wave hit, is now one of Vaugeois' most consistent dispatch helpers.
Another woman, who cooks dozens of meals in her kitchen once a week to supplement what the food bank gives families, is on social assistance herself. She spends a day working hard, turning donations into feasts. Then she spends two days recovering her strength, said the woman, afraid to use her name in case a government official would decide she can work and take social assistance away.
The need is huge, said Dicky Dikamba, whose Black francophone organization CANAVUA started a mobile food bank truck to help. Families who can't find work, or whose jobs don't pay enough to feed a large family, need more than a monthly food hamper. “When we are bringing food for some people and they're almost crying, it breaks my heart.”
For the last several years, the John Humphrey Centre's approach to community justice has been to identify natural advocates (people others turn to anyway for help and advice) and train them to be more effective. That means giving them inside knowledge on how justice, education, health and other systems work.
That's why Vaugeois was so quick to set up this community-based response, she said. A typical Western approach creating large, often rigid institutions can fail people. During past natural disasters like the Fort Mcmurray fires and High River flood, people with limited mobility, mental health challenges, uncertain legal standing and language barriers struggled to access the help they needed to recover.
The large institutions are often built up in a “punitive, bureaucratic way” so no one gets more than their share, said Vaugeois. But ID requirements and extensive paperwork “make things so undignified and so inaccessible. They don't consider the shame factor that's behind a lot of the need out there.”
In this new community-based approach, there is self-policing. It's not perfect, but givers talk among themselves and get to know who is trying to scam the system versus who needs the hand up because they're already giving as much as they can, she said. “At the end of the day, it's about holding each other.”
It's fascinating to watch the page in action. On Wednesday, a new member requested a ride and it was offered in two minutes. Someone asked a question about government support, and a meat shop owner offered free Christmas dinners. “Smile. Do the best that you can,” he said.
He certainly got a lot of smiles. This year has been full of change, full of heartbreak, but also something new. I hope it continues.