Mennonite Centre for Newcomers overflowing

Organization seeks space for donations

In a room at the Edmonton Mennonite Centre for Newcomers language centre, tables overflowing with kitchenware stand between mountains of blankets, kids' clothes and baby onesies.

Just down the hall, two more rooms are so chock full of donations stuffed into boxes and bags that not a single inch of flooring is visible. The space is meant to be used for English classes, and one staff member says there's a teacher's desk in there somewhere — buried under all the supplies.

EMCN executive director Meghan Klein said donated items have been piling up for at least six months as her organization scrambles to fill the gap left by last year's closure of the Edmonton Emergency Relief Services Society (EERSS). The supplies are a crucial source of free household essentials for refugees and newcomers arriving in Edmonton, but the EMCN needs more space.

“We have signs up all over this building: `Do not enter.' It's kind of like the cartoon where you open the door to the closet and all the things fall on you,” Klein said Thursday.

EMCN wants to find a low-cost or no-cost space to run a donation centre where they'll have significantly more space to accept and sort items. Ideally, they'd also be able to accept large items like furniture and mattresses.

The EERSS used to run its own donation centre, with emergency supplies to help refugees and others in crisis start over. But the organization dissolved after they couldn't find new affordable space when their no-cost lease with the provincial government ended.

EMCN has been trying to pick up the pieces with their “ad hoc” donation centre, but Klein said it isn't sustainable. Besides the space constraints, the organization needs to turn the storage back into classrooms to run in-person language classes, which have been held remotely for the last two years.

EMCN settlement practitioner Dalia Abdellatif guides people through the process of collecting household items, and gets them set up with other services they might need. Lately, she's helped many families from Ukraine who fled the Russian invasion of their country.

“Some of them say, `Oh my god' and they cry. Because they are not expecting that all of that is for free and they can get all that they need,” she said.

People she's helped recently are often looking for kitchen items so they can cook meals at home, Abdellatif said. And refugees come from all over the world: Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and more.

“Some of them, they come without anything. So they need everything,” she said.

Klein said, ideally, EMCN wants to work with other community organizations to establish a “new start essentials market” where there would be a donation centre plus employment and housing support services all in one location.

In the meantime, the organization is in need of more volunteers to help sort and organize items so people who need them can access them.