Local angels, the Chicks make a great mix
“It actually started as a sad story,” Kathryn Crooks tells me, explaining the origins of the Charity Chicks.
I’m sorry to hear it because she’s the kind you want nothing bad ever to happen to, though if anyone has a gift for turning misfortune to good account, it’s Kathryn.
She has a heart made of Jamaican sunshine varnished by winter-tested Canadian fortitude. That comes across in everything she does with the amazing, ever-expanding Charity Chicks team she co-founded four years ago with Bev Dexter.
They’re out in all weather, putting on events such as barbecues and hot meals for those in need, as they did recently at Urban Core Community Centre, Rebecca Street. They provide socks, warm clothes; hand out often neglected essentials like toilet paper; contribute to the Prom Project.
The sad story? In 2008, excelling at her job as sales manager for a large outfit, Kathryn fell critically ill with an internal rupture. She needed surgery to save her life. She was covered by benefits but in 2009 the company she worked for closed down.
“There began a slide from the life I knew,” she says. Her benefits ceased.
“There was great generosity from others but we had to consider sometimes whether to pay the bill or buy food,” says Kathryn. Those experiences, rather than defeating her, filled her with a drive and vision to devote herself to helping those going through what she did, or worse.
So in December 2013, her health restored, her life back on track, Charity Chicks was born. Charity, yes, but with a fun dimension of networking and mingling.
“The first thing, I wanted to make breakfast for those who don’t have breakfast around Christmas time,” she explains, “in a church basement, but barely anyone showed up.
“Sometimes the people we’re trying to help might have no money for a bus ticket. We have to go to them.” So they gathered everything up from the church and put on a pancake meal at Jackson Square. More than 100 got fed.
Ever since, Charity Chicks has been growing, especially in the affections of this city.
At one Jackson Square event, a CC volunteer embraced a gentleman being helped and he started to tear up, saying, “That’s the first hug I’ve had in seven years.”
They strive to restore dignity. They reach out to everyone at their events, one per quarter (others sprinkled through the year), where they also raise money for their Angel Network (emergency fund to assist workingpoor families). Their frequent Takin’ It To The Streets events see them distributing meals, care packages of clothing and hygiene products.
The CCs have quietly, insistently, become a very visible and welcome presence in this city, cheering all who meet them.
Kathryn, being who she is, lays much of the success at the feet of others, such as Bev, and CC stalwarts like Kimberley Bayne and Michelle Mahovlich.
When the word goes out for an event among the Charity Chicks, “we come together like a school of fish,” Kimberley says, dozens of volunteers mobilized as a single body.
And in the midst of it, there is the Charity ChiKcks’ non-chick, Israel Crooks, Kathryn’s husband, a terrific Hamilton artist (not to mention chess player, who’s victimized me often at the Tuesday regular chess on James North). He’s the Chicks’ creative director and offers tutoring and other learn- ing opportunities. For the recent Urban Core barbecue, he painted a beautiful mural of cupped hands in the middle of which is a butterfly.
The Chicks now get donations, material and support from so many — toothbrushes from a dental office, coffee from Starbucks, Lococo’s (beef for the chili), Giant Tiger, Momentum Credit Union, Tracey’s Place, Country Time, Sam’s Pharmacy, Home Instead Senior Care and so many more.
Maybe it actually started with a happy story after all, despite what Kathryn says; such is the dialectic of life.
She remembers vividly, when she was four, a mob came to her grandparents’ house with two men fighting over a woman at 10:30 at night. One was wounded.
“I watched them dress the wound and calm the men down. They (her grandparents) were always the ones the people brought their problems to. The voice for the voiceless.
“They wanted people to have a better sense of themselves. This is what is expected of us.”
The fruit clearly has not f allen f ar from the tree, even factoring in the distance from Jamaica to Canada.
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