Banking on breakfast for Falls’ homeless
It’s 5:45 a.m.
Do you know where your neighbourhood restaurateur is?
If it’s Angela Peebles, co-owner of The Regal Diner in Niagara Falls, she’s in the quiet kitchen of her Main Street breakfast hub assembling and wrapping breakfast sandwiches.
Peebles’s simple English muffin and egg stacks aren’t for customers who will show up for the most important meal of the day when the restaurant opens in a few short hours. Instead, she’s putting together the first — and possibly the only — meal of the day for people who stayed at a nearby overnight warming shelter last night.
“This fits into my schedule,” Peebles said as she waited to offer sandwiches to men leaving St. Andrew’s United Church on Morrison Street on a recent Thursday morning. “I have the time, I have the facility. I like to feed people. That’s how I fit into this.”
The shelter is run by Project Share as part of a two-year pilot program. It officially opened this fall in co-ordination with Out of the Cold, a volunteer-driven initiative serving the homeless during the winter months.
The shelter started with 15 beds, but Diane Corkum, Project Share executive director, said the need surpassed that, so they made room for 20.
“It isn’t a great location for 20 people to be sleeping overnight,” Corkum said. “We’re at capacity most nights.”
The men who seek refuge there are provided with clean linens, a mat for sleeping and a pillow. With no access to a kitchen, though, food offerings are limited when they come in for the night or leave in the morning. Project Share provides coffee and hot chocolate, juice, protein bars, and cups of soup.
Come breakfast, shelter users are offered coffee and a granola bar to tide them over until Project Share opens for the day with access to its food bank. Other options include The Soup Kitchen, run by Niagara Falls Community Outreach, which serves lunch and dinner, and a local church that offers supper once a week.
When Peebles learned shelter users headed into the day without a proper breakfast, she stepped up. She hands out her simple but warm, portable meals every morning at Oakes Park across from St. Andrew’s Church.
She does it independently of Project Share, taking donations from her customers and the community to cook up at least 15 breakfast sandwiches each day. She tucks them into brown paper bags with a piece of fresh fruit, juice box and napkin.
On each bag, she scrawls a message of hope and encouragement: Try to have a good day; Hope you can stay warm today. Sometimes she has extra socks or toques to offer, too.
And while the initiative fits with Peebles’s schedule, it’s an empathic act rooted in her own brushes with poverty.
“I’ve been so close, it feels like a good place to put my energy,” she said.
Peebles lived in interior British Columbia before moving to Niagara Falls in 2011 with her partner Simon Kelly. Though she didn’t have material wealth out west, she always had food to eat thanks to a garden she kept.
That changed when she moved to Niagara Falls where she operated a food trailer downtown with Kelly before opening their bricks-and-mortar Regal Diner a few years later.
“Things were tight,” Peebles recalled about those early years in Ontario. “When you know you have food in your pantry, you have that bit of security. But when you don’t have money to buy food or you can’t grow food, it’s eye-opening.”
Desperate to fill up the food trailer’s propane tanks before a lunch-hour rush one day, the couple accepted payment by cheque from a regular customer. It would end up bouncing, but not before Peebles was able to cash it and use the money to fill up and fuel a lunch rush. By day’s end, the couple earned enough to buy groceries.
It was pure luck, she recalled. “That cheque bounced but that’s OK,” Peebles said. “That cheque let me buy propane. That’s how close I was (to poverty).”
Since moving their business to Main Street, Peebles has befriended and fed some the neighbourhood’s most vulnerable residents.
Last winter, though, when one showed up needing more than food, Peebles learned there were no shelter options available in Niagara Falls. She ended up hailing the man a cab and sending him to St. Catharines for a place to sleep.
“That didn’t make sense to me, sending (him) away with a severe mental illness,” she said. “We’re shipping him away from everything that gives him security.”
Peebles joined the lobby for a local shelter, going before Niagara Falls council to ask for greater support for the city’s homeless. A temporary overnight warming centre was set up in February. Peebles took it upon herself then to make breakfast for the people using it.
She established a Facebook page called The Breakfast Bank and began accepting cash and food donations to make breakfast sandwiches on homemade buns with fresh-baked cookies.
When Peebles re-started The Breakfast Bank this fall, she streamlined the process and the cost. Each meal she serves costs $1.41, not including the bags and napkins.
She keeps all ingredients separate from what she uses in the restaurant and freezes leftover sandwiches to serve another day, ensuring nothing is wasted.
So far, she’s raised enough money to keep her Breakfast Bank going until January, but she hopes to sustain the effort until March 31, when the Out of the Cold program ceases for the spring and summer.
“So we have shelter now, and breakfast, lunch and dinner covered,” Peebles said, counting the current resources available.
“I couldn’t do it financially by myself,” she added. “I’m cooking by myself but I’m definitely not doing it alone.”