Judging a city by its compassion system
During that last heavy, cursed snowfall, which will of course not be the last before things turn green, I gently struggled to find a metaphor — one of my favourite things to hunt for — to portray the way compassion, the greatest of virtues a community can possess, percolates through the city. Misery, poverty, sheer bad luck come as a blizzard and snow us in; then compassion, wearing shorts and a Hawaiian shirt with sunshine on its shoulder, comes knocking, and things start to get better.
Well, that wouldn’t do, and then I got it; it’s an irrigation system, compassion flowing around the city, providing relief in those months, years, lifetimes when the inevitable brutality of our bully financial system, and the lottery of birth (you can pick your nose but you can’t pick your parents) beset us and for a while we find ourselves unsustainable. Flying overhead and looking down (in one of those tracking shots with which every Hollywood action movie starts) we can see the holding tanks of compassion; missions, hostels, NGO headquarters, drop-ins and maybe, one day, harm reduction centres.
Resuming then, from where we left off a couple of weeks ago, the review of the history of the building of that irrigation system in Ottawa, we can journey back to the First World War, the one that was supposed to be over by Christmas. It wasn’t, as we know, until a month before the Christmas of 1918, and with the manly providers of young families standing or lying in mud over there, it was quickly obvious to the city’s cadre of compassionists that the lives of women and children needed brightening. Hence, in 1915 the Christmas Exchange was born, as a sort of data bank and hamper dispatch system to make sure that some didn’t get double while others got none.
(At a recent visit to the low-rent bustling offices of the modern Christmas Exchange, now called the Caring and Sharing Exchange, out on Prince of Wales, I chatted with Cindy, the executive director, to get an idea of how compassion was faring these days. Cindy said that these days they were involved in dispersing back-to-school supplies as well as hampers and vouchers, and she confirmed my hunch that, since 2008, the number of families in need has risen steadily and that for the last two years donations have dropped slightly, kind of like bankers’ bonuses.)
For a decade or so after the end of the First World War, the financial system, as it did in the early 2000s, went into party mode and then, drunk on liquid assets and out of control, the capitalists wrecked the room in 1929, and the Depression started. Already by then the city had a Family Welfare Bureau, a sort of umbrella organization for the many private agencies of compassion, but it was not administered by the Board of Control, although some of the taxes raised by the city were brokered out to it.
As the devastating effects of the Depression played out, and unemployment rose and did not recede, and the Family Welfare Bureau was flooded, the city waded in and formed the Ottawa Public Welfare Board. A woman named Bessie Touzel was appointed supervisor of staff and in December, 1935, Bessie submitted her report on where the taxpayers’ money had gone, how much more was needed and where it was most required.
Following Bessie’s report, the city mounted a campaign to persuade the better-off citizens to donate bedding and furniture, even as it reviewed Bessie’s files.
It judged her guilty of an overgenerous heart and she and many of her female staff were shown the door, to be replaced mostly by untrained men. A rocky start, and I’ll be looking at how the contemporary city handles its welfare obligations in columns to come.
Meanwhile the progenitor of the United Way had been piped in in 1933 as the Ottawa Federated Charities with 22 member agencies.
The best way to show the increasing tidal effect of the United Way is to chronologically list its name changes and the corresponding amounts raised in those years. Just two years after it started, the name was changed to the Ottawa Community Chests (a device board of controller Charlotte Whitton had come up with) and they actually raised less than they had in their first year. A quarter-century later they had a name change at the beginning and the end of the ’60s, with one for good luck in the middle. Donations went from $1 million in ’61 to $2 million in the summer of ’69, when they emerged as the United Appeal of Ottawa-Carleton.
The word appeal was dropped five years later and the word “way” appeared for the first time. Following a levelling out in the early ’90s when the money raised stayed around $12.5 million, amalgamation gave things a boost and a bigger donation base, and in 2000 the mouthful was trimmed down to the United Way of Ottawa and that is where we are at now, with donations well past the $30-million mark.
The ultimate judge of a city, for me, is how well its compassion system flows and what flows through it. How is Ottawa doing? I don’t know yet, but in the months to come I’ll be taking soundings to find out. Ottawa the Good? We shall see.