A line on success at Scadding Court centre
I went down to Scadding Court Community Centre the other day to fish in their pool with Kevin Lee. When I arrived, I found him on his knees on the pool deck with a rainbow trout in his hand, asking 4-year-old Jamal if he wanted a fishy kiss.
Do you need any more convincing that Scadding Court isn’t your regular community centre and Lee isn’t your run-of-the-mill community worker?
Scadding Court isn’t in the Beaches or the Annex, where money can buy any program. It’s at Bathurst and Dundas Sts. on the edge of Alexandra Park, a little social housing complex where money is short and problems are long. A kid has been terrorizing this neighbourhood with his weapons for weeks without stirring our attention. (An arrest was made in the incidents Friday.)
This morning, a truck arrived from a fish farm in Erin, and dumped 800 rainbow trout into the pool. Lee hands me a pole outfitted with a plastic grub.
The idea came to him 12 years ago at the end of another short outdoor swimming season. He looked at the pool in the park behind his centre, slated to be dry for the next 10 months. It seemed like a waste of a valuable city resource.
“I grew up in the inner city with working-class parents who didn’t have a cottage or even a car. Most of these kids never get a chance to experience fishing,” says Lee, 55, tugging at his pole.
He pitched the idea to the city’s recreation department. They said no for all the predictable reasons. So, he decided to try it in the pool inside the Scadding Court Community Centre, which although city property, is run by a community board.
He started with 20 trout from Loblaws. They died after he threw them into the water. A Ministry of Natural Resources biologist explained why: the chlorine put into city water to kill germs also kills fish. He needed both an aerator and a chemical to neutralize the chlorine.
Last year marked the centre’s 10th “Gone Fishin’ ” festival.
“People thought we were crazy,” says Herman Ellis, Jr., Scadding Court’s program director. “At first, you are shocked and then you start to giggle and then you know Kevin’s got another good idea.”
Ellis says he’s often thrilled at work. After an hour inside the centre, I see why. It feels a bit like Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, full of crazy, wonderful things. There’s a skateboarding workshop, where disenfranchised teenagers design and manufacture skateboards for sale, a small orchard, an emergency daycare, a program that sends local kids to volunteer in India for three months, a bunch of orange-and-yellow shipping containers lining the sidewalk out front.
Windows have been cut in the sides of the containers and counters attached; over those counters smile vendors. Twelve of them, selling everything from Korean pancakes to camel burgers. It’s called the 707 Market.
Lee got the idea on a youth trip to Ghana in 2010, where the shipping container-turned-beauty salon is a fixture. When he returned to Toronto, he looked outside the community centre’s front door at an expansive, empty sidewalk. It seemed like another wasted resource to him.
So, he commissioned an architect to get to work. Councillor Adam Vaughan found $80,000 to buy and retrofit the containers and encouraged Lee to put them outside before the city could say no.
“I’ve never been in a meeting with three bureaucrats, where one doesn’t convince the other two that something can’t be done,” Vaughan says. “That first summer, every week somebody from a city department came by to tell them they can’t do it and then they experienced how great it was there and wanted to help them figure out how to make it work.”
What was once an empty sidewalk now feels like a road in Ken- sington Market. At one end of the market is Howard Bissoon, a retired mechanic who raised all seven of his children in Alexandra Park. He now serves up chicken rotis and ginger beer at his T&T stall. He went back to high school at age 50, starting at the alternative school inside Scadding Court. “This place has been really good to us,” he says. At the other end, 19-year-old Satchel Dille-boyd pushes a cable into a bike frame outside his container-cum-bike repair shop. It’s his first crack at running a business. He likens the experience to training wheels, which was precisely Lee’s idea — giving locals a place to try out new businesses while paying only $325 a month in rent. “He’s a businessman inside that building,” says Dille-boyd, who is childhood friends with one of Lee’s three sons. “He’s the shark of community services.” There is a waiting list of 40 people to get a stall now, Lee says. He hopes to expand the market around one side of building. He also hopes to export the model to other parts of the city. My hope: Lee’s model of entrepreneurial thinking expands to parks and community centres across city. We can learn things from Alexandra Park besides how to survive a crazy gunman. “You can always find barriers to do something,” Lee says, snagging a fish momentarily before it slips off his line. “At Scadding Court, we embrace change. For us, it’s how to live life.” Scadding Court’s Gone Fishin’ festival http://www.scaddingcourt.org/ gone_fishin opens Saturday, from 10-5, and continues every afternoon from 3:30 p.m. to 7:00 pm next week.