The Meeting Place offers sense of belonging
Downtown drop-in centre connects those in need with services, community
At the Meeting Place, a drop-in centre for the homeless and others on society’s margins, men and women chat while sipping coffee, and a few guys laugh together playing pool. One bearded man sits slumped over, asleep, his bags of belongings at his feet.
In her small, cramped office, case worker Sheryl Lindsay lends a hand to anyone who needs assistance with housing, jobs, income support and health care. She makes phone calls, helps with paper work and, most importantly, she listens.
“We’re very accessible,” said Lindsay, 53. “They’ve encountered many barriers to service and had bad experiences. A lot of our work is developing trusting relationships and finding out what we can do together to connect them to what they want.”
The Meeting Place, located on the corner of Queen St. and Bathurst St., was started in 1987 as a safe place, a sort of living room, for people in poverty.
“First and foremost, the Meeting Place is a community,” said Leslie Saunders, manager of mental health and addictions for the multi-service agency West Neighbourhood House, which runs the drop-in. The United Way provides key funding for all of West Neighbourhood’s programs.
Daily, about 200 people come to the drop-in. “They’re dealing with poverty, mental health and addiction issues and serious histories of trauma,” Saunders said. The centre attracts more men than women, and nearly half of participants are First Nations people.
“I love this place,” said Anna Samayuellie, 43, with a broad smile. Samayuellie, originally from Nunavut, was homeless in Toronto, but Meeting Place workers, over the years, have helped get her housing and health treatment. She’s now working with them on applying for a part-time job and a college program to be an aboriginal youth worker.
She proudly rattled off all that the Meeting Place offers: free showers, laundry facilities, a weekly Spirit Circle, arts and crafts lessons and a shop that sells the participants’ handi- work. She leads a visitor into the large community kitchen where soup bubbles on the stove and the fragrance of sautéing peppers fills the air. She points to a list of affordable frozen meals that can be cooked there or taken home. Samayuellie helps out with the cooking.
But it’s the people at the drop-in centre, the sense of community, that’s the big draw for her. A pregnant woman stops her to chat briefly. “I help her every day. I make sure she eats,” Samayuellie said.
“I like helping people. It keeps me up here,” she said, waving a hand above her head.
In Lindsay’s office, a 38-year-old man, who volunteers at the centre, has found a possible job but needs a work reference. He’s been living on the street and had trouble with the law, so landing a job is tough.
His face visibly brightens when Lindsay, after several tries, gets the potential employer on the phone. His face falls when she reports back that the job’s been filled. But Lindsay is upbeat and directs him to other employment services and encourages him to check in with her.
Her phone rings. A mother, who doesn’t live in Toronto, is worried about her 32-year-old son who struggles with mental health and substance abuse. Lindsay, working with him for seven months, has his permission to talk to his mother. Recently, he’d been in hospital for treat- ment but skipped out.
She tells the mother about their plans for housing and health care. She promises the mother: “We’ll hang in with him.”
People pop in just to say hello to Lindsay, a community social worker for 29 years. She was executive director of the women’s drop-in Sistering for five years, but wanted to return to front-line work.
As she walks across the Meeting Place’s large common room, she keeps stopping to chat. “It’s the relationships that sustain all that we do,” she said.
Some people come to her with layers of woes. One former construction worker injured on the job needs help dealing with workers’ compensation. His mother tongue is Spanish and he doesn’t always understand English well, he says.
But he’s also upset that his children are being bullied at school and the principal won’t do anything. And he was attacked in the elevator of his apartment building and wants to find new housing. By the time he leaves, Lindsay has a list of issues to tackle for him. “This senorita will help me. I feel better,” he said.
As the day winds down, Lindsay declares it was a good one, listing the people she saw and progress made. But the problems are never completely finished, she explained. “You make incremental steps with people, moving the situation forward.”