POVERTY & HOMELESSNESS no longer ‘downtown’ problems
Community partners are shedding light on the issues affecting the regions of Toronto, Peel and York
The Krasman Centre occupies a storefront on the stretch of Yonge St. that’s always been Main St. in Richmond Hill. It’s a tidy stretch of Yonge, the object of some care and investment to reflect the area around it — prosperous suburbs anchored around a historic village. It’s not the sort of place you associate with homelessness, but that’s why the Krasman is here.
The Krasman Centre is 20 years old; it began life as a resource centre and evolved into a drop-in to give aid to the homeless in the area, many of them with mental health issues. It became a United Way agency recently, which is what’s brought Daniele Zanotti, president and CEO of United Way Greater Toronto, here on a sunny weekday morning. The front room is full when we arrive, with clients doing crafts and drinking coffee. There’s no diagnosis needed to access the Krasman’s services, such as computers, telephones, food, washrooms and a shower.
Many of the staff have also had experience with mental health issues, and a third of them started as users of programs at the Krasman.
Zanotti is met by Susan Dobson, executive director at the Krasman, who introduces us to workers and clients and makes sure everyone is OK with having their picture taken. Those who decline make their way to the lounge at the back. Everyone is friendly, none more so than a cheerful man with an impressive collection of facial tattoos.
“What we like to see here most is people supporting each other,” Zanotti says. Dobson tells us they deal with all kinds of crises in the lives of their clients, such as loneliness and isolation, or the grieving widow who didn’t have anywhere else to go for sympathy. What surprises many people about the Krasman is that a centre for mental health and homelessness is needed here, so far from downtown.
When the Toronto United Way merged with its two adjacent agencies in York and Peel regions recently, it was an acknowledgment that issues such as homelessness, mental health, youth unemployment and simple poverty had migrated not only into working-class suburbs, but into neighbourhoods like Richmond Hill, which seemed prosperous and immune.
“In York Region, there were no low-income neighbourhoods in the 1980s; today about 16 per cent are low income,” Zanotti says. “And in Peel, the most dramatic increase, about 52 per cent of neighbourhoods are low income.”
Dobson explains that even working at capacity, they can only do so much work out of the drop-in centre, even with its central location on transit lines. The Krasman serves a large area, and there’s a need for mobile workers who can go and meet with clients in the field, at libraries and coffee shops.
The vastness of the area United Way agencies have to cover is underlined when Zanotti heads for his next stop, in Peel Region, at an afterschool program at the Erin Mills Youth Centre. We’re met there by Adoama Patterson, an adviser with the Peel Poverty Reduction Strategy Committee that’s co-chaired by the United Way.
The centre is run out of a suite of rooms on the ground floor of a public housing complex, in an
area that features the usual suburban landmarks: a Costco and a Home Depot, a Mandarin, some auto dealerships and an arena. Patterson tells us her first home in Toronto after moving here from Winnipeg was in another lowrise apartment just next door.
Workers and volunteers have started laying crafts out on the tables in the big room, and a few children have already showed up. One little boy is an obvious favourite of the staff, and effortlessly makes himself the centre of attention. He tells us he wants to be a YouTube star and drive a Ferrari.
Patterson says the hard part of managing programs out here is the rate of change. There’s the transience expected from their client families, who move to where jobs and rental accommodation can be found. But there are also demographic changes that have to be managed as newcomers alter the makeup of communities, and big economic changes, such as artificial intelligence, automation and the “gig economy” hit low-income workers first and hardest.
To address this, Patterson’s group has instituted an unprecedented 10-year plan for their region — the first in Canada, and unheard of in social services, where three to five years are as far out as most groups are willing to plan. She says it’s actually the best way to manage poverty issues that they consider their focus; there are areas they can predict changing rapidly over the next decade, such as Brampton, but the longer time frame lets them stay on top of those bigpicture issues. “Ten years allows us to keep in control of the things that will change slowly,” she says.
Another drive along the highway takes us to Rexdale, where Zanotti got his start in social work, and to Albion Neighbourhood Services. It’s one of the United Way’s “anchor agencies” — a hub, built in what was once a Catholic high school and home to multiple services and agencies, such as a Boys and Girls Club.
Executive director Lisa Kostakis meets us. Like most people who run social service agencies, she has a big personality; she’s known Zanotti for a long time, and they playfully tease each other while she shows us around the building, with its gym, meeting spaces and offices carved out of former classrooms.
The priority at ANS is youth employment, and Kostakis quickly runs through a number of recent programs, such as the youth job fair they recently sponsored at Woodbine Casino. The United Way’s corporate partnerships are essential to these programs, which help steer young people toward them as future employers; Kostakis mentions nearby Toronto Pearson International Airport offering internships to young people in their programs.
She takes us to the home of REXpressions — a media arts program based out of the centre, where local kids are given access to the equipment needed to edit photos, mix music and design websites. Mentorships are key to the program, and we watch a young man, Stephen Bambo, as he’s given help designing a website for a clothing line he’s designed.
Kostakis says they’re competing for the kids’ attention with the local gangs, who’ve been known to try and use the centre to try and recruit before they’d been banned. She says the hard part is that kids are always being asked what they want, and they’re tired of it. What’s needed is to provide options and resources.
“There’s no app for human care,” Zanotti says. “We’ve got to come to a deep understanding that we all have a role to play. It is literally our brother, mother or friend, on any of the issues and unless we commit to it and lean in on community and local issues, we aren’t going to solve this stuff.”
“There’s no app for human care. We’ve got to come to a deep understanding that we all have a role to play.” DANIELE ZANOTTI PRESIDENT AND CEO, UNITED WAY GREATER TORONTO