HELP FEED THE CHILDREN
Adopt-A-School campaign gets underway
Within the past few months, this newspaper has carried stories about poverty that should cause alarm in the minds of most rightthinking people.
One disclosed that hundreds of homeless children can be found in the Greater Vancouver area, 681 according to a survey.
Another spoke of the continuing delay by the B.C. government to formulate a poverty reduction plan in a province that has the highest rates of child poverty in the country. Yet another spoke of the insidious effect poverty was having on the mental health of children.
British Columbia is the only province without a poverty reduction plan, despite the fact that 557,000 residents — including a fifth of our children — are living in conditions so abject as to endanger them physically, mentally and morally.
The NDP government came to power promising to improve the lives of the poor, but we won’t know until next year what their plan entails, although its aim, apparently, is a drastic reduction of poverty levels by 2024.
That must seem a long way off when today you don’t have enough money to eat and pay the rent, or can’t buy your child a pair of shoes or a winter coat.
So until this brave new world arrives when, hopefully, thousands of children aren’t going to school hungry, or traumatized by the dehumanizing stresses of living in destitution this newspaper will continue its efforts to help them through our Adopt-A-School (AAS) campaign.
It will also continue to demand that the government implement a program to ensure children who need feeding at school get fed.
AAS was launched in 2011 and this will be our eighth appeal.
“To date $3.8 million has been distributed to 140 schools throughout the province,” said Harold Munro, editor of The Vancouver Sun and Province newspapers and chair of The Vancouver Sun Children’s Fund board that oversees Adopt-A-School.
“Last year, almost $600,000 was sent to schools to help alleviate the effects poverty was having on students — buying food, clothing, and other necessities,” he said.
“Without the support of our readers who have stood with us, nothing could have been done, only more of the helpless hand-wringing the poor are all too familiar with.”
This fall, the Sun has received requests from close to 80 schools totalling more than $800,000 — most asking for help to feed children.
In September, The New York Times carried a front-page story about children in a wealthy, firstworld country arriving at school unfed, hungry and chronically in
need of help. That a prestigious North American newspaper found such a story worth the telling is significant.
The story — with a few geographical alterations — could well have fit into the pages of this newspaper’s AAS coverage anytime in the last seven years. Their reporter went to Morecambe, a small, seaside town in the northwest of England.
Teachers there said that until recently they had never seen children arriving in such a state. What shocked them most was that many were children whose parents had jobs that in the past could be expected to feed them.
The conditions the Times found in Morecambe can be found here.
However, there are differences between Morecambe and Vancouver. We have had this state of affairs far longer than four or five years and the level of privation in our children is much worse.
Unlike humble Morecambe, the working poor here have the added burden of living in one of the world’s most heated real-estate markets, which has driven rents to a point where it becomes a toss up between paying rent or eating.
Teachers have consistently pointed to that as one of the main evils suffered by families trying to exist on income assistance or minimum wage jobs.
It results in families constantly going hungry at weekends, some with no food or, as we discovered in one case, with only an onion to share between them. It is the reason The Vancouver Sun is again asking readers for their continued support, said Munro.
“This is not an appeal for charity as it is for justice. These children are voiceless, they suffer the indignity of hunger and privation in silence, and their pain is only apparent to their teachers,” said Munro.
“Please, if you are in a position to help, join with us. One hundred per cent of your donation will go to these children.”
An idea of what some teachers here are dealing with is apparent from an email recently received from an inner-city school teacher ostensibly describing how donations of clothing — thanks to AAS — were coming into her school.
But it finished with a telling account of her day:
“Then I hear of six people sleeping today in a living room … or a 14-year-old pregnant … or a child seeing a parent using a needle … and (see) kids killing (bed) bugs in the palms of their hands while learning to read … and I’m so grateful to have this huge village helping our families. I’m exhausted.”