Variety Village staff keep kids' `club house' doors open

Variety Village is best known for getting kids with disabilities off the sidelines and into the game.

The Scarborough, Ont., fitness centre is open to everyone, but for 40 years has been both a safe haven and an engine of change for kids with disabilities, helping them break down barriers by teaching and encouraging fitness, sports and life skills.

Pandemic lockdowns have been devastating to those kids. Variety Village is a gym, a meeting place, a club house and a second home for them.

“Fifty per cent of kids with a disability say they have no friends, and that was before COVID,” says Karen Stintz, CEO of Variety Village. “These kids can't go to the park. They can't swing on the swings or go down the slide.

“Our facility becomes that much more critical.”

During the first COVID wave, Stintz and her team had to make crucial decisions about the summer camp programs usually offered at Variety Village. Nobody knew at that point how the pandemic would play out.

“These kids need us for basic exercises, for some social interaction and for that feeling of belonging,” she said. “When it came time to make a decision about summer camps, the questions were: Can we do it safely for our people. Can we do it safely for our staff? And can we do it safely for the community at large?

“If we can answer yes to each of these questions, we can open for the kids.”

They could, and they did.

Plans are to open the camps this summer, too.

Variety Village was shut down again in November, but partly reopened in February, thanks to an amendment to the Reopening Ontario Act that permits people with a disability to access facilities for physical therapy.

She concedes it's been tough negotiating the ups and downs of the pandemic while trying to stay true to the Variety Village mission.

“But I am very proud of the team's resilience and the way they focused on continuing to meet the needs of the community. They pivoted, they weaved, they jumped, they moved mountains — they stayed focused on those who needed us most.”