Who cares: Drop-in programs care for our most vulnerable
In the north-west corner of Toronto, every morning, seven days a week, two women, front-line staff at the Syme Woolner Neighbourhood Centre, enter through a side door and head towards their carefully organized kitchen. They sort through food items, donated or bought, and begin their daily task of preparing and serving delicious and nutritious meals for those in need.
By 11am, lone individuals, women with children, some LGTBQ+, sometimes entire families, many racialized and Indigenous, the unhoused or precariously housed, begin to wait outside the front door. By 1pm, over 80 individuals will have received what is often their only hot meal of the day.
Before March 2020, Syme used to provide meals for 30 participants enrolled in our daily Community Drop-In program. But when Toronto entered the pandemic’s first lock-down, our community’s needs exploded beyond anything our small organization had anticipated. Our staff noticed, with great alarm, how vulnerable individuals, already marginalized by deeply systemic inequities, got pushed even further into precarity as their basic human necessities — food, housing, clothing, harm-reduction supplies and medical and service referrals — became both urgent, yet more difficult to access.
How can we continue to provide this care? With difficulty.
City of Toronto-funded drop-ins are among the few easily accessible physical spaces in this city that provide trauma-informed low barrier services to people living in precarity — with no questions asked. Yet drop ins themselves are struggling with a number of challenges including low wages for staff, sky rocketing rents, staff burnout and inflationary food prices.
One of the key services drop-ins provide is a warm meal. On our shoestring budget, we have to find ways of feeding 80 people on a daily basis. While relying heavily on the food bank system, many drop-ins, including Syme Woolner, raise funds to ensure that no one goes hungry. The food that is provided through the food bank system has to also meet the needs of an ever-increasing line of families who use the food bank weekly.
In 2021, we served 5109 households which is a 45 per cent increase from the previous year. This number translates to 450 households that are food insecure every month — just in our tiny neighbourhood. The working poor make up these households, some are the very frontline staff who work at drop-ins and other front-line services throughout the city; they are, for the most part, racialized women, underpaid, with an average hourly wage between $18-$22.
As a primarily gendered and racialized sector of the care economy, community drop-ins occupy the bottom of the care hierarchy.
The hard emotional and physical labour, and the ability to support and manage a range of people with mental health and addiction issues, while concurrently creating an environment that is trauma-informed, safe and caring for people experiencing social isolation, requires skills and competencies with a highly nuanced and compassionate approach. Without a living wage, our staff leave the work or burn out.
Wages must be increased to harmonize with inflation and build the respect required for the people who hold our social safety nets together.
The Housing crisis in this city is now well known, including skyrocketing rental costs for people, small businesses — and for non-profit organizations. People and places are being displaced with dire consequences.
People are literally dying on the streets of Toronto. Syme Woolner recently lost five people who were regular participants at our drop-in program despite our efforts to keep in touch — just a fraction of the almost 150 people who died on the streets in the city in 2020.
The precarity of our clients is also reflected in the precarity of the organizations that serve them, as front-line organizations also brace for rent hikes. How much, do we as a society, value this labour of care?
The City of Toronto budget was debated and passed in February. The drop-in sector is now bracing for another poor allocation of funding. We are concerned that we will not have the funding to raise salaries beyond the $18-$22/hr with benefits. We are worried that we will not have the funds for our hot meal program, which is usually one of the first programs to be cut when purse strings tighten, and we are concerned that rents will increase for our agencies.
As the city proclaims yet another celebratory day for front-line workers, such words need to be translated into material improvement for our labour and for our programs so that we can work in and with dignity and provide the dignity and respect to our communities — a symmetrical recovery for all.
Photo courtesy of DepositPhotos
