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1.
Two more years!
2. New Book: Dying
for a Home. Homeless Activists Speak Out
3. Will the Conversation be Alive?
4. Remembering and honouring - Melvin Tipping
1.
Two more years!
I am excited to report that the Atkinson Charitable Foundation has renewed
the Economic Justice Award that I received in 2004 for another two years! click
here for details
I am grateful that the Sherbourne Health Centre has
agreed to continue to host me for 2007 and 2008, which means that this month
I will be joining them as they move into their beautiful new building across
from Allan
Gardens
in Toronto.
Over the next two years I plan to: work on local issues and emergencies that
impact on people who are homeless; play a central role in various national
networks (Toronto Disaster Relief Committee, National Housing and
Homelessness Network, National Housing and Homeless Coalition, National
Working Group on Women and Housing); strengthen outreach and communication
efforts with emerging housing partners in places such as Calgary, Sault Ste.
Marie and Kingston; allocate time to produce a film and community
development project about homeless families and children with filmmaker
Laura Sky; and support homeless initiatives at the Sherbourne Health Centre
such as the new infirmary.
If you scan through past newsletters or review other sections of my web site
you’ll see I’ve been able to work on many critical issues ranging from
pandemic flu to bedbugs to discrimination and the right to housing. I
would never have had this opportunity were it not for the Atkinson award and
the support of the Sherbourne Health Centre.
2. New Book: Dying
for a Home. Homeless Activists Speak Out
A project close to my heart is coming to a book store near you!
As I write this newsletter a book I have completed with a number of
homeless activists has gone to press. It’s
called Dying for a Home. Homeless
Activists Speak Out. (Between the Lines, 2007) and will be released
in April.
In the book I tell the story of how the Canadian icestorm helped me to
realize that homelessness qualified as a man-made disaster.
I introduce you to 10 homeless activists, men and women, who while
homeless, demonstrated courage, perseverance and eloquence in the face of
conditions unimaginable to most Canadians. They share their personal story
of homelessness, living in crowded and dangerous homeless shelters for
years, sometimes on grates, in tents, trailers or pre-fab disaster housing.
These experts expose the real truth - homeless people don’t choose to be
homeless, they all want housing.
Canada
needs a national housing program.
All proceeds from the book will go towards the participants who were
committed to telling their story. I
hope you will look for it in your local bookstore in April.
More information will be available soon from Between
the Lines.
3. Will the
Conversation be Alive?
In February I was invited to the
City Toronto
Summit 2007
to sit on the housing panel. Over
500 people attended the two day forum. The
following are my panel remarks on Day 1 of the Summit
.
Thank you for including me in this year’s Toronto Summit.
I want to begin with two very
different success stories which remind us that everyone can and should be
housed.
The first success story began with a tragedy.
In 1985, a former fashion model, Drina Joubert, was found frozen in
the back of a truck at Sherbourne and Dundas. There was a huge public
outcry. In 1986 the Ontario
government created a program called Project
3000 - 3,000 new units of affordable
and supportive housing.
The program was designed to ensure that housing money was twinned
with support funding from one of the ministries such as Health.
As writer Austin Clarke wisely said ‘You can’t just give a man a
warm place to sleep and think that all the pain he has experienced will go
away.’
That money
was well spent. People still
live in those units – I could show them to you. If
some of you have not seen such housing it would be good to see.
The second example of people desperately wanting housing is perhaps best
illustrated by the actions of the 100 plus people who settled at Tent
City. Tired of shelters and waiting
on housing lists, they built a community that had: 50 shacks, pre-fab and
portable housing units, generators, 6 portable toilets, running water, a
shower, even streets with names like ‘Billy Lane’. It was perhaps the one time
that business, service clubs, labour unions, construction companies,
architects, caterers, the film industry, media and advocacy groups
came together to do something so real.
It meant that there was a huge public outcry when Home Depot evicted the
encampment and Mayor Lastman suggested the people should go into some 200
empty shelter beds, which were not empty.
There was a huge public outcry because people knew, first hand that these
people deserved housing. And
guess what, they won it. Federal
money just sitting at the province, (Does that sound familiar? Consider
the $392 million dollars sitting there now.) was leveraged by the City and
an emergency rent supplement program was implemented. People
were housed!
The money
for that program was also well spent. Supporting
programs like this always makes politicians look good, so I don’t know why
they don’t do it more often.
I have just completed a book called Dying for a Home. Homeless
Activists Speak Out which will be released in April. The
book profiles 10 people who have been homeless and who have been fighting
for a national housing program. This
is what Marty Lang, who reminds me ‘he’s the expert!’ had to say.
First he describes the absolute delight of people when they won
housing after their brutal Tent
City
eviction. He recounts visiting
fellow Tent
City
resident, April’s new apartment.
April:
“I know what you’re gonna do first. You’re gonna flick lights on and
off and flush the toilet.”
Marty:
“And that’s exactly what I did.”
Thankful for his own home, Marty describes
the ongoing reality for others not so lucky:
“To the politicians who
think they can force people to sleep in a shelter, I would say: ‘Have you
ever walked at
11 PM
at night and talked to the people who are out there in their sleeping bags
and asked them why they aren’t inside?’ Well, it’s because of
tuberculosis, and other new epidemics, like bedbugs. And Out of the Cold
spaces are for one night only. They
might have eighty people for the evening and there are no shower facilities.
People coming in, just lying
down in their clothes.”
“I’d like to take the
federal minister of housing out for a tour to show him or her where so many
people are sleeping because they’re homeless. Toronto
is the worst in all of
Canada
…I know all the hidden outside
sleeping places. I would like to
talk to him…and show him these places.
I’d say ‘Did you see some people under just a little grey
Salvation Army blanket? It will
be cold tonight, it might snow. I’ll
tell you what, I’ll get two blankets, if you want to sleep out tonight.’
On Day 2 of the tour when we woke up, I’d take him to the City Hall
washrooms when they open. Then
maybe show him 2 Murray Street
– an example of the type of housing he should be building.”
I want to name six dangers that continue to cause
inexcusable harm to homeless and underhoused people since the Toronto City
Summit Alliance released ‘Enough Talk’ in 2003.
1.
Shelter
options have worsened. Since
‘Enough Talk’, ‘planning by omission’ has meant that the City
continues to rely on close to two dozen ‘Out of the Cold’ sites for
emergency shelter (in the winter months only), forcing hundreds of people to
move nightly (the United Nations would call these people internally
displaced persons). The costs of
a SARS like illness, let alone tuberculosis, hitting the shelter
sector would be unimaginable.
2.
Outdoor
sleeping conditions have worsened. Homeless
people who are still unable to access shelter, have to now hunker down and
forage further a field for food and survival supplies.
3.
Tuberculosis
outbreaks
in the homeless population. The
year following the City’s last summit a tuberculosis
outbreak (2004-5) in the homeless population involved more than a dozen
active cases of TB; in addition 16 shelter staff converted to a positive
skin test. The direct costs –
$ .5 million.
4.
Bedbugs
have
spread from the original dozen shelter and supportive housing sites
to infest the majority of
Toronto
shelters including drop-in centres. Bedbug infestations have
led to worsening mental health, skin infections and huge costs for
pest-control, relocation and replacement of personal belongings.
5.
Hate
and discrimination grows. Consider
the recent by-law proposed by Councillor Ootes to ban panhandling in tourist
zones in the City. Consider the
homeless man beaten to death in
Moss
Park. Prejudice remains one of the
biggest obstacles, which continues to define who is deserving and who is not
deserving of housing.
6.
People
are dying. Since
‘Enough Talk’ 220 names of men and women have been added to the Toronto
Homeless Memorial at the Church of the Holy Trinity beside the Eaton Centre.
Ursula Franklin says: “If a conversation can
lead to action then the conversation is alive.”
Marty Lang died on February 14 this year.
He was buried this morning. He
would want me to ask you to do everything in your power to make your
conversations these two days come alive, perhaps in ways you have not yet
thought of.
Thank you.
Postscript
On Day 2 of the Summit, Ontario Premier
Dalton McGuinty announced that “he felt uncomfortable” that his
government’s longstanding feud with Ottawa was leaving people in need of
affordable housing and out in the cold, and “The best thing to do under
the circumstances is to proceed to use the money for its intended purpose
and that’s what we’re going to do.”
The funding announcement means that $312 million for affordable housing and
$80 million for off-reserve aboriginal housing will be released.
4. Remembering and honouring
In the first two months of this year I noticed that front-line workers,
activists and people who still struggle with the state of homelessness have
lost a lot of special people- some deaths were expected, some were not.
In some cases agencies and front-line workers were dealing with 3
deaths in a week. That includes
the painful role of telling the deceased person’s friends and loved ones,
in some cases trying to locate estranged family members across the country.
It includes ‘managing’ grief in a congregate setting like a day
shelter, dealing with police matters, the person’s belongings, social
services, funeral homes and arranging memorial services.
All of this is particularly hard when
that person was someone you had a special relationship with.
One person I lost was Melvin Tipping.
These are my remarks at his memorial at Evangel Hall.
I first met Melvin in All Saints Church when he began coming to the Street
Health nursing clinics. In many
ways he was the walking stereotype of who I thought was homeless at the time:
male, in his fifties, single and unemployed.
He was a self-described alcoholic. He
was estranged from his family.
Boy, did he challenge the stereotypes I had and as he later reminded me “I
don’t think my life is the common story of who is homeless. I
think every homeless person’s story is different, they’re not all the
same, and for whatever the reason they’re on the street, homeless people
need a place of their own.”
I got to know Melvin much better when I was the nurse at Evangel Hall and
every Thursday for 10 years we had a visit during my clinic there. He
would bring the huge bag he always carried and always the 5 newspapers he
read every day. Although he always had some need, vitamins usually, we
really just had these wonderful visits talking about politics.
He would often chastise me, “I haven’t seen you in the newspapers
lately” or laugh, “I saw what the
Toronto
Sun woman said about you”.
He was persistent (another way of saying stubborn!), determined and
thoughtful. Melvin attended every day of the six-week ‘Freezing
Deaths Inquest’ in 1996. Perhaps
in part because he used to play cards with one of the deceased, Eugene
Upper, and perhaps in part because he always said it could have been him. Melvin
played a hugely important role at the inquest, providing expert testimony on
the witness stand. He was the
only person with homelessness experience that the presiding coroner allowed
to testify and even though not allowed to speak about housing, he was able
to say on the stand “most homeless people want housing.” He
was brave to do that.
To the end Melvin remained appreciative of having found housing and he
always adored nurse Wenda who helped him find and move into his apartment. He
was proud of how he faced his personal struggles with the support of Marilyn
White Campbell from COPA. In
fact he was very happy with his life and his housing although he regretted
not living closer to Evangel Hall. Evangel
Hall was his living room and all of you were his family.
I’ve written a book called ‘Dying for a Home’ and Melvin has an entire
chapter in the book. He had
hoped to do interviews about the book when it came out.
His chapter includes his story and his thoughts. For example he
recounted:
“I was one of the first
homeless people in Winnipeg
, although I didn’t think of myself as homeless at the time. I
got in an argument with my father and he threw me out. I
joined a gang. Most of us slept
on the street, wherever we could find a place. In
winter, I stayed in stairwells in apartment buildings. That
turned out to be a practice for me when I later became homeless in Toronto
.”
He also told me “Faith plays a big part in my life
now.” And he wrote: “My
apartment looks like a library. I have books everywhere.” And he did.
Melvin was confident of who he was. He
told me “I’ve been in an acting group. I’m pretty good.”
Last year a few amazing things happened. Melvin
completed his interviews with me for the book.
He agreed to a photo shoot with Arantxa Cedhillo, who he flirted with
(naturally), and the results are some beautiful images of Melvin.
He also agreed, after many years, to let me find his
family. We located his two
remaining sisters in
Winnipeg
and he began corresponding with Doreen. In
perhaps his last letter to her (where he enclosed one of Arantxa’s
pictures) he wrote: “This picture shows my age but it doesn’t show how
good-looking I am. I only have a
beard because it shows my sympathy for the homeless.”
Melvin was appreciative of the folks at St.
Christopher House and nurse Cathy Newman who looked after his health in his
later years. He would be very
happy that the people he cared about are here today on his birthday, to
remember and honour him.
Melvin would have turned 70 today. Happy
Birthday Mel.
Cathy
Thanks to Dave Meslin for
research and layout and Bob Crocker for editing.
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