We shine at solving non-problems
May 2, 2008
Our water bottles are safe once more, thanks to a federal response so speedy and decisive that you could almost believe a new day was dawning in Canada.
In less than a year, bisphenol A went from a chemical that few Canadians had heard of to one of the most talked about and roundly condemned toxins in the country. Were it not for my ongoing frustration at our penchant to rally around obscure concerns, I’d take last month’s BPA ban as a heartening sign that our federal government can still rally to a cause if it needs to.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m sure the world will be a better place without bisphenol A. It’s OK with me that we’ve banned the stuff. But in terms of tackling the issues that really ail us in this country and around the world, a ban on BPA gets us exactly nowhere.
North American scientists have actually known about the more unsettling aspects of the man-made chemical for more than 70 years. The media didn’t have much to say on the topic until about a decade ago, however, and only really got an appetite for it in the past year. Of the 115 stories on BPA that have collectively run in B.C. newspapers over the years, 100 of them have been in the last year.
If you haven’t heard - although I can’t imagine that - BPA is a chemical used in the manufacturing of hard plastic and epoxies. Researchers first identified it as an “estrogen mimic” way back in the 1930s. Men working in plastics factories can develop breasts from breathing in BPA fumes day after day.
BPA exposure is thought to put people at greater risk of hormone-related diseases like breast and prostate cancer. It’s also been linked to smaller penis size in infants.
Not good. But as a priority for public health, this loud fussing about BPA exposure is really just noisy distraction from the things that are actually killing us in this country.
The government wants us to believe it’s making the planet a little safer for all of us by banning toxins like BPA. But if that’s the case, how is it that truly disastrous toxins such as tobacco and alcohol remain readily available? Could it have something to do with the $14 billion a year in tax revenue generated through the sale of cigarettes and booze?
Smoking accounts for more than a fifth of all deaths in Canada. Alcohol-related harms cost us $14.6 billion annually. Consumption of either toxin over a lifetime is associated with all kinds of cancers, organ damage, heart and lung problems, and chronic health issues. Together, tobacco and alcohol use account for most of the burden of disease, death and disability in Canada.
BPA is used in the manufacture of plastic baby bottles, something which no doubt helped make it an “It” issue. But if it’s children and youth we’re worried about, why don’t we do something to protect the nearly 400 babies born each year in Canada with the lifelong brain damage caused by a mother’s alcohol consumption during pregnancy - and the untold thousands who go undiagnosed? How come suicide is a leading cause of death for Canadians ages 15 to 24, and we don’t even talk about it?
Facts and figures around BPA-related harms are far less certain. Studies of the chemical’s toxic properties have generally involved rats, which were either injected with BPA or had BPA implants placed in their brains. That doesn’t much resemble the way humans ingest the chemical, so it’s difficult to draw parallels.
Nor do rats and humans respond the same way to toxins. Even the rats aren’t responding uniformly to BPA exposure; some don’t react to the chemical at all, and researchers are calling for more study to sort that out. In the meantime, we just don’t know the effects of low-dose BPA exposure on people’s health.
Again, that’s not to say that we should keep the stuff around. If we don’t need it, why use it? But at the risk of sounding cynical, what I conclude from Canada’s rush to ban BPA is that the plastics industry must not have much of a lobby, and that the media hullabaloo leading up to the ban certainly did a fine job of distracting us from all the other things Ottawa isn’t doing.
But please, drink deeply from your new BPA-free water bottle, and take what comfort you can from the knowledge that an uncertain and possibly non-existent threat to your health has been avoided. As for the real killers, they’re still out there.
Friday, May 02, 2008
Pick a project to move us off the "stuckness"
April 25, 2008
We’ve got the motivation. We’ve got the ideas. We’ve certainly got the money, and all the knowledge we need to fix the problems taking root on B.C. streets.
So why don’t we? That’s the million-dollar question - or the $852-million question to be more precise, which is roughly what it costs British Columbians every year to ride herd on the 15,500 people living on our streets. With the Olympics a mere two years away at this point, I would have expected urgency tinged with panic to have reached the highest levels by now, and yet it never seems to.
Richard LeBlanc calls it “stuckness.” He should know, given the challenges he has faced trying to set up a therapeutic community on the old Woodwynn farm in Central Saanich (http://www.createhomefulness.com/home).
“There’s a grand stuckness in Victoria,” says LeBlanc, who I first got to know several years ago through his highly successful Youth Employment Program. “We need to pick a project like Woodwynn - or any project, really - to get through it. Let’s pick one we feel passionate about and get past this.”
LeBlanc says he has been overwhelmed with support for his project, modelled after Italy’s famous San Patrignano therapeutic community. He recalled one two-minute trip through an office building that turned into a 45-minute meander due to so many people stopping him along the way to tell him how much they supported what he was doing.
Central Saanich council dealt the project a significant blow in February by nixing institutional or residential use of the property before LeBlanc had even presented to council. But LeBlanc would rather sort that challenge out than go find another piece of land - a lengthy and potentially futile process at the best of times in our region, and a major contributor to stuckness.
“If not here, where? If not now, when?” asks LeBlanc. “If you pick a new property, nine to 12 months from now we’ll be finished with due diligence and be back in the exactly same place as we are right now - and a year later.”
LeBlanc and I got chatting about Woodwynn a couple weeks ago over coffee with Ray Howard, who’d brought us together to talk about his own dream to do something with the five decommissioned BC ferries that are coming out of service in September. Howard wants to use them as floating treatment centres for people with addictions, and even has a low-profile spot picked out in Saanich Inlet where the ships can anchor.
Howard says everyone’s first reaction is to scoff, then declare that it can’t be done - but really, why couldn’t it? It’s an interesting idea.
As is LeBlanc’s project. As is a bottle depot similar to Vancouver’s United We Can, designed to work with, train and hire the “binners” out there who earn a living redeeming the bottles and cans we can’t be bothered to return. (There’s even a depot licence available in Victoria right now.)
All sorts of innovative projects are out there waiting to be tried. They’re going to require us to take a chance on doing things differently, and to stifle that automatic “No!” that rises to our lips so easily in this region. In my opinion, no idea should be considered too wacky to dismiss out of hand, because nothing could possibly be wackier than leaving things as they are.
But all the ideas in the world won’t get us far if we stay stuck. Let’s do something big, bold and dramatic for a change, and prove to ourselves - and the world that will soon be on our doorsteps - that it’s possible.
Speaking of saying no, the Capital Regional District was none too happy about my column last week about separating out returnable bottles and cans so that binners can benefit from some of the $18 million in deposits that go unredeemed in B.C. every year.
The CRD contract with Metro Waste - the company that buys the recyclables collected through the blue-box program - is based on three to four per cent of the “container stream” being redeemable containers, says a CRD spokeswoman. In other words, the CRD got a cheaper deal by telling Metro they could count on people like you and me to put at least some of our redeemable bottles into our blue boxes, which Metro then takes in for a refund.
With all due respect to the CRD, I’ll do as I choose with the deposits on my redeemables, and eagerly await word of other ways to put our forfeited deposits to work on social fronts. In Vancouver, a pilot project to collect workplace bottles and cans is generating funds for the United Way.
B.C.’s redeemable containers are managed by non-profit Encorp Pacific, and our unredeemed deposits are its major revenue stream. But Encorp has the means to make up that revenue elsewhere, says spokesman Malcolm Harvey, and would be happy to see deposits being rerouted to help binners.
April 25, 2008
We’ve got the motivation. We’ve got the ideas. We’ve certainly got the money, and all the knowledge we need to fix the problems taking root on B.C. streets.
So why don’t we? That’s the million-dollar question - or the $852-million question to be more precise, which is roughly what it costs British Columbians every year to ride herd on the 15,500 people living on our streets. With the Olympics a mere two years away at this point, I would have expected urgency tinged with panic to have reached the highest levels by now, and yet it never seems to.
Richard LeBlanc calls it “stuckness.” He should know, given the challenges he has faced trying to set up a therapeutic community on the old Woodwynn farm in Central Saanich (http://www.createhomefulness.com/home).
“There’s a grand stuckness in Victoria,” says LeBlanc, who I first got to know several years ago through his highly successful Youth Employment Program. “We need to pick a project like Woodwynn - or any project, really - to get through it. Let’s pick one we feel passionate about and get past this.”
LeBlanc says he has been overwhelmed with support for his project, modelled after Italy’s famous San Patrignano therapeutic community. He recalled one two-minute trip through an office building that turned into a 45-minute meander due to so many people stopping him along the way to tell him how much they supported what he was doing.
Central Saanich council dealt the project a significant blow in February by nixing institutional or residential use of the property before LeBlanc had even presented to council. But LeBlanc would rather sort that challenge out than go find another piece of land - a lengthy and potentially futile process at the best of times in our region, and a major contributor to stuckness.
“If not here, where? If not now, when?” asks LeBlanc. “If you pick a new property, nine to 12 months from now we’ll be finished with due diligence and be back in the exactly same place as we are right now - and a year later.”
LeBlanc and I got chatting about Woodwynn a couple weeks ago over coffee with Ray Howard, who’d brought us together to talk about his own dream to do something with the five decommissioned BC ferries that are coming out of service in September. Howard wants to use them as floating treatment centres for people with addictions, and even has a low-profile spot picked out in Saanich Inlet where the ships can anchor.
Howard says everyone’s first reaction is to scoff, then declare that it can’t be done - but really, why couldn’t it? It’s an interesting idea.
As is LeBlanc’s project. As is a bottle depot similar to Vancouver’s United We Can, designed to work with, train and hire the “binners” out there who earn a living redeeming the bottles and cans we can’t be bothered to return. (There’s even a depot licence available in Victoria right now.)
All sorts of innovative projects are out there waiting to be tried. They’re going to require us to take a chance on doing things differently, and to stifle that automatic “No!” that rises to our lips so easily in this region. In my opinion, no idea should be considered too wacky to dismiss out of hand, because nothing could possibly be wackier than leaving things as they are.
But all the ideas in the world won’t get us far if we stay stuck. Let’s do something big, bold and dramatic for a change, and prove to ourselves - and the world that will soon be on our doorsteps - that it’s possible.
Speaking of saying no, the Capital Regional District was none too happy about my column last week about separating out returnable bottles and cans so that binners can benefit from some of the $18 million in deposits that go unredeemed in B.C. every year.
The CRD contract with Metro Waste - the company that buys the recyclables collected through the blue-box program - is based on three to four per cent of the “container stream” being redeemable containers, says a CRD spokeswoman. In other words, the CRD got a cheaper deal by telling Metro they could count on people like you and me to put at least some of our redeemable bottles into our blue boxes, which Metro then takes in for a refund.
With all due respect to the CRD, I’ll do as I choose with the deposits on my redeemables, and eagerly await word of other ways to put our forfeited deposits to work on social fronts. In Vancouver, a pilot project to collect workplace bottles and cans is generating funds for the United Way.
B.C.’s redeemable containers are managed by non-profit Encorp Pacific, and our unredeemed deposits are its major revenue stream. But Encorp has the means to make up that revenue elsewhere, says spokesman Malcolm Harvey, and would be happy to see deposits being rerouted to help binners.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Redirect bottles and cans to binners
April 18, 2008
We tend to look for big solutions to big problems. We all want that “magic bullet” that’s going to fix everything in one single, brilliant stroke.
But of course, there isn’t one. Whatever the issue at hand - global famine, rising obesity rates, a relentless rise in poverty in our communities - the truth is that every big problem is in fact just a dense thicket of small ones, all needing to be solved one by one.
So no magic bullet, then. No sexy instant cures. No one-fell-swoop solutions. Just the hard work of tackling a host of small problems one at a time.
Ignore that important fact, and nothing gets resolved. Here in B.C., alarm grows on all fronts that more than 15,000 British Columbians are now living on our streets yet the years pass and nothing seems to change.
Woodwyn Farm proponent Richard LeBlanc calls it “stuckness” (more on that next week). I suspect it’s about waiting for that magic bullet, when in fact the actual magic is in seeing that the key to dealing with any Big Problem is to address the myriad small problems at its core.
What can one person do to make a difference? I’m asked that all the time. As a member of the co-ordinating committee of the Greater Victoria Commission to End Homelessness, I can tell you that what’s being talked about there is the need for a Web site where people in our region can connect with like minds and innovative projects, and learn more about what has proven effective in other cities.
The Web site Our Way Home is a good start (http://www.ourwayhome.ca), but is not yet the interactive hub for ideas that people are looking for. So for today let’s consider just one simple and small thing that we could all start doing immediately: Change our recycling habits.
If you’re like me, you buy a lot of beverage containers without getting around to returning them for a refund of your deposit. Recycling them in your blue box diverts the containers from the waste stream, but that deposit you paid never does get returned. Deposits on beverage containers picked up in our blue-box program go unredeemed.
The accumulated deposits on all those unreturned cans and bottles in B.C. added up to almost $18 million in 2006. In fact, unredeemed deposits are the single biggest source of revenue for Encorp Pacific, the non-profit started by government in the mid-1990s to manage B.C.’s bottle returns. Something as minor as bagging your refundable cans and bottles separately from the rest of your recycling would put that money into the hands of what are probably thousands of street-level recyclers in B.C.
I’m sure Encorp would be unhappy to lose the revenue stream, but that’s hardly the point. You and I paid for those bottle deposits fair and square when we bought our beverages, and I certainly feel no qualms about exercising choice around who gets the refund that I’m choosing to forfeit.
In Vancouver, the highly successful business United We Can proves what can happen just by shifting our thinking on this one small front. Drive past the Downtown Eastside social enterprise on any given day and you’ll find a lineup of homeless people pushing shopping carts stacked high with empty containers into the UWC bottle depot. The program puts a few bucks into their pockets on a steady basis, and diverts a significant volume of cans and bottles that would otherwise be headed for the trash.
The 13-year-old business has grown to the point that it now employs 24 full-time workers, most of whom came from the streets. In 2006, it launched a new project that paired “binners” - people on the street who dig through garbage bins - with restaurants and other businesses that generated large volumes of returnable bottles. The binners were trained, matched with a business, and provided with one of 50 specially built collection carts known as UBUs (Urban Binning Units).
Will any of it solve homelessness? No, but it all counts. We’re not going to buy our way out of more than 25 years of flawed public policy just by handing over our bottles and cans to people on the street, but it’s one small step in the right direction. And with $18 million in unredeemed deposits up for grabs province-wide, it’s not even such a small step.
One word of caution before you begin: In our region, it’s illegal for anyone but you or the Capital Regional District to go through the contents of your blue box. To get around that, I sort my refundable containers into a separate bag and hope that will suffice in protecting the enterprising recyclers in my neighbourhood from being charged with theft.
April 18, 2008
We tend to look for big solutions to big problems. We all want that “magic bullet” that’s going to fix everything in one single, brilliant stroke.
But of course, there isn’t one. Whatever the issue at hand - global famine, rising obesity rates, a relentless rise in poverty in our communities - the truth is that every big problem is in fact just a dense thicket of small ones, all needing to be solved one by one.
So no magic bullet, then. No sexy instant cures. No one-fell-swoop solutions. Just the hard work of tackling a host of small problems one at a time.
Ignore that important fact, and nothing gets resolved. Here in B.C., alarm grows on all fronts that more than 15,000 British Columbians are now living on our streets yet the years pass and nothing seems to change.
Woodwyn Farm proponent Richard LeBlanc calls it “stuckness” (more on that next week). I suspect it’s about waiting for that magic bullet, when in fact the actual magic is in seeing that the key to dealing with any Big Problem is to address the myriad small problems at its core.
What can one person do to make a difference? I’m asked that all the time. As a member of the co-ordinating committee of the Greater Victoria Commission to End Homelessness, I can tell you that what’s being talked about there is the need for a Web site where people in our region can connect with like minds and innovative projects, and learn more about what has proven effective in other cities.
The Web site Our Way Home is a good start (http://www.ourwayhome.ca), but is not yet the interactive hub for ideas that people are looking for. So for today let’s consider just one simple and small thing that we could all start doing immediately: Change our recycling habits.
If you’re like me, you buy a lot of beverage containers without getting around to returning them for a refund of your deposit. Recycling them in your blue box diverts the containers from the waste stream, but that deposit you paid never does get returned. Deposits on beverage containers picked up in our blue-box program go unredeemed.
The accumulated deposits on all those unreturned cans and bottles in B.C. added up to almost $18 million in 2006. In fact, unredeemed deposits are the single biggest source of revenue for Encorp Pacific, the non-profit started by government in the mid-1990s to manage B.C.’s bottle returns. Something as minor as bagging your refundable cans and bottles separately from the rest of your recycling would put that money into the hands of what are probably thousands of street-level recyclers in B.C.
I’m sure Encorp would be unhappy to lose the revenue stream, but that’s hardly the point. You and I paid for those bottle deposits fair and square when we bought our beverages, and I certainly feel no qualms about exercising choice around who gets the refund that I’m choosing to forfeit.
In Vancouver, the highly successful business United We Can proves what can happen just by shifting our thinking on this one small front. Drive past the Downtown Eastside social enterprise on any given day and you’ll find a lineup of homeless people pushing shopping carts stacked high with empty containers into the UWC bottle depot. The program puts a few bucks into their pockets on a steady basis, and diverts a significant volume of cans and bottles that would otherwise be headed for the trash.
The 13-year-old business has grown to the point that it now employs 24 full-time workers, most of whom came from the streets. In 2006, it launched a new project that paired “binners” - people on the street who dig through garbage bins - with restaurants and other businesses that generated large volumes of returnable bottles. The binners were trained, matched with a business, and provided with one of 50 specially built collection carts known as UBUs (Urban Binning Units).
Will any of it solve homelessness? No, but it all counts. We’re not going to buy our way out of more than 25 years of flawed public policy just by handing over our bottles and cans to people on the street, but it’s one small step in the right direction. And with $18 million in unredeemed deposits up for grabs province-wide, it’s not even such a small step.
One word of caution before you begin: In our region, it’s illegal for anyone but you or the Capital Regional District to go through the contents of your blue box. To get around that, I sort my refundable containers into a separate bag and hope that will suffice in protecting the enterprising recyclers in my neighbourhood from being charged with theft.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Problems are fixed when people have a place to live
April 11, 2008
They call him Ishmael, and he’s OK with that. “Ishmael, the unwanted child,” he explains, pulling a Bible from his backpack as he tells the story of Abraham’s outcast son.
He picked up the nickname while living in Toronto’s infamous Tent City a few years ago. He liked that people found it easier to pronounce than his given name, and that they weren’t always asking him how to spell it. So “Ishmael” it was.
He built his house in Tent City for the grand total of $200, scrounging most of the materials out of other people’s garbage. As we chat in the coffee shop at the University of Victoria library, he brings out his laptop to show me photos of his little dream house from that period - a tidy, tiny structure complete with granite and marble floors, a woodstove, an outhouse, and a rosemary bush thriving in the front garden (photo above).
The media were reporting hundreds of people living in Tent City back in those days, but Ishmael figures it was actually about 80. The campers lived on the Toronto lakefront for three years on vacant property owned by Home Depot before being evicted in 2002.
Ishmael had moved in after finding himself out of rent money and in between jobs, and stayed for a year and a half. For him, it was the perfect situation, and in his opinion far more cost-effective than the “current idiocy” of spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the name of homelessness without ever solving the problems.
“When I was in Toronto, it cost $80 a night to keep me at the Salvation Army for two and a half years. That’s 1,000 nights - $80,000 in all - yet I was still as homeless on the day I left as when I arrived,” he says. “Here in Victoria, they’ve got a van that goes around at night handing out soup and sandwiches. But it costs [taxpayers] $12 a head for that soup and sandwich. I could buy the same thing at Quizno’s for half the price.”
These days, Ishmael spends virtually all of his daytime hours at the UVic library. He’s found a place to sleep in the Western Communities, but needs to keep a low profile so the property owner doesn’t spot him. So every day he hops a bus to the university and spends long hours browsing the library stacks.
“I don’t smoke, don’t do dope, don’t drink. You’ve got to occupy yourself somehow, so I’m doing this. And I am a bookworm, so it suits me,” says Ishmael, whose favourite writer is Thomas Jefferson. “I’ve got quite a book collection that I drag around with me, including some rare and hard-to-find volumes.”
He’s not sure why he lives like he does, but recognized years ago that he could no longer count on holding down a job long enough to pay his rent.
It wasn’t always that way. After immigrating to Canada from Germany in 1983, he landed a job quickly and was able to buy himself a house within a couple of years.
“But in 1990, I just kind of died,” he says. “They tell me I’m somebody who fell between the cracks. There’s a reason for every one of us to be on the street. A lot of us are really 12-year-old children in adult bodies.”
Ishmael jokes that he was a drifter throughout the 1990s, “then a new century started and I became a vagrant.” But he works when he can, and is currently making do on savings from the $7,000 he earned last year doing odd jobs. He refuses to go on welfare; socialism is “the philosophy of the parasite,” he tells me emphatically.
He’s 51 now, and no longer sure that his 2005 move to B.C. was a good idea. He’d ridden his bicycle from Toronto to Vancouver - a 44-day sojourn - after seeing televised images of the city and finding himself drawn to it.
But things haven’t worked out as planned. He built another tiny house in the woods of Metchosin, but that’s lost to him now. He swapped farm labour for a small wage and a place to live on the Peninsula for a time, but then he and the owner got into an argument and that was that. He’s thinking he might end up back in Toronto if he can find the bus fare, and get a room again at the Salvation Army.
I ask him what he’d suggest for readers wanting to know what part they can play in ending homelessness. Hire people, he says. (Call Cool Aid’s Community Casual Labour Pool at 388-9296 for more information.)
And if you’ve got a little bit of land where a wanderer might settle for a while, he’s all ears.
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Thanks for the great feedback on homeless issues!
April 4, 2008
Many thanks to everyone who responded to my column last week speculating whether my stories from Victoria’s streets were wearing thin on readers. The response was overwhelmingly positive, and I can’t tell you how nice it was to read so many inspiring and heartfelt stories about people’s own thoughts and experiences around homelessness.
All told, I got 226 e-mails, seven letters and a couple of phone calls. That’s easily 20 times the response I’d normally get even for a column that really struck a chord with readers, so the abundance of feedback alone was immensely heartening.
Only nine readers wanted me to give up the issue altogether, and I classified another nine as “not sure.” So that leaves 218 who urged me to carry on, all of whom were obviously very passionate about the issue themselves. (Of course, let’s acknowledge the inherent flaws of a poll asking whether people are still reading, in which only those who still are would even know to take part!)
It was wonderful to hear what people in our community are already doing to bring an end to this heap of problems we call homelessness.
They’re organizing study groups. Launching church initiatives. Volunteering at street-serving agencies. Giving money. Writing letters to government. Renting their suites to somebody who really needs it, even if the new tenant is a bit of a pain in the neck sometimes. Reading up on the issues, and raising the consciousness of friends and family.
They passed along terrific suggestions on ways for me to keep writing about the issues without turning readers off. Here are a few key ones, all of which I’ll be heeding:
Keep up the stories, but give us some successes once in a while. I hadn’t intended to be a downer every week, but somehow it happened. I’ve always been a bit of a gloomy thing in terms of what attracts me as a writer, and that has understandably turned out to be a bit of a bummer for readers.
So I’m going to work harder at including more columns on what’s working out there, as opposed to what’s not.
Don’t expect typical success stories - ones in which the person finds a great place to live, recovers fully from an addiction, stabilizes in his mental illness, gets a job, reconnects with his family and lives happily ever after. But at the very least I’ll bring you more happy-for-now stories.
I also want to be more attentive to all sides of the issue, and include the stories of people like the frustrated downtown merchant who’s replacing her store’s plate-glass window for the third time in four months.
Mix it up a little. People encouraged me to keep a focus on street issues, but to write about other things from time to time - maybe even something light-hearted once in a while. Great advice. More variety in my topics will keep things fresh, both for readers and me.
One reader suggested I’d gotten too close to the issue to maintain journalistic objectivity. Could be, as the issues dominate my volunteer life as well and I sometimes feel like all I ever talk about is homelessness, addiction and the sex trade. It’s probably not healthy.
Dump the “homeless” label. Readers rightly noted that “homelessness” is in fact just one characteristic of a wide variety of problems, the vast majority of which are much more complex than the mere need to house people (although that would certainly be a heck of a good start).
The streets are Ground Zero for problems as diverse as mental health, cognitive ability, criminal behaviour, physical injury, work injury, trauma, Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, hippie-kid syndrome, and bad luck. Solutions need to fit the problems, and that requires knowing exactly what those problems are.
Tell us how to help. This was hands-down the most common request. There’s clearly a lot of energy and urgency in our community for making things happen, but people need help in figuring out how to connect to the issue.
I’ll put some serious thought into that in the next while. And if you’ve already found a meaningful way to make a difference, please feel free to pass along what you’re doing so I can share those ideas with other readers. But do remember that while individual effort is a powerful thing, we still need to keep the pressure on all levels of government to restore public health, civil order and human dignity in our communities.
I was particularly touched by readers’ concern for me, and whether I was losing heart. One elderly woman unfamiliar with e-mail got her daughter in Vancouver to send me a message on her behalf to cheer me up.
Believe me, I’m cheered. Thanks so much for your kind words and big hearts.
April 4, 2008
Many thanks to everyone who responded to my column last week speculating whether my stories from Victoria’s streets were wearing thin on readers. The response was overwhelmingly positive, and I can’t tell you how nice it was to read so many inspiring and heartfelt stories about people’s own thoughts and experiences around homelessness.
All told, I got 226 e-mails, seven letters and a couple of phone calls. That’s easily 20 times the response I’d normally get even for a column that really struck a chord with readers, so the abundance of feedback alone was immensely heartening.
Only nine readers wanted me to give up the issue altogether, and I classified another nine as “not sure.” So that leaves 218 who urged me to carry on, all of whom were obviously very passionate about the issue themselves. (Of course, let’s acknowledge the inherent flaws of a poll asking whether people are still reading, in which only those who still are would even know to take part!)
It was wonderful to hear what people in our community are already doing to bring an end to this heap of problems we call homelessness.
They’re organizing study groups. Launching church initiatives. Volunteering at street-serving agencies. Giving money. Writing letters to government. Renting their suites to somebody who really needs it, even if the new tenant is a bit of a pain in the neck sometimes. Reading up on the issues, and raising the consciousness of friends and family.
They passed along terrific suggestions on ways for me to keep writing about the issues without turning readers off. Here are a few key ones, all of which I’ll be heeding:
Keep up the stories, but give us some successes once in a while. I hadn’t intended to be a downer every week, but somehow it happened. I’ve always been a bit of a gloomy thing in terms of what attracts me as a writer, and that has understandably turned out to be a bit of a bummer for readers.
So I’m going to work harder at including more columns on what’s working out there, as opposed to what’s not.
Don’t expect typical success stories - ones in which the person finds a great place to live, recovers fully from an addiction, stabilizes in his mental illness, gets a job, reconnects with his family and lives happily ever after. But at the very least I’ll bring you more happy-for-now stories.
I also want to be more attentive to all sides of the issue, and include the stories of people like the frustrated downtown merchant who’s replacing her store’s plate-glass window for the third time in four months.
Mix it up a little. People encouraged me to keep a focus on street issues, but to write about other things from time to time - maybe even something light-hearted once in a while. Great advice. More variety in my topics will keep things fresh, both for readers and me.
One reader suggested I’d gotten too close to the issue to maintain journalistic objectivity. Could be, as the issues dominate my volunteer life as well and I sometimes feel like all I ever talk about is homelessness, addiction and the sex trade. It’s probably not healthy.
Dump the “homeless” label. Readers rightly noted that “homelessness” is in fact just one characteristic of a wide variety of problems, the vast majority of which are much more complex than the mere need to house people (although that would certainly be a heck of a good start).
The streets are Ground Zero for problems as diverse as mental health, cognitive ability, criminal behaviour, physical injury, work injury, trauma, Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, hippie-kid syndrome, and bad luck. Solutions need to fit the problems, and that requires knowing exactly what those problems are.
Tell us how to help. This was hands-down the most common request. There’s clearly a lot of energy and urgency in our community for making things happen, but people need help in figuring out how to connect to the issue.
I’ll put some serious thought into that in the next while. And if you’ve already found a meaningful way to make a difference, please feel free to pass along what you’re doing so I can share those ideas with other readers. But do remember that while individual effort is a powerful thing, we still need to keep the pressure on all levels of government to restore public health, civil order and human dignity in our communities.
I was particularly touched by readers’ concern for me, and whether I was losing heart. One elderly woman unfamiliar with e-mail got her daughter in Vancouver to send me a message on her behalf to cheer me up.
Believe me, I’m cheered. Thanks so much for your kind words and big hearts.
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