Mitzi Dean is worried. “I fear we’re going to see more preventable tragedies,” she says.
That’s what happens when social services agencies can’t reach the people they need to help.
Dean is executive director of the Pacific Centre Family Services Association, which offers a range of programs in the West Shore, tackling everything from drugs and alcohol to domestic violence to child sex abuse.
Like everyone else in the sector, the non-profit is feeling squeezed, squeezed, squeezed. It’s still getting government contracts — Ministry for Children and Family Development, Island Health, Justice — but the funding has flatlined.
Costs are still rising, though. So is the workload, the West Shore’s burgeoning population combining with a trickle-down effect in which the agency finds itself dealing with people who really need clinical treatment, but can’t find it in institutions that are themselves overburdened. The complexity of their demands drains resources, reducing the Pacific Centre’s capacity to help the people it was designed to help — which has consequences down the road.
Social service agencies argue that early intervention prevents problems from growing into full-fledged crises. Note that the number of mental health calls handled by the West Shore RCMP steadily climbed to 571 in 2014 from 332 in 2011. The numbers ramped up right after the area lost its urgent mental-health worker.
Now Dean is fussing about the future of an anti-gang initiative, the funding for which runs out next month. She’s trying to cobble together money from a variety of sources. Non-profits are good at that, squeezing a nickel here, a nickel there to build a dollar.
Which is why Dean was happy to get a $4,200 cheque from the Times Colonist Raise A Reader fund this week. Not a lot of money in the big scheme of things, but critical to a program that sends a river of gently used books (15,000 in the past two years) flowing through the hands of families with young children.
Statistically, children with even one book at home stand a much higher chance of succeeding in life.
Just over $250,000 worth of Raise A Reader cheques went out to more than 170 literacy-related programs on Vancouver Island this week. Most of the money was raised through the TC’s annual book sale, which triggered a $110,000 contribution from the provincial government.
While groups ranging from the Victoria READ Society to the Mustard Seed and the Learning Disabilities Association benefited, most of the recipients were schools. The giddiness with which many of the cheques were accepted (some were hand-delivered, others mailed) reflected how little discretionary spending teacher-librarians enjoy. Some rely solely on the Raise A Reader money to stock their shelves. Walking into those schools with a cheque felt like Santa coming down the chimney.
It was, in fact, cuts to school library funding that prompted the Times Colonist to launch its book drive back in 1998. The 18th version of the annual event will be held this spring at the Victoria Curling Club.
You know how it works: On the weekend of April 18-19, readers can bring their good used books to a drive-through drop-off in the curling club parking lot.
Volunteers will then spend two weeks sorting the donations, which will go on sale to the public the weekend of May 2-3. The proceeds go to literacy.
It would be great if the volunteers, book donors and book buyers all had the chance to see where, and how far, the money goes. It is both heartening and sobering to see how much is done with how little, how much we get out of workers who are more motivated by mission than money. If we like our non-profits to run poor and hungry, we should be ecstatic.
“Broadly, our sector is dying the death of a thousand cuts,” Dean says. “We’re as lean as we can be.”
As taxpayers we like lean, but as members of the community we fret when there’s no help for those who need it (or, at least, no help until it’s too late and the cops are cleaning up the mess).
“It’s getting worse,” Dean says. “It’s grinding us down more and more and more.”
