In today’s world, there is an overwhelming pressure to keep your professional and personal lives separate, to compartmentalize — to navigate a tightrope between your job and your life at home.
In the world of social services, it’s difficult not to conflate the two.
For many of us who work in the social-housing sector, personal, social and political convictions drive us to want to help provide everyone in our community with the solid foundation they need: a safe and secure home.
In my career, I’ve worked on several facets of poverty reduction and community economic development, including employment programs, social enterprise, research and policy. These different tangents have always led me back to working on affordable housing, because in the bigger picture, if we really want to effect change in a person’s life, they need safe and secure housing as a starting point. Period.
It seems simple, but we have to realize that there isn’t a single housing solution that works for all people. Our community is fractured by so many fault lines, such as economic insecurity, the impacts of colonization, inadequate mental-health services, and addictions treatment and recovery, it’s no wonder we have so many people who have fallen through the cracks. At Cool Aid, our motivation for the past 50 years has been to work with people who are the most marginalized.
Community has always been at the heart of this work: We created community around a kitchen table in a small house in North Park, which was our starting point. We grew community when we expanded our services to include a health clinic, daycare services and employment programs in Fernwood — all with the same view of supporting people to live well in our community.
The drive to do this work, tirelessly and with great conviction, also comes from my own life experience — as it does for many in our field. This came full circle for me recently as I was visiting the former Tally Ho, which houses 52 adults.
My job at Cool Aid doesn’t involve a lot of direct interaction with our tenants. But on this day, I met one of our residents outside who has schizophrenia. He was having a hard day.
This encounter made me reflect on my own uncle, whose diagnosis with schizophrenia came in mid-life.
My uncle was a kind, gentle person with a sparkle in his eye and an air of mischief. When it struck, his mental illness was pervasive and consumed his life. Yet, he always had a safe home with extended family; he had a warm bed to sleep in every night.
As part of his management of his mental illness, he would walk through the city every day and stop in at a local restaurant for his lunch. On a monthly basis, my father would go to this restaurant and pay the tab to cover my uncle’s lunches. This restaurant and our extended family were my uncle’s support network for navigating life with a debilitating mental illness.
Unfortunately, there are too many people in our community who do not have this support network and for those people, Cool Aid is family.
Recently, Cool Aid met community opposition to a project that would achieve an additional 61 apartments at 210 Gorge Rd. East. Our proposal was to create a mixed-income rental building with a range of rents, including units for people on income assistance. Council has asked us to scale back the proposal, removing one or two storeys of housing.
The result could be less housing at a greater cost to build and operate per unit — and a delay in opening.
The housing crisis is so acute in Victoria that we cannot afford to forgo these opportunities to create housing solutions.
When have we reached a threshold for too much affordable housing in any specific community? My answer would be when everyone in our community has a permanent home.
Cool Aid is back at the drawing board to try to make it work. We’ve been doing this in Victoria for more than 50 years. We won’t give up on the hundreds of people who need our help — who need your help.
Deanna Bhandar is the director of real estate for Victoria Cool Aid Society, whose mission is to build homes, lives and community.
