TORONTO -- Offering a helping hand and a hearty meal is something Amanda Bergen is passionate about.
“I really have a heart for the homeless community,” she tells CTV News Toronto. “I experienced homelessness myself and experienced drug addiction and all the problems that come with it, so I really feel like I have an understanding of what the community is going through.”
Bergen is a drop-in worker at All Saints Church Community Centre in Toronto at Dundas and Sherbourne streets. She and her colleagues say those experiencing homelessness in the city have been facing some challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic, with many finding that they simply have no place to go.
“I think the biggest challenge for people experiencing homelessness has been the fact that they haven’t actually been welcome anywhere. Programs like ours shut down early on,” explains Sanda Kazazic, Drop-in Manager at All Saints. “We’ve been kind of a staple here for a couple of decades and the community has gotten used to using our space not just for meals but for socializing, for connection.”
It’s part of what motivated the staff and volunteers to continue serving the community as best they could when the pandemic began, even while other shelters offering similar programs were forced to close.
“When all of this started, it was basically thanks to our dedicated staff who agreed to continue coming to work, despite the circumstances, that we’ve managed to remain open as if COVID was not happening,” Kazazic says.
All Saints Church Community Centre says they serve community members who are dealing with food insecurity, who are marginalized or who have challenges accessing other services. Before COVID-19, they would often serve lunch to 150-200 people a day.
“We had to reduce the capacity of our program in order to be able to enforce physical distancing. So we had to make a really hard decision to reduce the capacity in our program to 25 people,” explains Kazazic. “We still try to find a way to connect to community members who couldn’t access the program. So in parallel, right away we started doing meals to-go, both for breakfast and for lunch.”
Meals to-go mean, in the end, about 100 meals are being served daily.
“We try as much as we can not to turn anyone away with some type of food,” she adds.
Bergen says it’s been nice for the community members to return to All Saints and see familiar faces, especially during this time.
“I know that they need us and I know that they need our support,” she says. “The love that we genuinely have for these people, it really shows in the things that we do and the way we treat them and even the meals that we make for them.”
In addition to providing meals, All Saints Church Community Centre has been providing space for people to sleep during the day, while distancing, or to simply “be” while other public spaces have been closed.
Suporna has been accessing the services and she says that support “means the world” to her.
“It’s somewhere where any person can come in and be able to open up and not be scared,” she tells CTV News Toronto. “If this church was not here, many people would have nowhere to go to sleep.”
“It serves a lot of people,” adds David Daniels. “They’re caring. They have great toleration for everybody.”
In remaining open during COVID-19, All Saints has taken extra steps to provide safety to those working on site and accessing services, with temperature screenings, symptom checks and testing for the virus. Even though they are in close proximity to other shelters that have had outbreaks, Kazazic says the recommended measures they put in place from the beginning have kept the team healthy.
“Our staff puts so much heart, such passion in the work they do,” Kazazic says. “It’s very obvious that this is not just a job for them.”
Meals are made possible thanks to deliveries from Second Harvest, support from Daily Bread, and home-cooking by volunteers.
All Saints recommends that anyone looking to offer a donation gives them a call, and notes that in the hot weather, donations of boxed juices or pop are helpful.
“Best thing about my job is I get to love people where they’re at,” says Bergen. “So no judgement, no criticism. I just get to love them as they are, and that to me is a beautiful thing.”
