Calendar is not accurate for the holidays!

The calendar wasn't updated to reflect programming changes over the holidays! This is the worst lack of a Christmas present that any hungry Torontonians could ask for.

If someone could post any info about accurate programming information for meal programs through the rest of the holidays, as a comment below, that would be so wonderful.

QWHC's thanksgiving list

Queen West Health Center's 2011 Thanksgiving Meals List is out. It still hasn't been copied to the meals calendar.

Blank calendars on meal program-related sites

Well, a couple of places have been trying to use the 'net to connect with their people. Maybe trying to connect with the wrong people. Maybe just trying to "get something up" and then fill it in later. Which of course, never works out.

Here's some of the carcasses:

Toronto Christian Worship Center (they run the evening dinners at Bellevue and College)

The Christie-Ossington Neighbourhood Center's events calendar ...but their meal schedule (which takes like four really careful clicks to find) says otherwise!

Meal times corrections

A few things have been corrected:

• For a couple weeks there's been an item in the calendar about Sanctuary womens' only meals on Tuesdays. It's not going on and it's corrected!
• Sanctuary's meal programs on the calendar have been updated to reflect the times that meals are being served.
• CONC lunches on fridays were mistakingly added to the calendar - that's been corrected.
• Sketch Working Arts is closed until October 4th - that's a two-week closure. The calendar has been corrected.
• The Church of St. Stephen-In-The-Fields hosts weekend breakfasts and sunday dinners, which have been added to the calendar. Exact start and end times are still being researched.

The information on this site has never been 100% accurate, but it's always been more accurate than that provided by #311 (now #211), the sheets put out by the Queen West Health Center (which are now being updated using this site), or any of the guides linked from the city of Toronto website.

The big goal is to engage more with program users through this website to approach 100% accuracy. At this point, leaving comments to posts like this one is the only way that users of this site can offer feedback and information. Hopefully at some point that can change!

Hungry poor VS the PDF file format

Seems like the people who put together meal program information just love the PDF file format, even though the PDF file format really hates the poor and homeless. Just hates us. It wants us to go hungry. It wants us to suffer. The 311 information site as well as the city hall website is all about dishing out useless, badly-formatted, often-garbled, heavy-as-fuck PDFs that don't work so well on ghetto public computers.

So if you're in the dubious position of having to publish a schedule for your meal program or other services, do us a favor:

1. Make a Google Calendar with your schedule.
2. Use the Embed code that Google Calendar gives you to place the calendar into your website.
3. Use the Calendar print function to bring up a print-out, and then use the Print To PDF command thing in your print thing. I'd love to provide better instructions, but every single print box is different. If you don't see any "print to PDF" type things in there, get the newest Acrobat installer (they have a new version about every ten minutes) and install it with all them shitty options on - prepare for reduced performance all 'round.
4. Someone in your organization will complain about the increased accessibility of your schedule. Tell them you were having to waste too much time getting back to people by e-mail about the programs because people are "too badly-educated" to be able to deal with PDFs.

Getting Free Food Scheduling info from Toronto's Meal Programs

Although most of the websites put out by Toronto's meal programs are out of date or difficult to interpret, the staff are generally very quick to respond to e-mailed requests about scheduling! So if you can't find info on a program online, try e-mailing the staff!

Taoist Chicken!

Now this is a mind-blower: Monday afternoons at 4pm, behind the liquor store on Spadina, near Kensington Market, in the back-alley parking area of the Taoist temple, they serve Chicken, veggies and rice, and you can go back for seconds. What a meal! This is the first non-christian, non-government thing to make it on this site and I hope it'll be the first of many.

St. Felix $1 Dinners

The sisters at St. Felix on Augusta do a great job of lunch, providing internet, clothes and other basic needs, but last year they started doing these $1 dinners, and they're pretty good. It's about at the same level as their lunches - maybe a notch up.

They do it monday to thursday, starting at 5:30. Seems like 6:30 is the latest you want to show up.

Sanctuary!

Finally, the complete Sanctuary weekly schedule has been added to the calendar.

So there's this place. It's called "Sanctuary." And they do this lunch on wednesdays at noon.

Here's where it be:

25 Charles St. between Yonge & Church.

It's a drop-in. They serve brunch, basically: coffee etc, and you can eat as much as you bloody well want.

Ghetto "breakfasts"

It's hard to find a good free breakfast in Toronto.

PARC will serve up some pretty sad cereal, the Corner Drop-In at least gives you the makings of peanut butter and jelly sandwitches (and soup or eggs if you show up around 8am), and the Christie Ossington Neighborhood Center is all over the map but always on the light side.

Apparently, the Lawyers Feed the Hungry program serves breakfast from 6:45 - 7:45 on thursdays.

The Good Shepherd will at least give you some kind of eggs during their daily 9am - 11am breakfasts. And they'll have all sorts of bagels and peanut butter. But even their breakfasts are pretty lackluster.

And then there's the Out of the Cold program, and when that starts, a lot of these places start to get better breakfasts. It's hard to co-ordinate these programs though, even staff seem confused about them.

Hoping it's accurate

So I have added a few things that I was surprised to have omitted before: meals at Upper Room, Evangel Hall and the Caribbean Catholic Church.

But there's still some stuff out there that has escaped the map and the calendar:

• This church next to the value village at Bloor and... is it Lansdowne? I think they've got Sunday dinners. I went to one of these and it was very preachy and musical but comfy.
• Sanctuary on Charles St. Sanctuary is now on the calendar!
• There's another place downtown that I think is on friday evenings, stays going very very late with a movie and then you can sleep over there on the floor. Kind of a strange place. The staff kept rearranging the tables to accommodate the varying traffic levels.

If anyone has any info on these places or other ones, that's what the anonymous comments feature below is for!

- Yours Truly, the Ultramarginalized

The Meeting Place: Free laundry, showers, storage, internet, phone etc

The Meeting Place In Context

It doesn't show up in the calendar or the map because meals is what this place isn't for. In its palacial location on the west side of Bathurst just north of Queen, the Meeting Place is the perfect companion to places in the area like St. Felix, the Corner Drop-in, Scot Mission and Evangel Hall. And the Queen West Health Center is the other perfect compliment to the Meeting Place, on the west side of Bathurst just south of Queen.

Laundry Time: 11:30

Sorry, this time has changed, and the new timing is unknown.

They open the door at half past eleven in the morning, Monday to Friday, with the occasional poorly-announced exception. Guests are asked to put their names in the general sign-in sheet, and then they can sign up for laundry, showers, computers etc. The phones are on a wait-and-wonder basis.

Showers and Storage: now that's harm reduction!

The Meeting Place will actually store your valuables for free. Having somewhere to put a backpack is a big deal for homeless and precariously-housed people, so I really feel like someone deserves to be knighted for putting that in place. Same thing with the showers.

The Breakfast/shower/laundry strategy power combo moves

For extra hobo points, try this (you will need a bike):
11:00 Show up at St. Felix, grab breakfast. Sorry, this time has changed... they open at noon now.

11:25 Start waiting around the Meeting Place door.
11:35 Put your laundry in on 25 minute Quick Cycle.
11:40 Take a shower (or try to get to the second Scot Mission lunch before 11:45) and back before your wash ends. Extra points.
12:00 Put your laundry in the dryer and do some internetting.

It's tempting to work the corner drop-in lunch in there somewhere, it must definitely be possible to hit up all three places and get a really solid meal in.

The sketchiness factor

The meeting place is so, so sketchy. Guests have to overhear shouting matches, conversations about violence and criminality, and out-of-control people with each visit, but the staff is pretty amazing at keeping it just barely safe for everyone. The key is not to get into anyone else's business and not let people provoke you, because they will try to, every once in awhile. My recommendation? Take it easy on the coffee and don't count on getting there on time, having your place in line or masculinity/femininity respected, or getting what you want to eat. You want to be able to get away with this day after day for the rest of your life if necessary. So remember: don't set yourself up to have to avoid one of these places, because it could really cramp your style.

Ontario Works Shuffles Little Portugal Clients to Downtown Office

Ontario Works clients whose postal codes begin with M6J received a notice this month that, "in order to serve you better," their accounts would be moved to the downtown Metro Hall office, and that they would get further information in the mail.

As of yet, further notices have not been sent out, and there seem to be various versions of the story. The phone line for the 1900 Dundas West office still says that it serves M6J-ers, the notice at the entrance to the building says something about it being effective on the 20th or something like that, and workers say that the move is because the office took on clients from a postal code further out. They talk about how happy the people at the eastern border of the M6J postal code must be.

Just to illustrate how little this serves anybody better, here's a map of the two M6J areas, and the two offices (the new one is the one that's further away from most of the area):


View M6J area code in a larger map

If you eyeball it, it looks like only residents of 1/5th of the postal code are actually closer to the new location.

So why didn't they just shuffle those in the green area to the new office, instead of continuing to force them to trek west on Dundas, and let the people in Little Portugal stay in Little Portugal where they want to stay?

It's basically a big f-you to Little Portugal residents on OW. It'll be interesting to see the scads of irate Portuguese rubbing shoulders with some of the roughest OW clients in the city, at the most ghetto, difficult-to-find office in the GTA.

If you're going to have to go to this hellhole, here's how to get there: it's just to the left of the main entrance pictured below, off the north side of Wellington street, and it's on the south side of Metro Hall.


View Larger Map

Fortunately, there is a silver lining to all of this: the people at the downtown office have a bit of a better attitude. They don't speak Portuguese, though. And everybody's getting transferred to new workers. How are our Portuguese immigrants who are still learning basic, basic English, supposed to make the transition, when they're already in enough of a pickle, having come to Canada expecting everything to be coming up roses, and ending up on the dole because, oops, Canada's a pretty tough place to live, it turns out.

Another actual plus: The employment center in Metro Hall is much less ghetto than the one on Dundas West.

The problem is the commute. Ontario Works clients don't spend their transportation allowance, if they get it, on transportation, they spend it on bills, because the accommodations and basic needs allowance, added up, are what most people pay for rent - if they're lucky. So this means a lot of walking. A lot.

Maybe now's a good time to set up a much-needed Bikes for Bums project or something.

Internet Famous Homeless People

Going around some of these drop-in programs, I see people who could really do well in movies. And I wonder how many of the people around me are building something incredible on the internet... with social networking, blogging or whatever.

Check this link out: 6 Awesome Homeless People Saved by The Internet

No Scott Mission Lunches on Sunday!

Full apologies... the calendar has misleadingly said Scott Mission lunch every day of the week at 10:30 and 11:30, and it's actually every day except Sundays.

And they don't want you to go to both! Here's a recommendation: go to the 10:30 one and then bomb down to St. Felix on Augusta just north of Queen. Go through the projects south of the market. For bonus points, hit up St. Steven's at Augusta and College before Scott Mission. It's a triple-whammy that you'll need some real Tupperware to make full use of. If you tupperware the shit out of those three, you can chill for the rest of the day.

Again - sorry! This site is about accuracy and this is embarrassing.

Much Love,

The Overconnected Hungry

Our Lady of Good Counsel @ College & Ossington: Best Toronto Soup Kitchen You Never Heard of

Praise the lord! This unassuming Caribbean Catholic church will make your Wednesday. Every Wednesday.

So they open around 8 or 9am to let people in from the cold and grab some coffee and what have you, and then at 11am, watch out. Watch the fuck out. They will they will feed you. These ladies don't stop until you're unable to leave because you're too full. Today, they started us off with some salad, well-dressed, and then comes the hearty veggie soup, and then they start laying the groceries on us. They gave us fishes - whole fishes. Boxes of cookies. Granola bars. Orange Pekoe in bags. The good kind. And candies. Tons of them. We all came away with grocery bags full of it. My girlfriend is going to think I robbed a grocery store out of desperation.

I was the only anglo there. Everybody else was Portuguese and there were a couple Chinese ladies up in there. The ladies serving us were all Caribbean sweethearts. Only 18 people showed up, and it looks like that's what they were expecting.

And it's 100% evangelism-free.

Here's where 'tis:

View Larger Map

Thanks for the dignity!

It is completely reasonable to be without food money. Toronto's a pretty cheap city to live in, but still - everything's getting more expensive except your paycheque. Even with NoFrills and Price Chopper, feeding oneself is pricey. Most people, when money's tight, will compromise their diet to the point where it drags their life down. But not me. I will gladly accept the help that's offered so that I can keep my head straight and continue to work my way back to... ugh... the grocery store.

During the course of authoring this website, I have alternated several times between being absolutely broke with loads of time on my hands, and having tons of cash and a full-time job, and no time to cook my own food. Between the two, I've been healthier during my unemployed periods, because I've had the time to either cook for myself when I can find food money, or access soup kitchen food which is heartier (and often tastier) than Toronto restaurant food.

Aside from staying healthy, there's another benefit to having access to reliable meal programs: it offers a degree of independence. I don't have to worry about food. I don't have to hope for sympathetic friends to feed me. I can just say "oh yeah, I'm on my way to dinner" and it's true, motherfucker. "I just came from a great lunch - and hey, I grabbed you some brownies, want one?"

It's ironic to find being dependent on meal programs liberating - after all, real independence is being able to provide your own money for your own food, right? Well the thing is, if we were any good, as a nation, at implementing capitalism, that would add up. But we don't get real independence in this country. We don't get the opportunity to maximize our potential. If we did, nobody would run out of food money. We get poisoned from birth by a government desperate to prove how unimportant public health can possibly be, an educational system designed to isolate and disempower us, and a mental health system with a pathetic success rate (the mennonites did four times better than the DSM-4).

Canadians are fucked from the start: we're supposed to eat as much wheat, dairy, sugar and plastics as we possibly can, drink as much fluoride and chlorine as they can pack into the water, we're supposed to breathe exhaust every day and night, and see ourselves in the context of our job, our gender and our education. If you're a man with no job and a poor education, in Canada, in 2010, it's not easy to feel alive because you're the problem, you're not useful, and you're not worth talking to. Thanks to our meal programs, Toronto's poorest men do have one thing going for them: they can keep themselves alive and redefine what it means to be a valuable person: A kind, thoughtful problem-solver that everyone wants to talk to.

Fortunately, a certain group of people (Toronto's Christians, bless them) have gotten one thing right: empowerment of one's fellow person. Either that or it could be the most noble evangelism ever. It is kind of inspiring: "Come on into our holy room, have some food. Christ has taught us compassion."

So remember - when we make use of what's offered us, in a kind and respectful way, it doesn't somehow use up Toronto's store of goodwill. It increases it. Good will is contagious. Graciously accepting help cultivates self-respect, something that nobody can buy. Caring for oneself, really treating ourselves well, makes a huge difference in how we treat others, and how effective we are at getting back on track, whatever that means.

Christie Ossington Neighbourhood Center Schedule Update

I started this site because it was hard to find scheduling information about meal programs.

Typically you have to show up somewhere at the wrong time, wait to speak with a volunteer, and then drag the information out of them like it's their back teeth. And if you have problems affording your own food, it's likely that complicated schedules aren't going to be easy to write down and keep track of.

Like most food security agencies in Toronto, the Christie Ossington Neighbourhood Centre (CONC) does not publish the schedule of their primary services.

The CONC website offers a history of the drop-in in article form, but not a schedule. The calendar is blank.

The hand-outs they provide at the front desk do give scheduling information, but it doesn't mention the snacks or the breakfast program. It does include an up-to-date calendar.

I erroneously listed their breakfasts as being between 10 and 11 in the calendar, and for that I must apologize. I have updated it to reflect the actual times: 8am - 9am, Monday through Thursday.

Quiche and fixed computers at Christie/Ossington Neighborhood Center

They were serving Quiche for lunch today at the Christie Ossington Neighborhood Center, along with some nice green beans. And all their main floor computers now work! Incredible. Plus everybody got a whole quiche to take home. Good day at C/O.

Some others things you may not know about this great spot:

• They have laundry services. You might get lucky and show up when it's not in use, but they have a signup thing so you can schedule yourself some time with the laundry room.
• There's a music recording studio and more computers downstairs in their "LOFT" youth program area. They don't have drums or a lot of instruments in the recording room like they do at Sketch, but their staff is pretty savvy and they've got some good electronic gear and a nice vocal booth.
• Their breakfast situation is really tight - they'll often have fresh fruit up in there too.