Happy Hungry Civic Holiday

This one hit without much warning. A holiday of some sort that's got drop-ins across the city shut down.

It's a really bad time for the Toronto Drop-In Network website to be down:

Fortunately, the holiday meals list has been hosted on the Toronto.ca website!

St. Felix and the Good Shepherd stay open during holidays, so they're the only thing that's likely to be open. Everything else is in "show up at the door and find out" mode.

There's no way for anyone to get alerts about holiday closures, so when this happens, people go hungry. So definitely hit the Sisters (St. Felix) and the Shepherd. And also, it's a great time to dumpster dive.

Good luck. Get over to the Shepherd right now.

Apologies to the 15 people that visited this site already today. The information on the calendar is misleading. A note has been added to it about closures. One meal program has been updated - the others are unconfirmed. St. Stephen's corner drop-in is probably closed.

The little things

This past week, the Corner Drop-in had cereal with chocolate bits in it. That kind of thing can make all the difference.

Happy Hungry Canada Day

TDIN really put their best foot forward this time, offering a great hilighted link on the front of their website, to the meal program holiday update for Canada Day... but of course...

1. You have to download a PDF file.
2. The PDF file has trouble downloading in certain browsers
3. The PDF file doesn't have a file extension on the end of it, so inexperienced Windows users may not be able to figure out how to open it.
4. The file is just called "Canada."

The good news: The Scott's open. EHM's open. CONC's open. The bad news: this guide is two pages and has very few listings. That is pretty sad.

But check it out: there's whisperings of a BBQ in Trinity Bellwoods Park at 1pm.

Here's their document converted so it can be viewed online: TDIN's Meal Program Listings for Canada Day 2013.

And here it is right in the page:

So once again, thanks to TDIN for doing the research, hopefully it's accurate, seems like about 1/3rd of what we'd usually have access to on a Monday, so who knows what's still happening today? If anybody knows of any Canada Day meals, any comments at the bottom could help someone.

Good luck and happy Canada Day, if that's what you want to hear.

The519 Sunday Breakfast & Monday MealTrans meal programs closed due to pride.

This is a great way to make Pride less accessible to the poor - suspend the free meals in the Village!

Of course, it's understandable. All the staff are busy with Pride related stuff. But it's funny how as soon as there's a holiday or something, the first thing that gets dropped is meal programs. So, for poor people, holidays and festivals are confusing, frustrating, hungry times.

That's why it's nice that St. Felix made the move to maintain most of their hours during holidays. Too bad they're not open on Sundays. And no $1 dinners. They just do lunch.

So this is going to be a very, very hungry Sunday for a lot of people. Many of those who use The519's meals aren't comfortable at the Good Shepherd, and the Shepherd doesn't offer an actual breakfast meal anyway, just a lot of sugar, dough and coffee - a great way to set poor people up for the day. Exactly what all us depressed schitzophrenics need to prepare us for an awesome downtown celebration like Pride. Crippling hunger, dizzying coffee and sugar rush, harsh sun, public partying.

Sistering

They do put up a good calendar - it even lists meal times!

And their drop-in page is pretty good.

So they have two meal programs, one in Parkdale at the Masaryk-Cowan Community Centre, and one on Bloor St near Ossington, which is a lot like CONC to the east - a storefront type of place:

Looks like between the two drop-ins, they offer more than 30 hours a week of coverage, which includes meals and a long list of other services.

Sistering is for women only. If there's one thing everyone learns from the soup kitchen scene, it's bravery, and women have to be especially brave to even start to venture into the scene. Sexual and gender harassment, and violence, are on the table, so to speak, so it's important to have a sprinkling of segregation here and there.

There are plenty of programs specifically for youth, men over 50, men only, LGBTQ and even just T people, and there are probably some secret Chinese ones, and of course, specific religious ones, etc. It'd be good to get the full range on this site, because 'etc' is a painful substitute. And it's silly that Sistering has taken so long to get here. It's in all the other listings, and this site is supposed to offer some coverage. But it did start with the programs that are open to absolutely everyone, and branched out. It needs to keep doing that.

Unfortunately, their email doesn't work:

Closed on OW payday: the Corner Drop-in at St. Stephen's does the unthinkable

Great time for a closure - when all the OW recipients plan to meet up with their ODSP recipient buddies to treat them to... whatever. A meal. Some drugs. Some booze. Some smokes. Some bike parts. Whatever it is. So that'll probably all be going down at the meeting place. Lots of debts getting repaid.

But it won't be going down at St. Stephen's Community House on Augusta just south of College. They're taking a "staff day."

Will there be a big crowd of confused and frustrated people at the Odette Corner Drop tomorrow morning? It'd be a good time to cruise by with some snacks to hand out.

Pulling back the curtain just a little bit...

Here's the searches that people did to find this site during the past month:

Browser and platform statistics suggest that over the past week, as many as one third of the site's users are accessing it through their mobile phones rather than computers.

Over the past week, the Calendar continues to get about twice as much use as the map:

What does tomorrow bring? A look at Sundays

St. Stephen in the Fields breakfast. Ah yes. Nobody has come up with a good nickname for the place, so we just call it the church across from the fire depot west of College and Augusta. Do they really serve breakfast from 6:30 to 8?

Then there's the corner drop-in, right around the corner, which apparently opens at 8. So there'll be that migration.

Then if you've got a bike, you could catch the Good Shepherd between 9 and 11. Show up in the first half-hour, and your breakfast will probably include protein. Otherwise it's basically just pastries and peanut butter and coffee... which is better than nothing.

If you don't have a bike, you'll be able to make it to the Lawyers breakfast, or if you do have a bike, it's an easy trip from the Shepherd.

If you're not straight, or you're not cisgender, The519 LGBTQ-only breakfast is the place to be. This is an amazing resource for people facing gender and sexual harassment in other drop-ins (and yeah, it's bad).

519 Church is also the place to be for their LGBT-only Lunch. An amazing lunch and an amazing program, like the breakfast.

Then there's the Good Shepherd dinner from 2pm - 4pm. If you've got a bike and some energy, it's possible to make it to the United Church lunch at Roncesvalles and Wright, as well as the Shepherd. It's a crazy trek, but on a sunday it's not so bad.

For actual dinner (2 - 4pm is not dinner), head to either the Evangel Hall Community Dinner or the aforementioned United Church. They're about the same, so whichever's closest is probably best. Unless you want to easily make it to the Grange Park Community Centre Dinner and the St. Stephen In The Fields Church Dinner as well, in which case it's better to line EHM up at the beginning of that run. The St. Stephen In The Fields Church Dinner, on Bellevue Avenue just south of College, one block west of Augusta, is probably the best of the bunch. You can ask to be served outside if it's too packed for you inside. They make you decide between sitting down for your meal or lining up for treats and beverages, so either do a buddy system or decide carefully which order you want to do things in.

It's a full 14-hour day, but on a bike you can collect up to 12 meals, which can be mixed and matched down to about 8 usable meals. So that could cover you all the way through Tuesday. That's two days of potential work. It's pretty much the only way to launch into making any money if work availability catches you in the wrong time of the month. Of course, there's no way to gather enough food to see you through the full three weeks that it takes from the first day of employment to the first paycheque, even with Employment Start-up, so if you don't have a food budget to start with, then launching into full-time or even part-time employment can be a bit premature. The best strategy is to secure one or two days of employment per week, and gradually increase it from there as work becomes more affordable. And the hardest thing of all is having to celebrate your new situation without spending any of the money.

You will need a backpack. But one of those cloth shopping bags is fine. They can be worn like backpacks if you're cycling. A bunch of grocery bags and newspaper are great, cheap stuff for wrapping things up in. It's a good idea to head in with a travel mug, camping mug, something that keeps stuff warm or hot and doesn't spill it all out. Unless it's gonna be in the way. Also, in this summer heat and rain, a good hoodie and a ball cap are musts for both cyclists and pedestrians. For cyclists, a bandana worn over the mouth is great for reducing smog inhalation. With no protection, doing this on a daily or weekly basis increases your risk of several disturbing medical conditions... like everything else about poverty!

Hopefully these tips are useful. Good luck. It's important to be patient and calm - otherwise this process of gathering food can be dangerous.

St. Francis closed today

Today, the door at St. Francis had a sign on it apologizing about the closure. The meal programs calendar on this site reported that it was open today, so that was incorrect.

St. Felix staff decide no more holiday closures

St. Felix (aka "the Sisters") is keeping their regular schedule on holidays from now on... except some evening meals may not happen. So there'd be one massive lunch instead of a lunch and dinner. But that's a great stand to take. So it's basically them and the Good Shepherd, holding it down on the holidays.

Scadding Court Monthly Meals

Scadding Court is another word for "that community center on the corner of Dundas and Bathurst."

They have a meal on the last Sunday of each month from noon to 2pm, and a dinner from 3pm - 5pm on the 3rd friday of every month.

Correction: every month ending last month and starting... at some point. To be researched.

St. Anne's Place Monthly Dinners

They're big, they're great, they're only once a month, but they're in an area that really needs it: Dufferin between Dundas & College.

Their dinners are on the third Sunday of each month, starting at 5:30pm. When is too late to get there, only they know. Most soup kitchen staff are squeamish about discussing the end of serving time instead of the beginning.

The space is large and the meals are large.

It's in the same building as Workman Arts... around the left-hand side:

40 Oak / TCRC

The TCRC, or Toronto Christian Resource Centre, or Regent Park Community Resource Centre, also known as 40 Oak and 40 Oaks (somebody please successfully brand this thing) does daily breakfast and lunch on weekdays.

It's at 40 Oak St:



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Their dining hall is nice and spacious. Damn, what a modern building. It looks like an art gallery or something.

Davenport-Perth Neighbourhood Centre

Here it is:

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Mealtimes, according to their community dining page, are Wednesdays at 5pm and Fridays at Noon.

Finding "The Stop" Community Food Centre

It doesn't have to be this confusing, but it is. There's The Stop, and then there's The Stop Community Food Center. One of them is a big, incredible innovation center, and the other is the soup kitchen where you can get free food. And nobody's good at giving directions to the soup kitchen, and it's a pain to find.

It's supposed to be at 1884 Davenport Road. So why is there just an apartment building there? Because The Stop, and all its signage, is behind that building.

So you have to go through this space, and to the left:

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They just don't feel like putting signs out. But their breakfast program is amazing. And so is their lunch, and so is their food bank.

The Stop's hours have changed. For the better.

Meal Trans Monday Night Dinners

The 519 hosts a weekly dinner especially for transgender people, which is an amazing service, considering how dangerous the soup kitchen scene can be for trans people, especially youth. According to their page about it, they welcome trans people including questioning people.

Church of the Redeemer

The Church of the Redeemer, at Bloor and Avenue, holds breakfast and lunch programs every weekday... except for holidays. They're also closed from August 6, reopening on September 16 this year - that's their annual summer break.

Directions, from their site: "We are located just on the corner of Avenue Rd. and Bloor St. West (our address is 162 Bloor St. W). On your first visit, enter through the SIDE DOOR of the church that faces Avenue Rd. You will go down a small flight of stairs and enter into a hallway that will lead you to our drop-in space. If you are in a wheelchair or need to take our lift down into the basement, please let someone know outside, and we will come up to assist you at the side of the church."

Church of the Redeemer website's drop-in page.



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Happy Victoria Day...

So, St. Felix and PARC both ran as TDIN said they would today... but Evangel Hall's lunch was at 11am, not noon as the TDIN Victoria Day schedule said.

That confirms that TDIN's listings aren't always well-researched, so in the future, more effort will be made to do that research and make accurate listings available on this website, so that at least somewhere on the 'net, there's a correct listing for holiday meals.

Victoria Day 2013 Holiday Meals & Schedule Changes

Here's the Toronto Drop-in Network's Victoria Day Holiday Meals update:




Or check it out on its own.

TDIN's website is probably not designed for meal program users, and that's why it won't just show you the data like this... it makes you download the PDF.

Looks like the schedule is pretty normal. PARC and CONC are serving at 1 instead of noon. It's the days before and after the holiday that are the real question. Please submit tips on closures in the comments section below - you can do it anonymously without logging in.

PNC lunch & jam sessions @ BPC

The BPC (Bonar-Parkdale Presbyterian Church) is hosting the Parkdale Neighbourhood Church meal programs on Mondays, and it includes a small musical setup. So there's food, coffee, guitars, keys, maybe a hand-drum, and a ton of locals. It's a big place.

So that's Mondays from 11:30am - 3pm.

Here's a Google Maps Street View link to the door you have to use to get in

The address is 250 Dunn Avenue, and it's just south of Queen St.