Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Toronto Meal Programs (the website) passes the 10,000 visits mark

Now that the site has passed the 10,000 visits mark, it's time to release a bit more information about how people find the site.

The keyphrase at the root of most searches that bring people to this site is: "free meals toronto."

Several other keywords have revealed themselves to be important: Food, Laundry, Meals, and certain days of the week, specifically Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.

The question is, are these keywords an indication of a bias towards these words in the site's content, or of the users' needs? Are we not seeing any popularity of "tuesday" in searches because there don't happen to be any articles on the site mentioning tuesdays? Or is it because saturday, sunday and monday are when people need meal programs the most, or when they're the least available? It's unclear. However, based on what little knowledge can be extracted from these statistics, a few ideas may be implemented:

Maybe some articles about food-gathering strategies for the various days of the week would be useful. And maybe expanding more into food-related topics beyond meal programs, and other services like laundry and communications access, would add value to the site. Expanding on listings of a broader range of services was already part of the plan, but the idea of articles for each day is a new one, specifically inspired by these stats. It's nice to have some stats, and for sites with no budget, it's great to have it included automatically, like it is in Blogger.

Here's some other fun stats:

This past month, the calendar was visited about 300 times. The map, not so much. It only got about 20 views. Over the whole history of the site, the map gets about one eighth the number of visits that the calendar does.

It's unclear how many individual users the site has, or how the user group breaks down in terms of how often they use the site. Stats indicating those facts are not available.

On average, the site gets between 8 and 30 visits per day. The site is probably more active during the latter half of each month. This is indicated but not quite verifiable in the available stats, and it also mirrors activity at meal programs. It's reflective of the social benefits payment schedule. Welfare recipients get paid near the end of the month, and Disability recipients get paid right at the end of the month, and both sets of benefits cover about a third of a person's monthly food needs. The tendency is to take a vacation from soup kitchens until the grocery money runs out, and then scramble to cover the discrepancy.

The site's activity has increased incrementally since it was first published in 2007:

From the looks of the chart, it really started to take off in 2011.

Well, those are some of the conclusions we can glean from Google's barebones but nicely-illustrated web stats. If you notice anything else about them that could lead to decisions on content or design, please leave a comment on this article.

CONC and St. Felix disappear and reappear on the calendar

The weekday listing for the Christie-Ossington Neighbourhood Centre (CONC) and St. Felix lunches have both disappeared from the calendar that is embedded on this site's "calendar" page. The listings have been added again.

The temporary omission was an error, caused by an unresolved bug in Google's free calendar software. The rest of the calendar has not yet been verified against similar errors. The current entries have been verified as up-to-date.

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Doing your laundry for free at the Meeting Place

There are several places downtown to do your laundry. The Corner Drop-In on Augusta near College, EHM at Adelaide near Bathurst, and CONC on Bloor near Ossington all offer laundry services. But the Corner Drop-In does theirs super early in the morning, EHM makes you sign up and then wait way too long, and CONC requires you to sign up days or weeks in advance. Only the Meeting Place at Bathurst and Queen offers convenient drop-in laundry, and nobody else offers more availability each week.

At the moment, the laundry facilities are out of service due to renovations. According to staff it could be done anytime between "tomorrow" and "three weeks from now." But usually it's pretty solid. And these days, in the winter, they're open every single day of the week. They do just randomly close every once in awhile, and if you're not going there frequently there's no way to know in advance, so you have to be prepared to show up with your laundry to a "sorry we're closed today" sign, or just somebody behind their closed gate yelling "closed today come back tomorrow." So on your way to the Meeting Place, as with many service locations, you have to prepare yourself for the disappointment.

There's three washers and four dryers. They're all in good shape, and they all get fixed pretty promptly when they break. The washers are modern side-loaders. That's good because they get your clothes nice and clean, and they lock while washing your clothes, so you can leave for a half hour without risking theft of your clothes. But it also means that if you make a mistake while loading your laundry, you're screwed. You can't hit stop and change something. If the load gets unbalanced, it'll just slow way down until it gets balanced enough to continue, and you can't open it up to fix the problem, so when this happens, your load could take an hour to wash instead of half.

After putting your stuff in the dryer, unless it's worthless to you, you basically have to stay in the room and guard it. That's the worst part. The laundry room can be a freaky and dangerous place. If somebody leaves their laundry unguarded, and then finds something missing when they came back, it's a great excuse to start a fight. Many of the visitors to the Meeting Place are looking for excuses to start fights. People will ask you to watch their laundry for them. It's a trap. If you're the only person in the laundry room, and someone who seems aggressive has left you alone with their stuff, hang out in the hallway outside. You can watch your stuff through the windows, and other people can see you as they go to and from the bathrooms and stuff.

The laundry room is also a classic spot to get trapped by someone who wants to talk your ear off. Grab a newspaper from upstairs, tell them you don't feel like talking or listening, you're too tired or something, you just want to read, and just read. Don't try to participate in conversations with a pathological lecturer. It's a neurological condition. It's not a personality trait. It's common in the poor community because employers will take any excuse they can to get an overtalker out of the workplace. There are certain places that are like funnels for people with this problem, and the laundry room is one of them, because you are physically trapped there with them. Try to interrupt them to say something, and they might put some nasty words in your mouth, and that's a great way to start a fight, and a very common way that fights in these types of places are started. So watch yourself. Now we'll get back to the practicalities:

To access the laundry service, you have to sign up on the laundry list, after signing in on the main list. The laundry list is numbered, so people get access to machines according to the order in which they signed up. Because there are three washing machines, if you're one of the first three people on the list, you can immediately start your laundry. If you're 4th, 5th or 6th, you have to wait about a half hour, and so on.

The place opens at 11:30, so depending on the demand, if you show up at that time you'll either be in the first or second round of laundry, so you should be able to be finished up and out of the place by 1pm or 1:30. If it's not a super busy laundry day, if you show up between 2pm and 2:30pm, you'll likely be able to start your laundry immediately. The last load goes in at 2:30pm, apparently. Show up too late, and you run the risk of being bumped to another day. Show up too early, and you may have to wait. Show up at 11:15 and physically keep your place in line outside the door 'till it opens, and you get a stressful opportunity to get out of there as early in the day as possible, with clean clothes.

Since the Meeting Place also offers shower services that work in exactly the same way, it's convenient to wash all your clothes, including the ones you're wearing, and even your backpack and shoes, while also taking a shower. So if you're out on the street with dirty everything, you don't have to walk away with one set of dirty clothes in order to take a shower, because they have housecoats and towels that you can use for showering and laundry.

They also offer a kitchen, phone, internet, personal storage in lockers, coffee, cheap food, and a smattering of self-help programs and support groups. This is one of the few places where you can actually make a phone call, leave your name and the Meeting Place phone number, and get a call back and have the staff find you with the call. So it's a good place to get a bunch of stuff done at the same time - some government-related phone calls, some personal care, some daily necessities type stuff, and probably run into someone you know as well. It's not called The Meeting Place for nothing.

Unfortunately, it also has a telling nickname: The Beating Place. It's an environment where violence hangs in the air like the smell of mould, and depending on the nature of your interactions with the other people there, it can be a very safe or very dangerous place. It's one of the most-avoided destinations, as well as one of the most popular ones. It's part of a cluster of services for poor and homeless residents in the area, and as much a wildcard on the scene as it is a staple. And it's where you'll end up doing your laundry if you're not lucky or disciplined enough to have a laundry budget, and not organized enough to do your laundry elsewhere.

Nabbing groceries from the Fort York Food Bank

It's on the south side of Dundas St. West. A couple blocks west of Bathurst. 211 has the wrong address for it. It's got a soup kitchen and food bank. If you qualify (by being poor and in the right area), you can grab a box of groceries once a week or something like that. If you can't prove anything about yourself, then maybe you can get a box of groceries once a month or once a year.

The first part of the process is to sign up with the person in the back who's co-ordinating the food bank. If you're not in the system yet, that's when you get interviewed and signed up. The person assigns you a tag with a number for that day. The numbers get called sometime around 12:30. The place is open until 2pm. It's open most days of the week. Not Monday. When your number gets called, you've got to present the tag to the person that's calling out the numbers, so that they can initial it or something. Then you can go into the food area, grab a box, and decide what you want.

In the food area, there's a bunch of types of food, and you get offered certain things. Typical things you'll find are: dried lentils and beans, canned veggies and soups, bread, milk, butter, peanut butter, maybe eggs, fruit, junk food, chocolates and candies, frozen meals, microwave popcorn, crackers and other packaged stuff, soft drinks, chips and dips, cooking and salad oils, dressings, maybe cheese... basically typical cheap grocery store stuff. There's not a lot of nuts, health foods, dairy or meat alternatives, or fresh produce. There's a lot of bread, canned stuff, and packaged stuff. It varies a lot from visit to visit. If you said yes to everything, you could walk out of there with a couple backpacks or a few shopping bags worth of food. About a third of it needs to be refrigerated. About half of it requires a kitchen for preparation. If you're a vegan, only about a quarter of the food will worth considering. If you're trying to stay organic, you'll be lucky to walk away with one or two items. If you're a vegetarian who doesn't mind eating cheap Monsanto food, you should be able to get a few meals per week out of the place.

The total time commitment for using the food bank is probably around two hours at the most. While you're waiting, there's coffee, tea and lunch available. There's also bathrooms and probably the worst internet access of any downtown drop-in. The atmosphere is tense but subdued. The location's close proximity to the cluster of meal programs and other services in the area make this a convenient place to grab groceries on a regular basis.

Thursday, January 16, 2014

Dear chefs, take it easy on the tomatoes and citrus in these cold winter months

We don't get a lot of sleep. It's not great sleep. Many of us are smokers and drinkers. Most of us are into the coffee. And when it gets cold, we're out in the cold wind for way longer than you are. That all means that our lips are dry and cracked and don't need any extra acids messing with them. Soup kitchen food, and north-american food in general, tends to be really acidic. We're really into tomato sauce, orange juice, and like I said, coffee.

We have no opportunity to care for our lips. The lip balm products that we get are cheap petroleum crap that doesn't really help that much. We're not good at protecting our faces from the wind.

So please, it sounds silly, and I know we, as the people who eat your food, are not stakeholders, we're the product, so we don't expect feedback to be considered. But still. Take it easy on the tomato sauce.