RIP Christie Ossington Neighbourhood Centre (CONC)

It's impossible to tell when this happened, but CONC is gone. It happened sometime before October of 2014. Apparently they're just temporarily gone. Nobody has any reason to believe or disbelieve this.

Their website is still up, and still listing their old address on Bloor St. West, and still listing their meal programs, like today's lunch:

No mention is made of the closure. The company responsible for their website is called The Wire. Maybe someone should contact them and let them know to change things. But they've most likely been out of contact with CONC since first designing their site, back in the day, whenever that was. This problem is typical of these multiservice agencies, and the sketchy relationships they have with those who do their web design. In general, they can't allow clients to work on their websites, since clients can't be trusted, and since nobody who has the keys to the site can afford to spend any time on it, and since communication between any of the parties involved is impossible. So, service agencies like CONC, when they're applying for funding, or when they have funding, find some web design agency that needs to do some charity work, or needs to do some portfolio-building work, they spend a month or so creating some evil monster that's impossible for the soup kitchen staff to maintain, and which they'll never have the time or the budget to touch again, and there you go. It floats in space forever. Telling people to show up at the abandoned storefront, every week.

Here's what the abandoned storefront looks like now. Notice the complete lack of any signage about where the new location is or what the new schedule is. The two things that are tacked up there are about a youth employment program, and a music event. Beautiful graffiti though.

This is typical of temporary or permanent closures. Users are not notified. The website continues to deliver inaccurate information. And sometimes, some other agency steps up. In this case, it's the Salvation Army. As famous for their discrimination as they are for their substandard food, this omnipresent charity superpower has picked up where CONC left off.

So now, instead of the best-quality food in the area, in a super cramped spot, where you can also go downstairs and book a recording session (if you're young), or laundry use (if you're organized), or get vegetarian food (if you're a vegetarian or a liar who wants to avoid meat), you can go a few blocks away, except on weekends, no more weekend meals, and get what you're a bit more used to. Something a bit more in line with what you'd find at the average soup kitchen. In the case of today's meal, it was bacon, a chunk of what is probably spam, undercooked potatoes, and salad. Or rather, lettuce.

To be precise, the new location is the dreaded Salvation Army, at 789 Dovercourt. And the new times are: Breakfast from 10am to 11am, and lunch from noon to 1pm. And the new days are Monday to Thursday. The only advantage is that Salvation Army's space is substantially larger. The crowd is still fairly sketchy, but there's more buffer space between people.

This website is getting craploads of traffic, which is great, yay

It's easy enough to lie about this kind of thing. Of course. But here's an update on the kind of web traffic that this site is getting. It's impressive. It's gratifying. It's dangerous. The more popular and used the site becomes, the closer it comes to getting shut down. Why would it get shut down? Because it's useful to clients, and because it reports on the problems with the way services are provided. It may be exposing practices that go against agreements that were made in order to ensure funding. It may expose stakeholders to risk. If and when it does get shut down, it'll just pop up under some other free publishing service, but then it'll take time for that to become easy to search for, and the information will have to be reassembled.

Anyway, here's some screenshots of Blogger's awesome "stats" service, showing how much this site gets used. These screenshots are of statistics taken from the entire lifetime of the site.

Contact (or rather, lack of contact)

There's no point in trying to contact the author for interviews, for advice, for whatever. It's not happening. Fuck that. There's no point. Where's the incentive? People sometimes leave their email address or some contact info in some comments somewhere, but think about it: anyone could contact you back, pretending to be the author. And it just signs you up for more spam, because your email address is sitting around on the web.

What you can do is leave questions in the comments section below, and expect to wait a long time for responses. They'll be put up anonymously, so you have no guarantee that they're written by the author. But any responses that anyone leaves pretending to be the author will be eventually deleted.

So go ahead, ask away. Anything you want to ask, you're going to have to ask in full view of the public. As it should be.

What's with the anonymity? About the author, about the site, etc.

I'm one person working alone, living with a disability, living on disability payments, I used to live on welfare, and before that I had various jobs, including web design and advertising copyrighting. I didn't have a post-secondary education, because I didn't have access to one. Not everybody does have access. I grew up poor, and so did my parents, and so did my grandparents, and poverty is a beast that, like the rest of us, tends to want to preserve itself. Poverty comes back from your past to catch you and bring you back into its clutches. Poverty disconnects one's attitude from one's circumstances, so my outlook, no matter how positive or negative it's been, has never had much effect on the outcomes of my efforts. The culture of poverty has followed me into whatever employment situation I've had, and I've never had someone who can teach me how to not act poor and think poor. And it's really how you act and how you think that dictate your outcomes. I've failed to fake it 'til I made it, because honestly, I didn't know how, and I didn't have the will to do so. It just involves so much lying. So that's my story. That's as specific as I'm going to get. There are tons of people out there just like me. So there's not a lot of possibility of discovery. And, shit, for all you know, the whole story could be a fabrication, full of lies, or full of delusions that make it easier for me to deal with.

What's my motivation for publishing this anonymously? It's mostly just so I can say whatever the fuck I want about these places. It's journalistic independence and integrity, basically. What do I have to lose when somebody finally outs my identity? Just access to meal programs. Or rather, safe access. I fear being recognized by staff and clientele, and any reprisals that may come along with that. But I mostly fear simply not being able to say what I want to say about these places. It's like the Vice Magazine album reviews, and a lot of the more contentious articles. They're published under bogus names. Because that way, they can say whatever they want. And because of that, they're worth reading. They're not boring bullshit.

Of course, it's occurred to me a thousand times that having authored this website may lead to employment of some kind, or recognition of some kind, and those things are nice. But in my experience, employment is fleeting and exploitative. I may find some way out of the cycle of poverty. I might be able to somehow access education, or make some partnerships that lead to an entrepreneurial success story. But at the same time, I have to hedge my bets by becoming as good at being poor as I possibly can be.

I've tried to write most of these articles using grammar that obfuscates the authorship of things on this site. But it's impossible to disguise my writing style. I haven't really tried. I've pulled the old web designer trick of trying to make it seem like I'm several people working for some big company, that I'm a team when really I'm just one person. And I've tried to enlist people from the poverty community to contribute articles, so that the site really can be a group effort. And so that the geographical range of the information can expand. And I still want that. But so far, none of that has happened. The site has a fantastic amount of usage, with the impressive traffic profile that comes along with it. And people do contribute tips in the comments of the various articles. And I'm very, very grateful for that. It's wonderful. It demonstrates that the poverty community does have collaboration skills, and the will to share information. It's just that, generally, our time online is limited and our energy for productivity time is limited. Everyone I know who lives in poverty needs an extreme amount of downtime in their lives, just to cope. Poverty causes illness, and is caused by illness, and people who are ill have trouble doing this kind of thing. And I have trouble doing this kind of thing. I'm in and out of this site. I sometimes work a lot on it, and sometimes not. I miss closures, and leave the calendar inaccurate for months. It's bad. But I do what I can.

Why do I feel like doing this, ultimately? It does involve a sense of indebtedness to the poverty community. Like I owe something. Also, the welfare and ODSP (disability benefits) that I've been living off of are paid for by the taxpayer. I have years of payments to make up for. There aren't any volunteering programs that I can work with... they all have requirements that I simply can't fulfill. So I do all sorts of little anonymous things, to give back. To reduce my shame. To contribute to my own sense of dignity. To be part of the world. And it's also partially just out of frustration: I can do this. It's relatively easy. And those who are being paid to do it... they do a horrible job of it. They're not being paid enough to do it, and not enough of them are being paid to do it. Because of my skillset, it's easy for me. It started out as just me making a google calendar and map of this stuff, to keep my notes straight. And then I was like shit, I could just tie this together on a blog to make it easier to use. And then other people could use it too. And then maybe I'd get intelligence (tips) from the community. And then maybe... maybe maybe maybe, something nice could happen. And it's been nice. Now I have power. Because people visit the site, and my words and experiences, which reflect the experiences of the poverty community, are here. They're not elsewhere, not really, not on the 'net. They're not on meal program websites. Because we're not stakeholders. Charity organizations, government departments, NGOs, and contributing companies, are the stakeholders. They're the ones that get representation and attention. Not the clients. We are the product. We get whatever representation the stakeholders give us. But not on this site. On this site, the truth has lease. Actual real-world experiences have lease.

I do have a plan for my identity being outed. For one thing, anybody could pretend to be the creator of this site. So I have plausible deniability. If somebody posts a picture of me, I can change my look. I can continue to go to these programs, with the additional fear of reprisal that's provided by being outed. I already fear going to these programs. The're not safe, after all, anyway. They are there to be there. They are harm reduction, because they reduce property crime. They are window dressing, because they provide something for the public to point at, saying, we're doing something... somebody is doing something. They're there for companies, to point at, saying, it's not a solution, but it's something. And yeah, it's not a solution. It's an opportunity. And it's a deterrent, for the masses, to leaving their jobs, to questioning their working conditions, stuff like that. It's something to point at to say do I want to be one of those people? No I sure don't, so I'll just ignore my employer's workplace standards violations, just like police threaten people with like you're gonna get raped in jail everyday, and nobody's going to question these charges, only you and I know they're lies.

I had plans to reveal my identity this year. I even wrote about it on this site. And then I removed the post about it. I can do that whenever I want with this site. I can change my plans. I can change my mind. I can present erroneous information. I can delete people's comments. And of course, Google can do whatever it wants with this site. Take it down, track me down, take it over, write bogus stuff... whatever it wants. Maybe I've broken the service agreement. Maybe I've broken the law. The agreements and laws can change at any time without notice, and the public doesn't have the means to know the law, anyway. So any of us could be investigated for any time, and jailed at any time, for any or no reason. And if there is a reason, nobody has any way to know, or any legal right to know, what the reason is. So there are risks to publishing this site. Since I don't know what those risks are, and have no way of finding out, I can't say that I've accepted the risks, but I have accepted the unknown.

Not that I can prove this in any way, but this site isn't published by the hacktivist group anonymous. I don't believe they are a legitimate collective of private citizens. I don't believe anything else about them, either. I just know I have no way of knowing what the fuck they really are, so I'm not drawing any conclusions. But I will sign this "anonymous," and I will continue to publish in anonymity, for now.

Yours in poverty,
Anonymous Journalist