Labor Day Schedule research

The following places have confirmed their holiday schedule situation:

• The Stop: Closed on Monday
• Scott Mission: regular schedule
• St. Felix: closed on Friday "so we can be open on Monday"
• Evangel Hall Mission will be open on Monday
• The Good Shepherd: no schedule changes to the weekend or Monday

As with the holiday earlier this month, the TDIN (Toronto Drop-In Network) has released a bulletin about Labor Day-related meal program changes, and posted it as a PDF that is inaccessible from some computers. So it's been posted here in HTML form:

TDIN's Labour Day Holiday Meals List

The problem is, the Holiday Meals List only covers Monday, and not the other days affected by the Labor Day holiday. And this website stands to do only a marginally better job. The calendar is less accurate than the information on this page, which is not very comprehensive.

Oasis Dufferin at like 5pm, not 6:30

So apparently 6:30 is now way too late to show up... suddenly they want to do things on-time and say "oh yeah there's no food left... oh what, you need a plate? ohh... I don't know if you'll find anything..." to those who show up without having been there in awhile, at exactly the time they were told to show up previously... this is so common in soup kitchens... it's like... if it's gonna change, you gotta have a grace period where you accommodate late arrivals for awhile. People spend TOKENS to get there and we arrive HUNGRY. Many of us have been robbed of our impulse control, by chemical exposure, by blows to the head, by birth defects, whatever, and hunger will do that too. So if you have this like tiny slim half-hour window where you can show up, and it changes from one month to the next, and a lot of your guests come once every month or so...?

Anyway the atmosphere is uncommonly warm and relaxed, and the food is very decent. They also have a food bank that's open each wednesday. You can only go once a month, of course, and it's only a backpack's worth of food, of course, but the Daily Bread stuff they have on offer seems to be getting better over time, and not worse. Hopefully that's an accurate assessment and not just desperate thinking.

It's at like... 1219 Dufferin, east side of Dufferin, just south of Dupont.

Good Shepherd calendar correction

For some reason, the Good Shepherd was missing from the calendar. Their morning and afternoon drop-in meals have been added back to the calendar.

They do 9am - 11am and 2pm - 4pm, every day of the week. And they usually do holidays, too.

Salvation Army Saturday breakfasts

Check I out: on "Darling Lane" just off Wellesley behind Pizza Pizza, on the 2nd and 3rd Sat of every month from 9 to 11 am, you can get a great little breakfast in this teeny tiny soup kitchen. It's a great, chilled-out meal.

Scott mission ladies & families monthly food bank

On weekdays except Wednesday afternoons, the Scott mission offers a food bank service to women and families. Users are limited to one visit per month, are required to show proof of your shitty income situation an some ID, and are assigned a membership card that needs renewal every six months. They process people pretty quickly, and give out some decent stuff.

Evangel Hall breakfasts

At 9:30am on weekdays, they serve soup and bread at the evangel hall mission (EHM). That was sort of sketchily mentioned in the calendar.

Corner drop in correction

This site has listed the wrong meal times for st. Steven's corner drop in on Augusta just south of dundas. The correct lunch times are 10:30am - 11:30am, everyday except Saturday. The lunch time has been corrected on the calendar, but the breakfast times listed there need confirmation.

Food Giveaways at Cowan and Queen on Thursdays

It's a bit of a shuffle, it's a bit competitive, and the whole thing has some Soylent Green vibes, but you can walk away from it with a bag full of usable groceries, and you don't need to give them anything. They're asking for a donation. It's not clear whether they'd turn a person away if they didn't have any money. There doesn't seem to be any minimum donation or maximum total items or anything like that. Some stuff has a limit, other stuff doesn't.

The format is: a bunch of boxes laid out on the sidewalk, with people supervising a line of recipients who proceed through the line of boxes, taking what they need.

It happens every Thursday at 4pm. It's unclear when it'll stop and then start up again, so it's not going in the calendar yet.

CONC Breakfast Schedule Mistake Fixed

There was a thing in the calendar with breakfasts at CONC at 10am monday through thursday, and that was wrong, and it's been removed. Apparently they may resume in November if they get the funding.

Following an incorrect calendar to a meal program that is not going on is painful and frustrating. With most things, when you point out a mistake, nothing happens except maybe someone's rude to you. That's not the case with this site. Every post has a comments form that works, and all the comments get read.

St. Francis Schedule Change

The flyer on the locked door during today's dinnertime was confusing:

LUNCH ONLY:
12:00 NOON - 1:00 PM
AUGUST 7 - 10, 2012

SUMMER VACATION:
AUGUST 12  - SEPTEMBER 2, 2012

REGULAR SCHEDULE RESUMES:
TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 4, 2012
@ 12:00 NOON

The calendar on this site will be updated according to these assumptions:

Between August 7th and September 4th, there is no dinner, and
Between August 12th and September 4th, there is no lunch.

Sketch Youth Tuesdays Closed for 3 Weeks

The art drop-in for youth under 30, featuring a great meal, coffee, keyboard and art workshops, on Tuesdays from 2pm - 5pm in the back of the main floor of the Queen West Health building, on the west side of Bathurst just south of Queen, is taking three weeks off, starting this coming Tuesday.

Their free lunch situation is 100% where it's at, when it's on. And there's some great volunteering opportunities with them.

Holiday Schedule Blues Wrap-up

The surprising thing was, on Monday, St. Felix was open. And it had been removed from the meal calendar on this site because it's typically closed on Mondays. So that was a mistake. Others were probably made, too.

The Taoist temple also served their 4pm supper, which was great. It was left on the schedule because they typically don't observe western holidays. Thank goodness for cultural diversity!

The update about Monday's schedule may or may not have made it to the front page of this site and stayed there all day. It was found in draft form just now, and then published, so who knows whether it was of any use to anyone. Hopefully, it was.

And hopefully, this site will at some point be the definitive guide to food security during the holidays, as well as the rest of the time, and all the seasonal changes will be accurate as well. It would be nice if it could at least keep its users up to speed on how fresh and accurate it is at any given time.

Holiday Schedule Blues Update

The previous article was about the upcoming holiday festivities, and how accurate any of our ideas of the meal program schedules may or may not be.

On the eve of the holiday in question, which is apparently Alberta Heritage Day, this final report is ready for you, the hungry poor and/or curious. The gist of it is that TDIN's schedule is basically sound, with a couple messed-up details. So they did pretty well and you can pretty much just go by it with a couple corrections.

Since no field research was done, this is still not a strong day for this website. But it's better than recent holidays. This time, emails were sent out to confirm TDIN's holiday meal schedule, and the staff of half of the agencies questioned did respond to those inquiries.

So here's the situation: the calendar on this site for August 6th is probably accurate. Things that say (unconfirmed) on them are probably not happening. Things that say (confirmed) on them are happening according to their staff.

Good Shepherd's a go, normal hours. Where it says "hours" on the TDIN thing, it should say "breakfast," though. And where it says "breakfast," it should say drop-in, according to their staff, because it's not a substantial breakfast, and that is definitely true. It's a great drop-in. It's somewhere between nothing and breakfast. It's enough to get you to an actual breakfast.

Scott Mission is a go. They'll let people into their first meal between 10:30am and 10:45am, and their second meal between 11:30 and 11:45am. Remember, you can only go to one of these two meals.

The Good Neighbours Club is a go, but where it says supper? That's apparently just a snack:
Breakfast: 8:15am - 9:15am ($1)
Lunch: 12:15pm - 1:15pm ($1)
Supper Snack: 3:00pm - 3:15pm ($1)

CONC is in, but they're doing their weekend hours: A snack from 11am - noon, and lunch from 1pm - 2pm. With CONC, you want to get there early.

Maybe 4 out of 8 confirmations isn't bad. It sort of is, though.

Gateway, Maxwell Meighan, Council Fire and PARC haven't confirmed, but if the rest of the TDIN schedule is any indication, then their programs, as well as those who aren't mentioned in this article are probably happening as indicated in their PDF, and maybe one of the meals is actually a snack.

TDIN did actually manage to try to post their PDF, which was also emailed out onto their mailing list, onto the internet, on this page, but the download for the PDF doesn't work.

Since PDFs are a pain, here it is, reposted in HTML form: TDIN's Holiday August 6th Meal Programs Schedule

It's pretty messy: each page is there first in an image form of the PDF that was mailed out, and then the text for that page is underneath it. So it makes for a weird document. But it's better than TDIN's website does with their broken document link. What is with the obsession with PDF files anyway? These places really have totally given up on getting people to just do web design.

If a broke person could make this website on public computers, between meal programs, to save having to write a big schedule list down for friends in need of info, then it's easy to see how someone with web design skills ends up broke. They're not being used. The web design that needs doing isn't being done. Same with the rest of the job market.

So there's your guide to this holiday. It's enough.

Holiday schedule blues

It's not easy to figure out what a holiday schedule is like for these drop-ins.

The Toronto Drop-In Network (TDIN) sent out an email with a PDF attached, to update us all on Monday, August 6th, which turns out to be Alberta Heritage Day. But it also says July 2nd, and if you've worked in an office before, you know how these things can get back-burnered and rushed.

Here's a screenshot of the PDF file:

And, of course, it wouldn't be due diligence to just take TDIN's info as 100% accurate, so before the meals calendar on this website gets any touch-ups, it's time to verify all the times in the PDF with the actual places.

Verification is hard when the IT departments that put together these sad websites still think that it's dangerous to put up your clients' email addresses on the 'net, and it's much better to have a contact form with a little spam-busting thing on it that's too hard to read, and gives you an error anyway when it does work:

It's safe to assume that EHM has not received any email off this page in awhile, and that nobody there, or at their IT service provider, IT Werks, has any interest in seeing this changed.

If every drop-in on this PDF were listed on this site, there'd be like ten more to go. Good thing only about seven of them are.

Next up, Council Fire. The email address on their contact page is linked wrong, so anybody who doesn't know how to link an email address right won't have much luck getting in touch with them. In this case, not a problem.

Let's see how the Good Shepherd does in terms of emailability. They make you decide what kind of inquiry you're making. This one is probably "general." General inquiry lines, with no names attached, are pretty sketchy. But maybe they'll confirm the schedule. TDIN's PDF says:

Hours: 9:00am - 11:00am 

L: 2:00pm - 4:00pm

Considering that The Good Shepherd stays open on all holidays, and runs breakfast from 9 - 11, lunch from 2 - 4, it's safe to assume that TDIN just screwed up and should have put "breakfast" in place of "hours." Definitely a rushed PDF.

Now onto Gateway. Their contact page doesn't list anyone as being in charge of meal programs. So this inquiry will go to their director.

Then there's Maxwell Meighen. Their contact page has this under "how to contact Maxwell Meighen:"

Thanks, guys. Good thing there's an email address listed under "Primary Support Unit." Too bad it's not clear what the PSU is. Well, whoever they are, they're getting a confirmation email.

The Good Neighbors Club has a general administration email as well, and no emails listed for scheduling questions. Hopefully they respond. According to the PDF, their supper's gonna be from 3pm - 3:15pm. Their contact person confirmed that. Let's see if it stands up to a second inquiry.

CONC actually has a drop-in meals contact person! Yay Deborah!

So we'll see how many of these people confirm and what the accuracy rate is like. Yay.