Food Program

Every Friday evening, St. Thomas's operates a Out of the Heat/Out of the Cold meal program late afternoon for over homeless and marginally housed. We feed over 100 weekly. Sandwich bee volunteers gather to prepare the meal and several others help serve each week. We have teams from St. Thomas's, St. Mary Magdalene's, and Trinity College, U of T, and have also had help from the students at Royal St. George's College.

In summer, our parish garden provides the bounty of fresh vegetables for guests of the Friday night supper program to enjoy.

Donations of food, as well as money to purchase food, are appreciated. Also appreciated are unused travel-size toiletries, and in winter warm socks, mittens, gloves and hats.

We also annually stage our traditional Christmas Eve turkey dinner with all the trimmings for the guests at our Friday supper program.

For more information or to contribute or volunteer, please contact Maggie Helwig at 416-537-7290, maggie@web.net.

If you've been thinking you'd like to help with Out of the Heat/Cold but don't know how, you might enjoy volunteering at one of St. Thomas's Thursday sandwich making bees. Every Thursday, the bees start at 12:45 p.m. (after 12:15 Mass) and 5:30 p.m. (after 5:00 Evening Prayer). All you have to do is show up, and there is no obligation to attend regularly. For more information, contact Maggie at the number or e-mail address above.

Some statistics on poverty

Did you know?

* More people are affected by poverty than you may realize. One child in nine - 324,000 children - are growing up poor in Ontario?

* People in poverty are living far below a decent living standard. The average low-income family would need $7,100 more, just to reach the poverty line.

* Hunger is all too common in Ontario, with food banks serving over 318,000 people in Ontario, 39 % of them children. This number is up 14% since 2001.

* Just having a job does not guarantee a livable income. The combination of low wages and high rents means that a growing number of working people must rely on food banks to ward off hunger. For example, 21% of people using the Barrie Food Bank are regular wage-earners.

* The shortage of affordable housing deepens the hardships experienced by low-income people. This shortage affects people all over our diocese, in communities large and small. In Haliburton County, some people are living in trailers or cottages where pipes freeze in the winter, and they cannot afford heat. Meanwhile a low-income family in the Region of Peel would have to wait 21 years for subsidized housing, the longest waiting list in Ontario.

* Poverty costs us all. In fact, it's extremely expensive. Did you know that poverty costs every household in Ontario at least $2,300 a year? The total figure for extra health care costs, social assistance costs, lost tax revenues, crime and other hidden costs, according to a new report by the Ontario Association of Food Banks.

* Other countries have done much better than Canada in reducing poverty. While our rate of poverty is 12%, countries such as Finland and Sweden have less than 5% of their people living in poverty. In our country, Quebec has been able to cut its child poverty rate in half during the past decade.

* Measures that could help uplift families from poverty include: a $10 minimum wage (currently it's $8.75); an enriched Ontario Child Benefit; low-cost child care; higher social assistance rates; and policies to make it easier to move from social assistance to work.

* A growing number of Ontario citizens want action. Anglicans are part of a broad, non-partisan coalition calling for a detailed action plan to reduce poverty by 25% over the next five years, thus uplifting over 300,000 Ontarians from poverty. It's called the 25 in 5 Network for Poverty Reduction (www.25in5.ca).

To learn more, contact Campaign 2000, www.campaign2000.ca; Citizens for Public Justice, www.cpj.ca; and the Ontario Association of Food Banks, www.oafb.ca.