A Year of Living Generously

Dispatches from the Frontlines of Philanthropy

Lawrence Scanlan

• Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781553656173
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

A Year of Living Generously follows award-winning journalist Lawrence Scanlan as he volunteers with 12 different charities, among them well-known institutions Habitat for Humanity, the St. Vincent de Paul Society and Canadian Crossroads.Drawing from first-hand experiences - serving in a soup kitchen in Ontario, building houses in post-Katrina New Orleans and teaching at a women’s radio station in Senegal — Scanlan tests the ideas and theories on global aid and philanthropy and makes a compelling case for greater commitment and real connection from us all. The result is an engaging yet informative primer for today’s volunteers, young and old, who are looking to make a meaningful contribution.

JANUARY

LIFE
at Vinnie’s

JANUARY 2. Day one for the new volunteer at the St. Vincent de Paul Society-Loretta Hospitality Centre and the very first order of business is to free his old truck, mired in foot-deep snow, from the parking lot.

I am here to help (by pitching in to shovel the lot), but first I have to move my truck and now it looks like I am the one in need of help. Snow is not the problem. It’s the ice below. Rocking the truck—from forward to reverse and back again—launches me no more than a metre in either direction. The red ’91 Nissan King Cab is stuck.

Two men and one young woman, the latter coatless in the cold, a cigarette dangling from her lips, leap onto the back bumper and in unison begin to pump on it. No one has said anything to the others, so clearly they have done this before, and it works. The engine revs, the tires grip and I’m free.

While the wife and daughters of one of my rescuers “shop” in the used clothing warehouse at the back of the lot, he and his companion start to clear the parking spaces. There is a dearth of shovels, so I dash home, grab mine and return to join them. The two men chat amiably about wind chill, the Toronto Maple Leafs, what kind of shovel works best. Canadian banter.

“Vinnie’s”—the St. Vincent de Paul drop-in centre here in Kingston, Ontario—operates out of a one-storey, aluminum-clad white box of a building set amid marginal housing in the city’s north end. In a previous incarnation, this house at 85A Stephen Street was headquarters to a small pest-control company. In the northeast corner of the lot is a former carport that shelters benches for smokers, and my first impression is that many of those who come to Vinnie’s for a hot meal, groceries, warm socks or simple companionship also take comfort in the small pleasures of nicotine and caffeine.

As I shovel near the smokers, I hear folks talking about the Christmas they had, how busy it was, and I remember similar conversations with my own friends just days before. The helper and the helped are one and the same, or so I think. The writer Joanne Page, who has volunteered for years at Vinnie’s, gave me some wise advice before I signed on for the month of January: do not assume, do not judge, do not accuse, do not patronize.

IN KINGSTON, Princess Street bisects the city from the northwest to the southeast and acts as the great dividing line. The stereotype has it that if you live south of Princess, you are either a professor at Queen’s University or one of the typically privileged youth who study there. North of Princess is supposedly home to the working poor and families on welfare. Fine homes and not-so-fine homes exist on both sides of the line, of course, but the divide between the two worlds is as stark and plain to see as the million-dollar yachts moored next to the notorious jail, Kingston Pen.

One effect of the area’s having so many prisons is that the families of convicts come here to live, swelling the numbers of the city’s poor. Roughly thirteen thousand people in Kingston live on some sort of social assistance, with an annual average income of $6,500. An equal or greater number work at minimum-wage jobs that generate an estimated annual income of under $16,000. According to Bhavana Varma, president of the United Way in the Kingston region, some 3,800 children, from junior kindergarten to grade 12, arrive at school hungry and with no lunch in hand.

“As a proportion of total population, Kingston has a lot more issues, a lot more pupils at risk than Toronto does,” says Varma. She points to a huge disparity in income levels and to shocking levels of poverty in some areas of town.

I know of two schools eight blocks apart: in one, there is no library, and in winter some children lack proper warm clothing; in the other, the pupils have access to a fabulous library—and to golf lessons. My own comfortable home is just south of Princess, but I can walk to Vinnie’s in ten minutes, and to another hot lunch program, actually on Princess and called Martha’s Table, in two minutes. The disparity is huge; the distance is not.

THE STREET-FACING door of Vinnie’s is closed to all but those who use walkers or wheelchairs and the wooden ramp, so almost everyone enters by the aluminum side door and steps. To the left is the dining room with its dozen or so Formica-grey tables, straight ahead is the one washroom, and to the right is a tiny kitchen with most of the south wall cut out so the servers and served have a clear view of each other. When the doors open in the morning, chat between them is light and playful.

Sister Loretta McAndrews, who convinced the parish priests that the need was great for a place like Vinnie’s, looks out on the dining room from an old black-and-white photograph, her face tightly framed by the modified habit and simple veil then worn by her order. My aunt, Rosemarie Scanlan, a nun in the same order (the Sisters of Providence of St. Vincent de Paul) helped start the food bank in nearby Belleville and would have known Loretta well.

In my experience, nuns are not afraid to ask for things, big things, and they often get them. What Loretta McAndrews lobbied for was a gathering place where people in Kingston who had little or no money could socialize and enjoy a good hot midday meal.

Twelve people came to Vinnie’s on the first day it opened in March 1982, but that year the daily average was only four visitors, attended to by two volunteers. The concept of the food bank had been introduced in Canada just the year before (in Edmonton), and the country’s hard-won social safety net was still years away from its slow and tortured unravelling. For a time, Vinnie’s operated just three days a week, then demand took it up to five. In 1993, an average of twenty-five people a day came in for a meal. In 2007, it was sixty-eight a day.

The 2008 data breaks down like this: 15,442 three-course hot meals were served at a cost of 70.4¢ each. An average of seventy-five guests arrived daily; some 5,714 clients received emergency groceries; and $31,857.75 was given out to help people with their electricity, rent, transportation, medical needs or other expenses. Volunteers gave 10,494 hours of their time and expertise. Had those volunteers been paid the minimum wage, their labour would have cost $91,826.88. Vinnie’s actual budget in 2008 was $158,882.30.

Whether these higher figures are due to Vinnie’s becoming better known or due to rising need is anyone’s guess. Likely both factors have come into play.

WHEN THE shovelling is done (it takes about an hour and leaves me with apple cheeks, icicles on my beard and, later, a sore back), I duck inside, get outfitted with an apron and a baseball cap (to meet health regulations) and go to work in the kitchen. Throughout the month, I will come here two or three times a week, arriving in the morning and leaving around mid-afternoon. I feel awkward in the beginning, especially that first day. This is not my usual tribe, and I feel like I have “volunteer” stamped on my forehead, just as those coming to eat have “client” marked on theirs.

A calm and seemingly unflappable young woman named Jenn is today’s head cook. Sully, a trained chef who has managed restaurant kitchens all over the city, is another paid staffer who fills in for Jenn on occasion. And while many volunteers show up through the week to prepare and serve meals and to wash dishes, Thelma is the one volunteer who is here every day of the week, from the moment Vinnie’s opens to the moment it closes. Thelma is in her mid-fifties. She has a strong nose. She wears her hair pulled back in a ponytail. Her mouth is almost always on the verge of a smile. She seems intimately connected with this kitchen, the day’s list of jobs and what to do when. There is chat between Jenn and Thelma, but it’s casual and polite. No need to say “do this” or “do that,” because each easily anticipates the tasks of the other.

Thelma knows where to find every pot, pan and plate in the kitchen; knows where to search for the missing broom. At one point I am holding a big serving tray and she sees my lost look and wordlessly points to the cupboard the tray calls home. If this place has a Mother Superior, it is Thelma. Jenn and I start to call her Thelma Smartypants, and you can see the smile spread across her face. She loves to be teased.

“It makes me feel useful to be here,” she tells me. “I miss being here when I’m not.”

Today’s meal comprises homemade turkey-vegetable soup and crackers to start, one hot dog in a bun, a small side of fries, a dollop of cabbage-and-carrot coleslaw and pumpkin pie for dessert. Jenn has tried serving more elegant fare than this high school cafeteria menu. She once prepared beef stroganoff, another time tuna casserole, but the clientele turned up their noses at these offerings. They prefer basic beef and chicken, uncomplicated lasagna and stews, and hold the spices. Grilled cheese sandwiches, says Sully, still draw the biggest crowds.

The food is cooked on two stoves: a large gas model and a smaller electrical one. A small island in the centre of the kitchen is both prep area and plating station. Once the action starts, so too does Vinnie’s industrial dishwasher, racing through its complete cycle in about five minutes, belching steam when its doors are opened. Any volunteer between jobs can always find work cleaning pots or putting away piping-hot plates. My first assignment is to use a broadsword of a knife to carve through sturdy cabbages and break them into ever smaller chunks so that Thelma can then persuade them into the food processor. Jenn boils water in a forty-litre pot for the hundred or so hot dogs. I serrate carrots and transfer pie onto plates, and when those jobs are done I ask Jenn or Thelma to give me something else to do. They cheerfully oblige. At 9 a.m., opening time, half a dozen or so people come in for coffee. For many of them, it’s warmer here than in their draughty, under-heated apartments.

Vinnie’s can accommodate forty-eight guests at a time. “It should be a quiet day,” says Jenn. She’s predicting twenty or thirty for lunch, with lots of take-home hot dogs left over. But by noon the place is packed and as some leave others take their places. The sated walk down the stairs and out the door; the hungry pass them on the way in. In the end, seventy come to be fed.

“It means,” says Jenn, “that they’ve spent their money for January over Christmas. There’s no money left for food. It’s going to be a busy month.”

Before anyone is served, Thelma rings a large brass bell that hangs above the kitchen entryway, then she goes to the end of the small dining room and asks for a brief silence—the equivalent of a traditional grace, though sometimes there is both silence and grace. Thelma knows every person in the room, how each comes to be here, and treats all with dignity and respect. While I was cutting cabbage, Thelma had set me straight. “This is not a soup kitchen. You line up at soup kitchens. People don’t line up here. This is a hospitality place. You have to make people feel comfortable.”

I am struck by how pleasant the atmosphere is, the smiles of gratitude when a plate is put down, the cheery hellos and goodbyes. The sincere thank yous. Vinnie’s turns no one away, unless it becomes necessary, which sometimes happens when a guest turns unruly.

“That’s the hardest,” agrees Jenn, who works half-time here and half-time at a women’s shelter. She is a woman in her thirties with fine skin and teeth, and the earrings she wears suggest that she takes her work seriously—but not too seriously. Otherwise, I’m sure, her two hard jobs would undo her.

Jenn is trained as a youth-care worker and is self-taught as a chef. She tells me, proudly (rubbing the fingernails of her right hand on her chef’s whites), that Vinnie’s was inspected by the health department just before Christmas and passed with flying colours. The dishes that come out of the sterilizing machine are steaming hot, too hot to be touched, and they dry in seconds.

“Too hot” also describes the odd guest (“client” or “participant” are other words that staff and volunteers use to describe those who come). Some here have been abused by their parents in the past or by their partners more recently. Some face unresolved mental health or addiction issues. A few are bitter and angry and it doesn’t take much to set them off. More are simply worn down by the daily and perhaps decades-long grind of poverty. What must it be like, always, to have your hand out?

Poverty cannot be disguised. At Vinnie’s, there are obvious giveaways: bad or missing teeth, lifeless skin, ill-fitting clothes and, the kicker, sad shoes, more apt to be plastic than leather, past their prime and wrong for the season. Often it’s running shoes all winter long.

Anyone who causes a disturbance at Vinnie’s is given a warning. One strike, two strikes, three and you’re out. But even then, Jenn or Thelma will fill plastic margarine containers and glass jars with food that can be passed on by friends to that errant man or woman.

I see a teenager, no older than seventeen, leave with a jar of soup, her slice of pie inside a plastic tub, a large garbage bag full of clothes from the warehouse and coffee in a Styrofoam cup.

“You need a horse,” I tell her. She laughs. My God, I think, she’s young, too young to be a guest at Vinnie’s. I try to imagine what home is like for this waif.

I have never worked in a restaurant in my life, so serving is new to me. I am taken aback when a thin woman in her sixties tells me that she has asked other servers four times for pie, and would I mind, when I get a minute, to attend to her? I bring her back a small plate containing, as it happens, two slices. She is thrilled.

At another table sits a woman with three sons, all teen-agers, all with the same sallow complexion. They look unwell and discomfited and they seem not to be talking much. As one volunteer put it, coming here is not the kind of childhood memory you want to hold dear. How, I wonder, does a mother explain to her children where they are going when they set out for this place? Vinnie’s is decidedly not a restaurant, for no money changes hands. Maybe that is why Thelma hates the phrase “soup kitchen.” It’s demeaning, and it conjures Depression-era line-ups.

There is a charm to Vinnie’s and a deeply felt sense of community here. But no one comes to Vinnie’s out of choice; they’ve come by default. Given their druthers, everyone here—and that includes the volunteers—would be elsewhere. The clients, of course, would rather have money to spare and their choice of a meal at home or, on occasion, at a restaurant in town. As for the volunteers, some, like Pat, a retired neurological nurse, just shake their heads, especially when they see mothers in the dining room with kids in tow.

“We shouldn’t be here,” Pat says. “There shouldn’t be a Vinnie’s and a Martha’s Table and all these support services.” It should never have come to this.

To say that clients have no choice is not quite correct. One woman calls Vinnie’s every morning to find out what’s on the menu. No doubt she calls around to Martha’s Table and the other places in town that offer free or heavily subsidized meals (Martha’s charges $1) and lets the bill of fare determine where she’ll eat lunch that day. Vinnie’s staff have come to expect her call and find it amusing.

Not so amusing is the brochure that Jenn gives me the first day. Published by Volunteer and Information Kingston, the six-page pamphlet lists all the shelters (six), the places offering hot meals for free (ten, all with varying hours), food banks (five), used clothing and furniture depots (thirteen) and drop-in centres (five). All these helter-skelter parts of an infrastructure are run mostly by volunteers and all of them compete with each other for the charity dollar. Ther...