Archives for October 2022

Archive for October, 2022

4 ways to support families in need this holiday season

Posted on: October 26th, 2022 by Nellie's No Comments

While the team at Nellie’s always works extra hard to make the holiday season a special one for our families, it’s truly the generosity of our donor community that helps to make such a difficult time a little bit easier. If you’d like to help us bring the magic of the holidays to families in need this year, here are four ways you can give back:

Donate gift cards: Gift cards are an amazing present for families in the Nellie’s community. These are families who don’t live in our shelter, but they use many of our community programs, such as our Food Program or our Housing supports. Frequently, these families are headed by a single mom doing everything she can to give her kids what they need. Grocery gift cards can help a mom stock their fridge with essentials, or make a nice holiday dinner. Gift cards for stores like Wal-Mart can also help her buy groceries, along with necessities like clothes, diapers, and toiletries.

Donate cash: Your monetary donations help us continue to provide shelter, dignity, and hope to women and children leaving violence, poverty and homelessness. Here are some ways your gift can help us today:

$35 will help us pay for a taxi to transport a woman and her children away from a violent and life-threatening situation
$75 will pay for one day’s stay at the shelter, including food
$150 will provide counselling and support services for a woman and her children for one month, giving them a chance at a brighter tomorrow

Sponsor a family: Every holiday season at Nellie’s, more than 50 families in our community join our “Sponsor a Family” program. As a sponsor, we ask you to purchase a small gift for each child, a small gift for the mom, and a grocery gift card to help her get a nice dinner on the table. This is approximately a $250 commitment per family of three (a mom and two kids). When donors are assigned a family, they’ll be given a list of likes, the age and gender of each child, as well as their clothing sizes, to help give them ideas of what to buy.

Give a gift of securities: One of the most financially sound ways to support Nellie’s this holiday season is with a gift of securities (stocks, bonds, or mutual funds). By donating publicly traded securities, you eliminate the capital gains tax that you would have to pay if you instead sold the securities and then donated the proceeds. You’ll also receive a charitable tax receipt for your donation. Consult your financial advisor if you’d like to consider this donation option.

No matter how you choose to donate to Nellie’s this holiday season, you’ll help us spread joy and support to families when they need it the most. Thank you for your generous support, and happy holidays!

For more information on donating to Nellie’s, please visit our Donate page or email fundraising@nellies.org

How Nellie’s is helping to fight food insecurity in Toronto

Posted on: October 25th, 2022 by Nellie's No Comments

No doubt you’ve experienced some sticker shock at the grocery store recently — according to new data released in October by Statistics Canada, food inflation has soared to a 41-year high in Canada. Grocery prices just keep climbing, rising by 11.4 per cent year-over-year, while hourly wages rose by only 5.2 per cent. And when you combine the increasing inflation with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s not surprising that more Canadians are facing food insecurity than ever before.

According to the Canada’s Invisible Food Network report released by Second Harvest, 6.7 million Canadians relied on food charities in 2021. That’s equal to 18% of Canadians, or roughly the population of Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan combined.

Here in Toronto, there were 1.45 million visits to Toronto food banks in the last year — the highest number of visits ever recorded in the city — according to the Who’s Hungry report prepared by the Daily Bread Food Bank and North York Harvest. Perhaps the most sobering statistic is that for the first time ever, new clients outnumbered existing clients at Toronto food banks with a 61 per cent increase compared to the year prior.

At Nellie’s, we’ve seen the demand for our food program continue to grow throughout the pandemic. In fact, the need has been so great that despite having to temporarily suspend many of our community programs due to the pandemic, we never closed the doors on our food program. Between 60 to 80 women and families apick up food from our food program every single week, from seniors living below the poverty line, to single moms trying to make ends meet, to women with disabilities who face economic and social exclusion. Some of these women have lived in our shelter, but many others simply live in our community and come to us for help.

Our food program depends on donations from our community, as well as support from our friends at Second Harvest. Every Tuesday morning, the food rescue charity makes a weekly delivery of fresh, frozen, and packaged foods. We never know exactly what we’ll get each week, so we call our food program “Supper Surprise”. From week to week, we fill food baskets with everything from pasta and rice, to fresh fruit and vegetables, to peanut butter and milk. We round out each food basket with stock from our own non-perishable food pantry to ensure that each family receives a healthy mix of protein, canned and boxed goods, and fruits and vegetables.

It’s because of generous donors like you that we’re able to keep that pantry stocked and ready to support our community. Our need for non-perishable food donations continues to grow as the increasing demand persists. Kids’ snacks and cereals are always incredibly helpful to the families who visit Nellie’s, as well as anything that is quick and easy to make into a meal.

Another way you can support our food program is through a monetary donation, which can be used to buy TTC tokens for those who come to the food program. We strongly believe that transportation shouldn’t be a barrier to food access, so we give each woman a token to get home and a token to come back next week.

To make a secure online donation, please visit our donation page. Or, you can make an even bigger impact by becoming a monthly donor. Our regular monthly supporters help us provide critical and consistent funding towards our daily efforts to fight food insecurity in our community, as well as our other essential programs. Automatic monthly payments are easy to set up, convenient, and create a lasting impact on the lives of the women and their children who need us.

How Nellie’s’ housing program helps women access safe and affordable housing

Posted on: October 1st, 2022 by Nellie's No Comments

With the percentage of renters increasing in Ontario and across Canada, the affordable housing crisis is becoming truly untenable — especially for our country’s most vulnerable populations. Renters in Ontario now make up over 30% of the total population, and here in Toronto, we’ve now become the second most expensive city in Canada for rentals and the most expensive for buying a home, according to recent statistics from the Canadian Real Estate Association. Housing is increasingly becoming more and more unaffordable — with a median income in Toronto of just over $35,000 a year, housing costs are terribly out of sync with incomes. Too many people are having to make impossible decisions about whether they’ll pay for their groceries, their essential medications, or their rent each month.

“I think it’s all intertwined: inflation, housing […] and then COVID came and a lot of people ended up unemployed, especially in the manual labour market,” explains Jiin Yiong, Nellie’s program director. “And so it drove the working class into poverty even more, and then the inflation came. I think for a lot of immigrant families especially, you now have to keep two to three jobs to maintain a roof over your head and food on the table.”

Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the current housing crisis, Nellie’s is continuing to see an increase in clients who need housing support. Our Transitional Housing Support Program helps women who have left situations of violence, poverty, and homelessness access safe and affordable housing. Through this program, Nellie’s assists women with the application process for subsidized housing, as well as with safety planning, crisis support, and advocacy.

In addition to working with women to secure housing, our staff also connects them to community resources in their area so that they will have the support and tools they need to establish themselves once they move into their new homes. We also assist clients with finding furniture and other household items that help make a house feel like a home.

As part of Nellie’s continued efforts to collaborate with community and strategic partners, our greater goal is not only to improve our crisis response, but to also further work on eviction prevention. Currently our staff is working to increase our outreach by visiting more community drop-in centres to lead workshops on housing-related topics, including tenant rights, budgeting, and more.

“Providing accurate information is crucial for eviction prevention,” says Jiin. Misinformation is easily spread, especially in vulnerable housing communities. Jiin gives an example of a client she recently worked with who was told by her landlord that she needs to leave because she’s living in a bachelor apartment with her two children. But legally, a landlord must apply for and receive an eviction order from the Landlord and Tenant Board in order to begin the process of eviction — they can’t just give you verbal or written instructions to force you to leave. Unfortunately, many landlords use intimidation as a tactic, and women in vulnerable situations, especially new immigrants, will often just do what they’re told for fear of greater repercussions.

“We want to provide the support for our clients who require immediate support, but instead of just responding to the immediacy of it, there’s got to be some things we can do to prevent it,” says Jiin. “I think prevention is the most important, because then you don’t send people into crisis.”