New Program | Nellies

Posts Tagged ‘new program’

Our weekly food program gets a brand-new home

Posted on: April 18th, 2024 by Nellie's No Comments

At the end of January, our weekly food program moved to a new location inside the Kimbourne Park United Church in the East Danforth neighbourhood, and our team is feeling so fortunate to be able to run our program out of this beautiful, spacious spot.

“The church has been such an amazing partner in helping us along the way — they’re super supportive,” says Amanda Nobile, our Community Support & Outreach program coordinator. “And the space itself has been great. It’s so nice to have a larger space where we can spread out more. It’s been very smooth in the way that we’ve set it up to hand out food to our clients. It’s also just a beautiful, calm space, with a really nice energy. It feels very nice to be in this beautiful place that we’re so welcomed in.”

Every week, 120 families rely on our food program to access a basic human need — that’s as much as double the number we were serving just a year prior. And there are another 60 families we could be serving if we had the resources. Our new, larger location provides the space to potentially expand our program, but in order to do so, we’ll need to secure additional food donations, and have the people power for client administration, food sorting, and cleaning. Currently our team is working on grant applications to help us purchase fridges and freezers for our new location, which would allow us to store more fresh food, and start offering weekly milk, eggs, meat, and bread for our clients.

As with most food programs, we depend on donations from our community and agencies. Every Tuesday morning, our friends at Second Harvest — a food rescue charity — deliver fresh, frozen, and packaged foods. From week to week, we fill food baskets with a wide variety of foods, like fresh fruit and vegetables, pasta and rice, peanut butter, and milk. We round out each basket with stock from our own non-perishable food pantry to ensure that each family receives a nourishing mix of protein, canned and boxed goods, and produce.

While we work towards adding more fresh food to our offerings, Amanda hopes that we’ll be able to start increasing the amount of food we can provide to our clients each week. “I know a lot of our clients go to more than one food bank,” says Amanda. “I’m hoping we’ll be able to eliminate that, that they’re not going to have to run around and go to multiple different food banks — they’ll only have to do a one-stop shop and have enough food for the week.”

Now that we’ve settled in our new location, we’ve been thrilled to see the many ways this larger space can enhance our food program experience and increase the number of families we support through this crucial service. “[In our previous location], we used to only be able to have a few volunteers, especially since the space was small,” explains Amanda. “But now we’ve been able to get volunteers through the church as well, and they’ve been such an amazing help. It’s way less stressful and the whole production of everything is just so much quicker.”

Thank you again to Kimbourne Park United Church for being such an amazing partner, and helping us provide an enhanced food program experience for our Nellie’s clients!

To make a secure online donation to our food program, please donate here.

Introducing our new substance use and addiction program

Posted on: October 26th, 2023 by Nellie's No Comments

As we work toward a future free of gender-based violence, here at Nellie’s we’ve been working to build new ways for us to better support our community of women and their children fleeing violence, trauma, and homelessness. And thanks to a financial contribution from Health Canada, we’re currently developing a brand-new substance use program to provide even more women with the help they need.

There’s a major intersectionality between substance use and violence against women — an average of 63% of women seeking assistance with violence issues are also struggling with substance abuse. Many women in addiction recovery also report experiencing some form of abuse in their lifetime. But until now, there’s been a lack of holistic support for women in need of both of these services.

Enter our new substance use program, which aims to increase the knowledge of and build additional capacity for harm reduction services within violence against women shelters. Toni-Ann Allen, Nellie’s Substance Use and Addictions supervisor, has been tasked with creating this expansive program, which she recently launched with a presentation to the Violence Against Women Network (VAWN) about how the program will be integrated across all women’s shelters within VAWN.

Although the program is being developed at Nellie’s, the goal is to create a standardized practice within all VAWN women’s shelters to address and support individuals who are experiencing both gender-based violence and substance abuse. Toni-Ann is working on building this program from scratch, and she’s currently in the research stage and working on building out the assessment framework. “The assessments will help us evaluate and see where each organization is currently at with substance use, addictions, and harm reduction within their shelter,” explains Toni-Ann. “Once all the assessments are finished, I’ll take all the information and then give each shelter feedback.” Working alongside Toni-Ann are peer volunteers who have lived experience with gender-based violence or substance use — they’ll be providing feedback on all steps of the process, as well as joining Toni-Ann on the in-shelter assessments starting in January.

After Toni-Ann and her team finish completing the assessments and providing feedback, the next step will be to provide essential training to frontline shelter workers to help them better support their shelter residents. “Because of this intersectionality [of women experiencing substance use and gender-based violence], we’re finding that individuals aren’t accessing services as they should, and it’s creating barriers for women,” says Toni-Ann. “We want to bridge that gap and prepare the workers and VAW shelters to deal with this complex issue.”

Another element of the program that Toni-Ann is looking forward to exploring is how nutrition can be used as a form of harm reduction. “I don’t believe there’s enough conversation around nutrition and how it helps individuals who use substances, wherever they may be in their journey,” explains Toni-Ann. “From a community standpoint and a harm reduction standpoint, I haven’t seen that — so that’s really exciting.”

We’re proud to be starting this innovative and transformative program, and we’re eager to soon be supporting the women at Nellie’s even more effectively. Our goal is that the impact of this program goes far beyond the direct support we provide to our clients — it’s also about challenging the stigma surrounding substance use and harm reduction. “I think it will change a lot within the community, and I think it will change perceptions on harm reduction and substance abuse,” says Toni-Ann.