Beggars SHOULD Be Choosers

This week marks a small victory for the Right to Food movement in the DTES or at least the tiny wave of food activism that reverberates within the walls of where I work: we successfully got Food Runner  (the principle link between food donors, the food bank and non-profit organizations) to stop giving us bag loads of day old pastries! Yes, two weeks after we made a bold request, they showed up sans those big clear bags of stale poverty-diet-staples for us to sort.

Hell did not break loose, the apocalypse did not happen (yet), and we did not piss the FR off enough for them to stop delivering the food we actually need. Our clients will not starve as a result of our impudent requests (though it is fucked up that they could without the help of charity.) Nor did any of the other fears that keep organizations from telling donors what they do and do not need materialize--though we were afraid...

Email Revolution:

All it took was a simple email, one manager to another,  politely reiterating the health concerns that prevail among the population we serve and courteously requesting (if it is not too much trouble)  that they please keep those refined sugars and flours AWAY! It's probably a good thing that I didn't write the email, I do have a tendency to get a wee bit militant. Some clients refer to me as the food police--yes I am, so?--and I got in trouble in an interview setting with two managers once when I stated that I rather have clients starve to death than have them eat day old pastries every morning--its true though! Well at least theoretically.

Now my coworker Jess and I no longer have to cringe as we watch clients eating handfuls of donuts and cakes that we were forced to put out on the counter when we ran out of garbage space--a regular occurrence that completely reduced all our efforts to serve the most tasty and nutritious food possible to crumbs. We are still not able to do everything that we would like in the kitchen (the revolution is not funded!), but at least we can help our clients start the day off a little less toxically. 

Wants versus Needs and for Whom?

What we do deal with now though, even more profoundly, is the reality that it is very difficult to create a healthy meal with what tends to get donated and that pastries really filled a void (filler in the fullest sense of the word) where proper funding ought to be. 

We also deal with backlash from some clients who want the sweets, which raises ethical questions around speaking on behalf of individuals who seldom have the opportunity to speak for themselves and who don't have access to choice of any kind including in the basic realm of what to eat for breakfast today? 

It is important to think about the huge discrepancy between workers and the clients we are representing (and to always remember that it is pretty messed up that we are employed to "represent," at least ostensibly). Yes beggars can't be choosers in our society, but that's not just an old cliche, its a pervasive ideology that is self serving.

And it is so easy for me to take on the role of food Nazi when I can satisfy both wants and needs (i.e I can spend some of my paycheck on some tasty craft beer and overindulge with no critical--or pitying-- gazes monitoring and discussing my every move. I can also easily knock back some of my expensive supplements and organic foods the next day to bring the rosiness back to my sallow cheeks. )

Of course it is not me the individual who is robbing people from their right to choose (but maybe me as part of a collective); it is the charitable system itself (donor driven!) which is also a symptom of an inequitable society. Charity does not even allow us to secure basic needs and all the sugar in the world can't coat that truth.

The position I am in allows me two limited choices: to be a highly limited spokesperson (as  utterly problematic as that is) or to say nothing at all and carry on with business as usual.

I pick the lesser of two evils, that is my only choice. 

An Ode to Working in Social Services

Where I work is more than a testament to psychiatric deinstitutionalization (aka the shutting down of "legitimate" mental hospitals), it is a testament to how easy it is to be lost in this atomizing, broken society. The space I occupy professionally represents a general malaise that is rendered invisible by a deep class structure that positions us all in an overarching hierarchy that legitimizes some, while rejecting others. It is a microcosm of the bigger picture. There, the rejected and the legitimized not only co-exist, but enable one another to exist.

It is a known as a drop-in centre for people with diagnoses of mental illness. It serves as a makeshift asylum for the "unhousable," the "non-compliant," the "deconpensating," the "concurrently disordered." Many of the regulars are abjectly broken: they are known as under housed, addicted and medicalized bodies. They are viewed as the unproductive members of a capitalist society; they are labelled individuals who are considered at once victims and con artists.

Everyday as staff we come face to face with the hopeless realities of many human beings. We are intimately acquainted with the symptoms of a broader problem: from bed bug infestations, slumlords and chronic illness, to suicide threats, "disordered" thinking and drug abuse, violence, the effects of lives spent in institutions and filled with trauma, and a lack of food and shelter amidst so called plenty. But we cannot solve these problems: there is no solution only grey areas. There is no housing, there is no justice despite humanitarian rhetoric, there is no room for everyone to be productive in a society that values productivity above all else.

And poverty is a productive industry.

So we “reduce harm.” We are the paid facilitators, working under the middlemen ( the layers upon growing layers of management), we are the redistributors of scraps.  We are forced into the role, implicitly, of determining who are the deserving vs. the undeserving poor: who gets to have that expired sandwich for cleaning the washrooms, and who gets turned down for a pair of donated boots because they have a history of selling goods on the street.

Yet once you spend enough time on the service provider side of the line you begin to question this distinction, provided you are fortunate enough not to find yourself completely consumed by the contradictions. You realize that we too are inhabiting a grey area, that the divides and boundaries are abstract constructions that barely hold it all together. With increasing certainty, you come to terms with the fact that we are all to some degree "messed up;" that it is the world that is insane, that you were fortunate enough to land on the right side of the divide because you were able to pull it off, to put forth and maintain a mask of respectability. 

I love my job but sometimes the contradictions drive me to the brink of hopelessness when I start really thinking about the implications of the fact that my job exists, that I am spending my days doing what I am doing and that this is necessary, that I love my job. In order to do this job well, it seems you need to find a tricky balance between forgetting the bigger picture (because if you dwell you will go insane) and remembering (because if you don't you will become jaded and even cruel). 

Thankfully we also exist at an everyday, interpersonal level and the people I work with (on both the client and staff spectrum, but major love to my coworkers!) are some of the most amazing folks I have ever met across the board. 

The Only Difference Between Me and a Madman is That I'm Not Mad!