Helen was a founder of the Jane/Finch Community and Family Centre and its first President. Helen and her family lived at Bayview and Sheppard prior to moving to the community in 1967 and staying until 1982. “We planned to live here for 5 years but stayed for 15 and then it was time to leave.” As of February, 2011, Helen is retired and living in Vancouver, British Columbia.
What brought you and your family to Jane and Finch?
Gary and I had portable jobs (Gary was a teacher and I was a nurse) so we thought we might experience life in a third world country. That plan came to an immediate halt when our six month old daughter Megan had an intestinal intussusception that nearly ended her life. We put our plans on hold because to jeopardize our children in another country made no sense. The much vilified Jane and Finch drew our attention and we moved there for five years but we were so intrigued that we stayed for 15 years. There was a lot in the newspaper about Jane and Finch and we thought we had 3rd world countries here so we bought a 4 bedroom condominium at Driftwood near Grandravine. I’d grown up in a poor area and I preferred my children to go to a school that wasn’t upper middle class because I didn’t want them to hold attitudes that weren’t common with most Canadians. So, that was another reason, the schools.
What was going on in the community when you moved here?
The area, just recently farm land, was quickly developed and included social housing in townhouses and high rises. Schools had followed as had a hospital, library, a recreation centre, a shopping centre and numerous strip malls. Little thought had been given to other amenities and services required by a population of 28,000 consisting of many children – it was larger than any other ward. Bad publicity, poverty, isolation, especially in high rise building caused people to be distrustful and anxious about their neighbourhoods.
The stuff in the newspaper was horrendous. Growing up, I was used to living in poor communities, and I thought it was just fine. My kids loved it because they had the run of the ravine. They played safely in the ravine; they didn’t have streets to cross or anything to get to a park.
What was going on in the city or the province?
Both the province and the city were enjoying good times and the availability of work drew Canadians from other provinces. Jane and Finch provided social housing with rents geared to income, helpful to workers when construction slowed down over winter and they had to rely on Unemployment Insurance. Previously, many Italian Canadians formed the majority but gradually wave after wave of newcomers turned the area into an immigrant reception area.
Yes, it was the beginning of shelters, people were stepping out and doing things on behalf of their community, a man had landed on the moon! I’m a newspaper addict so there was a lot going on at that time but it was mostly yuppie stuff. Drugs were around the projects, around the local university, they were very easy to obtain.
How did you get involved in the community?
Katie (Hayhurst) was the ward Alderman and partly because of her influence, I started going to Downsview Weston Action Committee (DWAC). DWAC was a “watch dog” group of residents, workers in the area and Katie, the Alderman. They raised issues on behalf of the community such as heavy traffic, semi-tractors using arterial and residential streets to avoid the Jane Finch corner, youth crime, transit problems, newspaper coverage and the alarming growth in housing within an area bereft of many amenities and services. It (DWAC) wasn’t there when we first came, but Katie’s election spurred it along. So they tried to tackle different problems in the community.
A lot of things came out of DWAC, but it was definitely political. The city staff came up at that time and they did little research projects. For example, the population was twenty-eight thousand and a lot of the wards in North York were fifteen or sixteen thousand. They complained about the rate of teenage crime and at that time the police would disclose statistics, so it would come out time after time that some of the middle class wards had higher juvenile crime than Jane and Finch. Suddenly those records were closed to us.
It was through DWAC that I met Mary Lewis who was given time to do community development for mothers and children. Single mothers especially were isolated in high rise towers with few friends, little money, often looking after children 24/7 without relief and who were wary of the community surrounding them. Mary and Wanda began Tiny Tots to break isolation and highlight children’s needs.
I joined a committee to put their work on a stronger footing. Community input was scant because most people were simply confused, as I was, about what we were attempting. We could only look to the past for models. Hull House, Chicago, and settlement houses and similar agencies provided models we could modify to suit a suburban situation. A location for a centre similar to downtown centres was out of the question.
In an effort to gather some supporting data, a federal grant was obtained through DWAC and two students pulled the census data pertaining to the neighbourhoods that were in the area. What really broadened my perspective was time spent as interviewer for York Survey Research on surveys to do with drug use, Canadian attitudes, and welfare. This allowed me to visit many homes in the area. This experience gave me a good sense and liking of the residents.
But it was what I learned about welfare moms that changed my life in a very practical way. Older women, on receipt of the welfare cheque, paid the rent and immediately bought food for the month, holding back money for fruit/vegetables, milk and emergencies. Here were women who made every dollar do the work of three. This was no so with younger women. Since they often lacked both money management and cooking skills, they were unable to last until the family allowance arrived and were sometimes in debt to friends and family. Sadder still were stories of ex-husbands who arrived to collect on the day the cheques arrived. I’ve always disliked shopping and so I tried the approach of shopping by the month. It took a while but soon I had it and this resulted in better balanced meals, greater variety, lower costs and best of all I gained at least 9 hours for other activities.
It was cheap enough for Ontario housing to start building here and I believe their idea was to get welfare families out of the city core to see if that would make a difference. So I did some interviews in Jane and Finch. I talked to a family from Newfoundland. There were a lot of Newfoundlander’s in the townhouses. They tried to mix private townhouses with public housing but there was a wall between them. I think there was a physical wall between them even though they were abutting each other. I interviewed people before they moved to Jane and Finch and then after and that was one of the studies. So, I did in fact have an idea of who the population was. It was primarily Anglo, Italian, and just starting to become international. Those were the primary groups at that time.
What issues were people facing at the time?
According to DWAC, they fought over entrances to super markets (ours always had more entrances than were provided by law), bus service, schools was really big, transportation in general, and how people were treated. At one point, we had a clean up the ravine day and a bike was donated for those persons who collected the most stuff. Lenore Suddes, a community resident who played a leadership role in starting the Youth Clinical Services, actually ran the day; I just started it. So everything was collected behind the library. We attempted to get the carts to the grocery stores and were told that they would call the police if we were in possession of stolen goods! There were always these things. For example, you go into the bank and there would be a line for 20 or 30 feet. So, I called the bank downtown and said this wouldn’t happen in other banks we use. It was the lack of tellers of course and when I went back to the bank, they said, you complained about us; you know “blame the victim” instead of making the situation better.
There were issues over subsidized housing in the private apartments, like when a couple would be paying one thing and another person would be paying something else. Some residents felt that anyone who pays taxes should vote and that people who lived in townhouses and high-rises didn’t pay taxes so shouldn’t vote. We had to get across the idea that rent includes the taxes and that people in high-rises pay far more taxes for the space they occupy than a private, single family who pays the least in taxes, but that went nowhere. I mean there was always something and then every so often when it was a slow day at the papers, they’d run something about Jane-Finch. I suppose they thought they were helping, but Jane-Finch got known across the world.
How did the community respond to those issues?
We had an NDP member of parliament (Fred Young) and so there was quite a big NDP group and primarily they were the ones who went to DWAC. Like every place else, people stayed in their houses because they believed information in the paper, limiting their freedom to come and go. I wanted to have all the statistics at hand so that every group didn’t have to go back and do their own research. I got a federal grant for $4,000 and hired a York student and a sharp girl who was the secretary. The York student changed his field of study to social planning after his experience with us. They started work the first of July and the money came in mid-August. Being totally naïve, I got Gary to fund it and when the money came, we got it back again. So, the statistics were a handy reference and I guess that’s partly why I got involved with the Social Planning Council. We sold the book…$2.00 or something. It was highly criticized, saying the analysis wasn’t right, the numbers weren’t right, but it all came off the census tract!
I really enjoyed doing it and I felt quite resourceful to have gotten a grant from the government to do something like this. And, of course they sent around one of their auditors and that was priceless because I had to pay the government things like salaries so I did it by the week, I did it in pencil – everything balanced but I had never taken bookkeeping or anything else. This dear man came into my house to go through the books to find discrepancies and he couldn’t but he just shook his head at how I had kept these books. Everything was balanced. I didn’t care but he was so upset too valuable to be sent around to people’s homes to look at their books!
You worked closely with Mary Lewis to start the Jane/Finch Community and Family Centre - what was the beginning like?
Well, I may be wrong but I think I met Mary (Mary Lewis was a worker at CAS) at DWAC and some of her time was doing community development work. DWAC had been approached to help with some of her work and that’s how I got working with Mary. During that time, we visited the settlement houses; we met with different people who were knowledgeable about settlement houses and working with groups. We went to Don Vale Secretariat and the Children’s Storefront. It was very, very interesting but I didn’t think anything would come of it. We looked at all sorts of examples of how communities cared for themselves – the Hull House in Quebec and a place in the states and then the public health nurses had really done a lot of work in different places. The nurses did community outreach and development but then they had to go back to public health as we know it at that time. They had very little influence in community. So, we were looking for some means to have influence on families.
There were a couple of people who were pushing for this and Mary would know who they were but they were looking for community people to be part of this. I was interested and I had to find other people who were interested and of course, I wasn’t very successful. I didn’t care whether they were teachers in the community or whatever – if they had any interest in the community, I would ask if they would be involved with this committee and that didn’t work either. So really, the people who were involved were connections that Mary already had and then Marvyn Novick joined us. (Marvyn was a senior planner with Social Planning Council of Metro Toronto at that time). And that really helped a lot because he was in touch with politicians and people downtown, and Mary too. They knew people and the funders. We didn’t have a lot. It took more than two years whereas it should have taken us one year - it was pretty heavy going.
Finally, after two and a half years, it was time to fine tune the philosophy, structure and components of the Centre. Marvyn Novick’s advice was invaluable. His interest in the suburbs resulted in “Suburbs in Transition”. We decided on three components: community outreach, child/parent programs, and a community office which would serve the community and ourselves. Some ideas such as a Women’s Credit Union were left behind because of lack of knowledge, time, and financial acumen. The philosophy and components were compiled; the centre incorporated as a non-profit organization and a board was named. Gradually, funding was acquired and we were able to hire extraordinarily gifted staff. Funding came mostly from the Toronto Social Services and the United Way – their confidence in us was reassuring.
As always, space at Jane and Finch was always a problem. In the end, we were given the use of the recreation rooms at 4400 Jane Street, a Toronto Community Housing apartment building. Board decisions were arrived at by consensus, a slow process, but a process women are comfortable with. Similarly, the staff were asked to work together as a team thus an overall director was extraneous to the three component leaders. We avoided a corporate structure but a democratic approach is difficult to grasp, especially when business models were all around us. Eventually, the board changed to a corporate model with an overall director.
Finally we got to the point where you [Wanda, the interviewer] were hired. There were a lot of people that we made contact with that really helped us define what we wanted. We wanted to support mothers on welfare, we wanted things for pre-schoolers, we wanted community development and then we wanted a community office. Those were my goals. When I said we talked to a lot of people, we spoke to Dr. Wilson Head (professor at York U and former senior researcher at Social Planning) and he knew Peggy Edwards was a student from St. Wilfred Laurier and she was still at school – there were a ton of people who were interested in the area. Peggy eventually became the community development coordinator and Sheena Suttaby was the secretary.
Tell me about why and how you started Northwood Neighbourhood Services?
I thought about this for the community after it (Jane/Finch Community and Family Centre) was fairly secured and we had this wonderful staff and we impressed all our financial supporters with how well we did things. It was time to leave because at that point, it was becoming all about Helen Ede. It may have been my gift to the community, but I didn’t own it. It belonged to the community and I didn’t want one person to become the focus. At one point, I got quite scared because they wanted to put my name up for the YWCA Woman of the Year award so I said no, this is a group effort and it should be recognized as a group effort. The Y eventually did give the group recognition.
Northwood was about the sale of a golf course. The club consisted of several buildings as well as the private course that went into the ravine. The land was sold to the City of North York and was overseen by Parks and Recreation. Space could be booked by community groups and others. A community group had asked that one building be set aside solely for community organizations but this did not occur. With a very small grant, where I was the researcher and Gail Mercer was doing the outreach, this group led to the formation of Northwood Neighbourhood Services. The neighbourhood was similar to the others except for the large amount of military housing. What was learned at Jane and Finch was used at Northwood Neighbourhood Services but tailored to suit the residential mix of the area. I sat on the board and got it going with a few people.
How did the government or influential people e.g. religious leaders, activists, respond to the issues in the community?
Toronto had a wonderful social services department that tracked what was happening at Jane and Finch and they were our first funders. Later, the United Way became a funder and both agencies appreciated and encouraged Jane and Finch. Churches catered to their congregations but the Mennonites had staff to do outreach and they cooperated with community to discover and serve the needs. At the provincial level, NDP-er Fred Young was well liked and always available to residents. Bob Kaplan, liberal, was the federal representative and diligently reached out to the Italian-Canadian population. Later, when they were doing the subway (university line) I pointed out to Mr. Kaplan that all the land to the university and onto the airport was vacant and this was the time he should be pushing to get this going. I don’t think he thought of that. He was so pleased about the subway extension to Yorkdale and to me; you set the land aside now, not to go after it when people were living on it. It would be so much more expensive. Anyway, I get into trouble for thinking laterally!
Tell us about your involvement with social objectives and urban planning.
I found social planning very interesting and so I was pleased to sit on a Social Planning committee which acted as a critic when Marvyn Novick was preparing “Suburbs in Transitions” which gave substance to the situations that befall densely populated suburban areas. After I had left the board, I continued as a representative at NYIAC, and the United Way. Finding volunteers to fill these rolls was difficult and expensive – the cost of child care, TTC tokens, and the occasional meal away from home as well as “time” made it impossible for many community women. I decided that I would spend two days in the community and one day as a community representative but as these things go, it often became 3 at home and 2 away plus a two day part-time job to finance my activities. This led to family complaints. I wasn’t a “milk and cookies after-school mom”. It was too exhausting as well.
Tell us about Seneca College coming into the community.
The college held land on Jane Street and the plan was to use it as an educational satellite. Much time was spent developing programs suitable for our community and at the point a board had been chosen, the college withdrew. The need for re-training and adult education was greatly needed to find employment. Many people were refused jobs because they lacked Canadian experience even though they had skills to do the work. To encourage adult women to return to school, Elspeth Heyworth Centre for Women and York University arranged an upgrading English course (Bridging Course for Women) to encourage women to return to school. It had been a small but very successful beginning that had high impact and raised self-worth.
What do you think were the biggest challenges back then?
I think that the treatment of single moms - to have to go shopping with a couple of kids, one in a stroller and people criticized them for taking cabs back from the grocery store. Sometimes the sidewalks weren’t ploughed and it was almost a mile for some people to get home. At that time, grocery stores often charged more in poor areas than in middle class areas which I could never understand. So, that was a complaint.
The attitude of the schools bothered me but I don’t think that was a community thing as much as what happens to single parents and the attitudes of teachers towards them. When Andy (her son) was in middle school, we went to see his English teacher and he showed us Andy’s folder and he said, “ I don’t know what that is, just more garbage”. Andy wrote poetry and this guy didn’t recognize this. So, when he said that, I thought to value these kids like that was just wrong so we moved Andy almost immediately out of there.
People who earned their living in the area often ranged from extremely critical to those who detested the community and its residents. Struggling parents, often holding two jobs, single moms on welfare, etc., did not deserve bad treatment because of where they lived. At one point, Mary arranged that we meet with the editor of the Toronto Star to request that news concerning Jane and Finch should be reported but stories depicting Jane and Finch negatively did not help but rather made things worse for us.
What was your philosophical approach to how you did things?
I think it has a lot to do with my childhood and Gary’s (her husband) influence because he had really good insight into parenting and to me, parenting is how you look after your community. It’s just parenting on a bigger scale. One other thing about Jane Finch that I always thought was interesting that when you ask about peoples kids, Irene (Irene Pengally was a resident-activist in the community) was a perfect example. She’d tell you about them so that you felt you would know them if you met them and that was true for many, many parents whereas in a middle-class setting and you ask about kids and they’ll tell you their achievements at school and you know, the kid could be about anybody just a completely different approach when talking about kids.
What motivated you to do this volunteer work?
Well, I just worked part-time and my kids were in school and I helped in the library in the school. I just had the time to do it.
Were there roadblocks that made the work challenging?
Other than our supporters, for the most part, we were ignored and left to do things as we saw fit. I suppose there was friction with some agencies who felt that we were being funded at their expense. The belief that poor people are poor because they can’t manage money was often heard.
What were you most proud of in the community?
The Centre and its achievements, most of which came about because of the excellent staff we were fortunate to have and the outreach they did. The mix of people who used the Centre was very impressive as well.
What was challenging for you personally?
Keeping my mouth shut when people complained about Jane Finch! People, even up to today have preconceived ideas about poverty and homelessness. People generally don’t understand how residents can turn their lives around for their community and for themselves. At one point, parents had to get themselves organized to get their kids across Driftwood to go to school because the semi-trucks were taking a short-cut around the corner of Jane and Finch and coming down Driftwood Avenue (south of Finch) and continuing down Jane so it was really difficult for little kids. I went to City Hall and asked if we could please have a cross walk because of the traffic and one guy said, “Are you kidding me…there’s nothing wrong with mothers walking their children across the street. Women should be at home looking after their kids. Don’t bother me with this trivial request.” He didn’t care, I guess.
The process probably was the greatest challenge. At the beginning, I wondered if anything would come of our endeavour. The politics of social services sometimes didn’t make sense. I was very green but I had the support of my husband and that was encouraging. I’ve often thought that the principles of child rearing also applied to community building.
Continually having to face the attitudes that were held about the community and its residents was very challenging and dispiriting. Perhaps because of the trials we faced together we’ve formed close and lasting friendships.
What are your fondest memories?
It was fun; I had a really good time. I enjoyed the people we met and in all probably, those were the best years of my life. It is so pleasing to know how much the Centre has achieved from such humble beginnings. I am amazed. It is surreal.