Malcolm Shookner worked with resident groups and staff from various organizations and agencies in Jane and Finch and across the former City of North York from the early 70’s to 1990. In 2000, he and his wife, Linda, moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia. As of March 2011, Malcolm is the Manager of Community Counts, a website that provides statistics for communities, in the Economics and Statistics Division of the Nova Scotia Department of Finance.
How did you get connected to the community of Jane and Finch?
My first connection with Jane Finch was in the early 1970’s, working with Doug Barr and John Piper out of the Toronto School Board. We had a grant to do some kind of a project with youth, a trailer-type of thing in Jane Finch similar to what had been done downtown with a trailer in Yorkville. We wanted to do something in Jane Finch because we thought that there was a lot going on up there - this is from downtown Toronto to Jane and Finch. We hired a youth worker, Mark Smith, who played an animator role to go up there to meet people, figure it out and hire people to create some kind of a place to work with youth. We met with him regularly as he did his work.
I was working with Youth Services Network at that time and we were trying to work with youth across Metropolitan Toronto. The Youth Services Network had grown out of downtown youth issues and we were trying to be Metro-wide so Jane Finch was a community we wanted to connect with, especially with the youth in that community. There was also the Clinic (Youth Clinical Services) that had been set up in a portable beside York Finch Hospital and we thought, okay, let’s work with the clinic and residents up there to figure out a way to develop some kind of youth programs that were responsive to youth needs in that community. Doug Barr and John Piper were both working for the Toronto Board of Education at that time so they were thinking from an educator’s point of view. A trailer was set up behind Jane Finch Mall and it was referred to as the Youth Action Project. A local resident, Brian Whitehead was hired. That trailer behind the mall was the Yorkville trailer model that had been done in the 60’s and early 70’s downtown and taking it to the suburbs. So, that was my first connection to Jane and Finch. I was working out of downtown and so it was a stretch. Through this project, I met people who lived in or were involved with Jane and Finch at that time, people like Mary Lewis, Helen Ede, and Pat O’Neil. So, that was the first connection. That’s how I knew about what was happening in Jane Finch.
When I went to the Provincial government in 1977 as part of the reform of Children’s Services in the Ministry of Community and Social Services (COMSOC), I was assigned to work on prevention policy. At that time, I was staying in touch with what was going on in Jane Finch just by connection. I think Mary Lewis was my key connection there with what was going on with her work out of North York Inter-agency Council. So, I was trying to keep abreast of what was evolving out there because I knew it was a place of energy and focus as well as a community that had a lot of needs and that needed attention. So, I think it was 1979 or 1980, through my work in the province, we released a policy on prevention and we had pulled together some funding within COMSOC to give grants to prevention programs.
By that time, the Jane/Finch Community and Family Centre had just been set up. We knew there were things going on in prevention up there so Jane/Finch Centre applied for a prevention grant related to children and youth. Mary was a key player at that time along with others who were working to mobilize around the Jane Finch Centre. I didn’t really have much in the way of direct contact, face to face contact at that time. It was more through connections through intermediaries trying to help direct resources to that community for the community to figure out, what they can do to help themselves. That’s what was going on in my mind because the prevention policy was about helping communities to mobilize to address their own needs.
So, a couple years later, I left COMSOC (in 1982) and I went to work for the North York Interagency Council (NYIAC) as the Senior Coordinator, replacing Mary Lewis. She left behind for me some stuff that was going on that I had some knowledge about and I knew she was active in the Jane Finch community on behalf of NYIAC. So, I wanted to pick up that thread and figure out …what can NYIAC do to continue that work? I went to the community and met people that Mary had worked with and started to understand what was going on from there and trying to figure out what could NYIAC do to support this work.
During ’82 -’83 time period, I was working more closely with people like Pat O’Neil and others like Helen Ede around the idea of a Community Health Centre. There had been some discussions in the community with a fellow named Sonny (???) who was trying to promote a community health idea, giving out health information in pamphlets to people, but people thought he had a hidden agenda. So I was approached at NYIAC to help the folks in the Jane Finch community to figure out how they could get a community health centre going. I started having meetings with residents, parents, people who lived in different buildings like 4400 Jane Street, 15 Tobermory and a couple of other places to hear, what they had in mind and what they thought when you say “community health centre.” They talked about things like they needed a place where they could get their health issues looked after, where the community is in charge of what goes on there; it’s not a hospital based program but a community based program, pointing to community based models that already existed in Ontario in the 70’s.
That started a seven year process of development. Marie Cerney was involved in those days too and she was very active in this. I can’t remember all the people but others like Peggy Edwards were around and Peggy Birnberg was also there. We started those discussions around what was their vision of a community health centre, how do we get there from here and we just started a process of talking to people to get their ideas; talking to the Ministry of Health about what they would do to support a community health centre; what kind of requirements there were to document the need for a community health centre. The documentation of needs turned out to be a four or five year exercise, mostly in frustration, because the Ministry of Health was not very helpful to us and they said things like, we had to demonstrate the need and what did that mean? We were saying that this was a community with a lot of poverty and people living here were saying that poverty was not good for your health but we could not find, in the mid 80’s, more than a handful of research references that documented the links between poverty and poor health. Of course, fast forward to now and people understand the social determinants of health. But at that time, people who lived in the community knew the connection but the research world hadn’t caught up with them.
The other big obstacle was that we had to get the hospital’s support. But they saw us as a threat. They thought that they could run “ambulatory clinics”, but the only time people go to their hospital was when they think they had an emergency. We did manage to find evidence that most of the people in the emergency room didn’t have emergencies and that if we could create a community-based model where people could go with their health needs, it would take a lot of pressure off the hospital. It took us a couple of years of dealing with the Vice President and others in that hospital to get them to come around to the view that a community health centre would not be a competitor but rather an ally to the hospital in meeting the health needs of people in the community.
For me, that was the first concrete request to NYIAC that I felt we could respond to and that was pushing NYIAC beyond the interagency role to supporting communities role - a role that Mary Lewis had started but she was somewhat out on a limb. Actually, when she started her work, she was working for the Children’s Aid Society and then she went to NYIAC and continued it. I picked that one up and said, okay, let’s do this. We spent seven years and we had many students coming to help, mostly from York University on placements for short periods of time, and we had community volunteers working with us to document and to collect information, to do research and make the case for the need for a community health centre in Jane Finch. We spent five years doing that and then about 1987, the Minister of Health Larry Grossman stood up in the House and announced that the province was starting a new policy to support community health centres across the province. Overnight, things changed. Suddenly, the Minister of Health became a friend and an ally and a supporter and even gave us money to finish the development work. Most of the red tape disappeared and within two years, we received approval for what became the Black Creek Community Health Centre.
That got me started, so once I was in the community working with people around the community health centre, I got to know people. I went to the Jane/Finch Centre and got to know people there and what was going on. What we were trying to do at that point was to connect the neighbourhood associations around Jane Finch with the Interagency Council. We wanted to have residents on the board of the Inter-agency Council, we wanted to expand the role of the interagency council to become an interagency and community council and in fact, that’s what we did. I don’t remember the year but sometime along the way, in the mid to late 80’s, we were successful in gaining neighbourhood residents involvement, not just agency people who worked there but people who lived there, to be on the board of NYIAC. We broadened the mandate by adding a C to the acronym to rename it as North York Interagency and Community Council (NYIACC). That opened up our role to work on a lot of new things. From working with residents, people got to know me. Another thing that really sticks in my mind is somewhere, after a couple of years of being up there, I got a call from (I don’t remember who it was) but one of the people I knew had real issues with one of the principals in the local school. There were some things going on there that residents were really unhappy about. They tried to deal with the Board of Education and were very frustrated and angry at the lack of response so they called me to a meeting. I sat in somebody’s living room at 15 Tobermory and listened to parents vent their frustrations about the school board and asking…can you help us get rid of that principal? I remember saying, well, I don’t know, maybe. I’m thinking the Board of Education is a big supporter of NYIACC and so this was a case of me trying to reconcile fundamental differences between an institution and neighbourhoods.
Well, to make a long story short on that, we spent a number of meetings listening to parents talk about their concerns, trying to ask questions about what specifically did they want and how do we get that. They wanted the principal out of there…okay so he goes to another school, then what? Oh yeah…we don’t want him doing the same thing at another school. So then, they started thinking not only did they want him out of there; they wanted him in a different role because what’s the point of shifting him from one school to another. Certainly, this was a school where people had been brought in who had problems elsewhere. So, it was really uncovering serious issues about the lack of accountability within the school board and the school system.
We went through a period of time with them; there were meetings with the school principal and the staff and there were discussions about the specific problems that had flared up. There was a response to an alleged abuse in the school and eventually the residents were successful in pressuring the school board to make changes that they felt were satisfactory.
One thing leads to another. People get to know you. We worked with the Delta Child Care Network (now Delta Family Resource Centre) with the things they were doing in different neighbourhoods. Once you get to know people and they get to trust you, then you become more of an ally and somebody they can go to and be a resource to the community. That was a role I really cherished.
What was going on in the community, city and the province at that time?
Some of the things that were going on were created from the development of the area in the sixties in terms of all the high-rises and density and lots of people with problems living in compressed areas with lack of access to services and resources. I recall a report that was done by the Social Planning Council in the 70’s that Marvyn Novick led that was trying to document the needs of the suburbs…Suburbs in Transition. We were trying to respond to the recommendations from that report. Now that came out before I went to COMSOC so I was aware of that at the time and also when I went to NYIACC, I was thinking along those lines. Some of the things they documented were the high-density, high-need communities that had risen out of the kind of development model that was done to turn those farms into high-rise buildings. There were also issues about the lack of trust of agencies like the Children’s Aid Society and other agencies that appeared to be intruding into people’s lives, taking their children, challenging their skills as parents….just a lot of mistrust with these social agencies, all of which were involved with NYIACC.
Of course, Mary Lewis, having worked for one of those agencies, was trying to deal with those issues herself, as well. So certainly, there was a lack of trust with social service agencies that were delivering services in that community and the problems people had with that. On a larger scale, Jane Finch was not the only neighbourhood in Metropolitan Toronto at that time that had development pressures and high concentrations of people living in low income, immigrants and other kinds of social issues that were being collected in these neighbourhoods and not being adequately addressed. Of course, there was also the downtown verses the suburbs tensions and that was what Suburbs in Transition was trying to document, the need for Metro Council at that time, to pay attention to the whole of Metropolitan Toronto, not to just look at the downtown issues.
I guess when I got to NYIACC in 1982, I found myself in the middle of all this; working for an interagency council whose members were very big supporters of the council like Children’s Aid and others and there were also groups like the Youth Clinical Services that were on the ground in Jane Finch. They were agencies but they were on the ground and they were closer to the community and seemed to be having respect to and from the community. I was trying to figure out with an interagency model how you reconcile those conflicts and differences and try helping people to focus their attention on overcoming their problems, dealing with some of the negative ways the agencies interacted with the community and to help the community take control of its own development and its own needs. With the Jane/Finch Community and Family Centre, there as a hub and a real focal point for people to come together in the community, to look after themselves and then the neighbourhood organizations, committees, associations in the other buildings in the area and the eventual development of neighbourhood associations in a lot of those places. I tried to give as much attention as I could to the neighbourhood groups as I had to give to the agencies and try to find ways for those differences to be reconciled somehow.
Neighbourhood Network evolved from those small neighbourhood associations. It brought community leaders together from a number of neighbourhoods, to look at common problems and solutions. Neighbourhood Network got some funding from somewhere that brought community leaders from neighbourhoods across North York. The idea was to bring the neighbourhood leaders together to talk amongst themselves and learn from each other’s experiences. Flemington Park had its own history which was very similar in many ways with Jane and Finch and there was the Peanut up in Don Mills and other places where similar problems were occurring. NYIACC was taking a city-wide approach so the idea of bringing neighbourhood leaders together into a Network where they could share their frustrations and their successes and also figure out how we could work together in ways that would address the common problems that we all had. I left NYIACC in 1990 so don’t recall if it was still going on at that time but now that I think about it, one of my roles at NYIACC at that point was to support these neighbourhoods to deal with common issues with the United Way, Social Planning Council, Children’s Aid Society, the police, the institutional services that they were all dealing with similar problems and trying to find ways to bring those problems around the table to the NYIACC inter-agency crowd. We wanted to have people sit down to figure out how to do things differently, how do we change our policies to work more effectively, how do we change our funding arrangement to flow better funding through there? There was also the moral support to have community leaders to find out that they were not struggling in isolation, their problems were not unique, that they could learn from each other and that was powerful within itself. We supported that work and I don’t know if Neighbourhood Network ever got any funding to bring them together but NYIACC certainly had resources to help them to come together.
The community faces many issues today. What do you remember as being the issues back then and how the community responded to the issues? Also, how did bureaucrats, politicians and influential people respond at that time?
Part of our work involved active engagement with the City Councillors, the Metro Councillors and the School Trustees, and the political people from the area to try to help residents get their messages across, get their points made and figure out the strategies they needed to have an impact on policies with the Board of Education, the City of North York level and at the Metro Council level, which was downtown and far away. And also as part of a learning exercise for all of us was how to change the policies of school boards and political entities like city and metro councils. I recall, for example, lots of residents showing up at the school board the night a debate was on about some sensitive issues that were affecting the community. Childcare was a big one, trying to get childcare into the community and issues related to childcare in the schools. I remember hundreds of residents showing up with balloons at the school board meeting to make their peaceful yet visual case for community support for childcare that was required in the schools. There was a lot of competition around whether they could use school space, school policies that were inhibiting the use of school space for childcare, and all those kinds of issues tied up in a bundle. At that point, the childcare scene was really evolving quickly in the mid to late 80’s and childcare was emerging as a dominate issue to the point that in 1989 and 1990, they were on the verge of having a national childcare policy. But then something happened - might have been the recession or depression of the early 90’s or change of government. Something happened at that moment…they were that close to signing something off but it never came about.
What we were trying to do was not only help the people to do what they needed to do to solve problems locally but where those problems were bigger problems, whether they were policy issues in play or institutional forces in play, to go to the sources of those problems and address them directly and to do so in an organized and articulate, well-researched and documented way, to bring the knowledge of the community, the power of numbers and also a plan to say, this is what we want.
One of the other things that really was an important lesson for me is, when I arrived in North York in ’82, a lot of the work was in reaction to issues at the time. Gradually people started saying, this is what we want rather than, this is what we don’t want. The Black Creek Community Health Centre was one of the first projects where people and organizations became pro-active as a community and said what we want for our community. Thinking in terms of goals, it became a proactive community development and what people now call asset-based community development. So to me, the work that was going on in Jane Finch at that time was an early example of communities trying to take control of their own resources and their own destinies, taking control away from distant forces of institutions and agencies and developers and others that had created conditions that were bad for communities and people who lived there. We were trying to change those conditions in a way that people would say, this is what we want and let’s work towards this goal and not just to work to get away from a bad thing. To me, that was an important transition for people who lived there. People would get tired of fighting an issue. If you’re always reacting to issues and the issue goes away, people go home….okay we did that, now there’s another issue…what are we going to do now?! We wanted to build capacity to say, okay, that issue has been addressed so now what do we want, let’s start working towards what we want. I think that’s been an important way for communities to build their capacity and to take control of their own destinies. Things like Neighbourhood Network, Black Creek Community Health Centre, and other things that evolved outside of Jane Finch like the $1 million dollar grant that opened up the North York Community House, were all expressions of communities trying to do for themselves. And those are legacies of our work. Those resources still exist. .
What do you remember as being challenging in the work that you were doing?
Most everything….including long drives home late at night from meetings in Jane Finch!!!! At the time, I was living in the Beaches; the other end of town but I spent most of my waking days and nights working in North York, especially in Jane Finch. And working in North York was also for me trying to balance off the demands of different communities from across the city. Part of the challenge was that there were so many demands over such a big city, of over 500,000 sprawled all over the place, and trying to be responsive as an interagency community council to the variety of needs across the city and find ways to bring people together and to connect. I think another big challenge was, as I said earlier the big complex conflict of interest that we had around the NYIACC table between police and child welfare and some of the other major institutions that had to intervene in other people’s lives and the residents who took their place at their board table to bring the voice of communities to that table. Managing those tensions so they would lead to productive results was probably one of the biggest challenges. Working with the community was the fun part. Working with the residents; that was the best part. I found a role to play that was useful and helpful so they wanted me there to help them.
What were you most proud of and what were you most happy about doing?
To me, the biggest thing that I’m proud of is the Black Creek Community Health Centre. I say that because it took us seven years. It came out of a direct expression of what community residents wanted for themselves and over that seven years, that expression became a design for a multi-purpose and multi-service community health centre run by the community, owned by the community, with a million dollar budget, a huge resource that still exists to this day to be a rallying point for people in the community and a resource that they can draw on. That was one but there were others too; a lot of smaller projects that we had some success on but that was a big one and it took us so long to get it to happen and for most of that time we thought we’d never see the end of it. I think the other big one was changing NYIACC to become a community council to reflect the diversity of interests across the city and to have that as a working model.
What did this community teach you?
It taught me that people know what they need and that the solutions come from the people who are experiencing the problems and that the role of professionals like myself was first of all, listen and hear what people were saying and help people to articulate what it was that they needed and wanted for themselves. The needs, often being based on reacting to bad conditions and wanting to have a better life for their families and their communities, are challenging and how people figure out to achieve that. So, I learned those skills of being someone from outside the community who would be there as a resource and to help people to achieve their goals.
What advice would you give similar workers today working in Jane Finch?
Listen and learn!!!
Our community is very diverse. What was the community like back then and what challenges did you have in engaging people from the diverse community?
I see diversity in a number of ways. Jane Finch had poor people living in buildings but it also had middle-class people and it had fairly well-off people so it was not just an impoverished community. I think part of it was understanding that those elements of the community, if you were going to build a community, the people who lived there needed to be working together; middle-class people, people who lived and worked there, the local professionals like Helen and Gary Ede and many others to be working together rather than being at odds with each other around, “oh, what are those people getting.” So part of the diversity had to do with social economic status. Part of it had to do with ethnicity and culture. A lot of immigrants came to that community, including people who had come with refugee status or were fleeing horrible circumstances, arriving in Jane Finch and being a minority group and living in difficult situations - all those issues that Toronto is known for as being a magnet for people from countries around the world, I mean those schools had kids from families speaking over 100 different languages. One of the things that was amazing to me was in schools with so many people from so many different cultures whose children were all in one building all at the same time. The school board was really on the front line of that. Often, the kids would show up from El Salvador or some other place where there was strife. The first thing the parents did was to get the children into school. Often of the first things we heard about when a new wave of immigration came, was when the schools were suddenly seeing a bunch of Sudanese kids or wherever they were coming from. So, there was the challenge of ethnicity and culture and trying to work with the diversity of people.
There was thought about how to engage people from the diverse communities. Neighbourhood groups that were on the front line, in terms of the parents, often got involved in the neighbourhood associations or because they needed childcare, they would be getting involved; people like Marguerite (now Director of the Jane-Finch Community and Family Centre) for example was one of those who rose up out of that situation. I don’t recall that any of the agencies at the time were really playing an active role in terms of the settlement issues. The school board was really on the line for that and so we were trying to help the school board to figure out ways to do that.
What’s your fondest memory of Jane and Finch?
People like you!!! Truly, the people I worked with who, in spite of difficult circumstances, had a lot of pride in themselves and a lot of hope for their families and the future of their children and hope for a better life. And so, to me, that was really the best part of it….being able to meet people, learn about their lives. I learned a lot about the world and about peoples’ lives from working in the community and that’s why I say, listen and learn. There’s a lot to be learned from peoples’ experiences; some of the horror stories people told about the things they were fleeing and some of their hopes and dreams for what they wanted to achieve for when they got here, which were mostly frustrated by the circumstances they found themselves in. But, it was the people I met and the opportunities to sit with people; in apartment buildings, in school buildings, in people’s living rooms, whatever places where people were gathering, just to hear, listen and to participate with them in whatever was going on at the time.
Any other comments?
My experience with Jane Finch -I learned a lot about community development in those days, a lot of what I was doing was a gut reaction and a set of principles that I brought to the work. I moved to Canada in 1970 from New York during the Vietnam era. I came in search of community. I was looking for a community for myself and my family and I was looking for a way to support and be a part of community. So my work at NYIACC was a great job for me because I got to work with communities and in communities across the City of North York, which was a big sprawling place, with a lot of diversity in it. And the neighbourhoods themselves had diversity and you’d spread it out across the city. I learned a lot about community development through that work, mostly by the seat of the pants kind of stuff. I didn’t learn community development at college; I learned it on the ground. I learned about community development from people who were doing it in Jane Finch because it was the right thing to do, because people were motivated to do things. So that’s why I say I learned so much from that and I draw on those experiences to this day – 20 years or so later in terms of what makes for good community development. Now where I am, when people are taking about issues in rural communities here in Nova Scotia, a lot of the same things apply, the same principles apply. It was learning for a lifetime!