Marvyn worked for the Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto (now called Social Planning Toronto) from 1970 – 1982 where he held the position of Senior Planner and Director of Social Development. Marvyn left the Council to become a Professor of Social Work at Ryerson University until his retirement in 2006. As of March, 2011, Marvyn remains actively involved in work on poverty eradication with the Social Planning Network of Ontario.
How did you become involved with the Jane Finch community?
I was working at the Social Planning Council (1976) and in a staff meeting we were advised that a request had come from a group in the Jane Finch community for somebody from the professional staff to come out to do some consulting with the community. I was chair of the social development group. I had people working with me. The guy who was doing a lot of the consulting was a guy named Doug Barr who became a trustee and Chair of the Toronto School Board and head of the Canadian Cancer Society. But at that time, he was in my unit and we were confirmed parochial - provincials from downtown Toronto. The whole debate was about who was going to respond to this request because neither of us wanted to. The agreement between Doug Barr and I was that we would flip a coin and whoever lost would go up to Jane Finch, and consult.
I lost the coin toss and I was the one who went out to Jane Finch. It was one of the best loses in my life. Had I won the coin toss, my whole professional life would have changed. Doug Barr would have gone to Jane Finch. In 1976, we were living in the urban reform period in Toronto where the suburbs were dismissed as a place of dull middle-class life. Downtown Toronto was where all the exciting things were happening with young wise people who were into new ways of living. We were on the cutting edge of urban life…why would anybody want to go up to Jane Finch!
I went up to meet with Helen Ede and Katie Hayhurst who were working up there. Katie had worked at University Settlement before she went up north (Jane Finch) to live, and became a city councillor. She knew about the downtown and about the Social Planning Council. So, that’s how I became involved in the Jane Finch community and it was one of the best moments of my life. It involved a lot of learning. As soon as I came into the community, it dawned on me that there was a world of people in the Jane Finch community who were basically forgotten. Nobody knew about them. But, they were quite committed to their area; they were every bit as committed as people in the Annex, people in the Beach, people in Regent Park. We didn’t know about them though, nobody new about them at all. They were just up there and forgotten.
I started by consulting with DWAC, the Downsview Weston Action Committee. I was available as a consultant to testify at the Ontario Municipal Board against the land use proposal of Del Zotto on the North West corner of Jane and Finch. We went down to Toronto to visit the Children’s Storefront as a result of people in Jane Finch wanting to have their own community based child and family centre. I was helping community based agencies get set up in the centre of Toronto through the LIP, Local Initiatives Program. It was time for residents in Jane Finch to have the community supports available to families in Toronto.
My consultations in Jane Finch fuelled the decision to pursue the major suburb study that I did for the Social Planning Council. Once I was in Jane Finch, it became clear that the rest of the world should know there was another reality up there, which few knew about. Mel Lastman didn’t know about the reality of Jane Finch. Paul Godfrey, who was Metro Chair, didn’t know about the reality of Jane Finch. These were North York political leaders who had basically abandoned the distant corners of their municipalities. They saw no political advantage from knowing about Jane Finch, the Peanut dome, or Flemington Park. My job at the Social Planning Council was to help people across Metro know about this. There was a reality that wasn’t being shared.
While continuing my work in Jane Finch, I proposed to the Social Planning Council that I do a report to tell people about the real story of the suburbs and who was living there. Work on the report started in 1978 and part one came out a year later in April 1979, and part two came out in April 1980. The report was called Metro Suburbs in Transition. All this came as a result of consulting in Jane Finch. I had the benefit of meeting people on the ground, I met you (Wanda) and Helen, I met Pat, I met Gary and became aware. I did stuff in the schools and I did group interviews at Jane Junior High (now called Brookview). We were able to get 100 kids to talk about their community experiences. We did key informant groups in neighbourhoods and a lot of interviews with front-line workers because I didn’t trust what agency directors would tell me. They would spin everything in contrast to front-line Public Health Nurses, a committed teacher or a community police officer. It became clear that there was a need to get more community based agencies going and that’s how Jane/Finch Community and Family Centre started. There was good work going on from local workers such as Mary Lewis of Children’s Aid and other committed practitioners. But there was no local agency that had ongoing resources to do both support and bring people together for public issues when it was required.
Tell me about what was going on at that time.
What was happening was quite interesting. The United Way had no idea of what was going on in Jane Finch. For all their alleged sensitivities, they were clueless. They generally are on important things. When things have been discovered, the United Way would like you to believe they always knew about it but the reality of it was that they were clueless. Most of their money was going into the centre of City. Metro Toronto was clueless as well. The only people who knew what was going on in Jane Finch and other suburban communities were workers like Mary Lewis.
Across Metro, there was lack of municipal recognition that there were diverse populations in the suburbs as in Toronto that needed a whole lot of community supports that any diverse population would need. This had started to become evident through the Local Initiative Programs (LIP) that began in 1973 helping people start community based services and programs. Some of these LIP projects were showing up in suburban areas as well – not many, but the notion that municipalities needed to build a social infrastructure in their communities was just starting to be discussed. The Social Planning Council had done a review of community services in Toronto. We suggested that cities had a responsibility to look after the social infrastructure and social development of their communities and that should be a municipal responsibility. The idea was starting to creep in. The John Robart’s Commission on Metro Toronto in 1976 was beginning to say that this should be part of local government’s responsibility to be concerned about the social infrastructure and support systems in all communities.
There was also the recognition that Metro Toronto had growing numbers of communities, including the suburbs with racialized minorities. During the seventies, there were serious police issues on race relations. We set up four pilot groups where the police would meet with racialized minorities on law enforcement issues; Jane Finch was one of the first four pilot communities along with Parkdale, Regent Park and Rexdale. The Urban Alliance on Race Relations grew out of law enforcement and police and race relation issues. People became aware that there were racialized minorities living in suburban communities like Jane Finch.
There was a growing demand that local government fund community based programs that had been started by Local Initiatives Projects so the scope of local government funding of community support programs was increasing between 1975 and 1980. Before that, residents and workers in Jane Finch didn’t feel that their community was getting its fair share of public services and support.
When Metro Suburbs was released in 1979 and 1980, it changed everything. The report got enormous coverage changing perceptions of who lived in the City. It helped build metropolitan alliances. People in the downtown, in Parkdale, in Kensington, in Regent and in east Toronto, recognized there were people similar to them in other parts of North York and Etobicoke. The building of alliances started and this was quite important. But it just didn’t happen overnight. It took the Metro Suburbs report to get people to recognize that inner city schools were in the outer areas for the Metro Toronto Board of Education to make inner city criteria apply to all schools so that extra resources could go to schools in North York, Etobicoke and Scarborough that had similar high need populations as Toronto.
A change in perception took place across Metro. There was political recognition emerging that local government had responsibilities to fund community support programs before Metro Suburbs, from North York. There were political leaders from North York like Paul Godfrey and Mel Lastman who were both indifferent and ignorant about what was going on in their own areas. That was the world that prevailed but there was a tremendous strength at the grass roots in the Jane Finch community. There were strong community people who were vigorous and stood up to resist further high-rises in Jane Finch, and started to demand that they have needed community services in their area. They started the first suburban community and family centre. That’s been the strength of the community – affirming and building upon its diversity, what the mainstream media never presents.
There were some early tensions between parts of the more established community and newcomers to Jane Finch but it never became a defining thing. The real strength of the Jane Finch community is how people found a way to cross over differences and work together around schools and other community concerns.
What were some of the issues that were identified when you were doing focus groups?
Basically, people talked about the things they didn’t have. They couldn’t move around, they couldn’t walk in the community in the winter-time; they didn’t have ways of using public transit. There were very limited recreation services for kids, there were hardly any day care or childcare programs even though the number of single parents was as high there as it was anywhere else in the rest of the city. There were no immigrant reception programs. Welcome House which was the major immigration reception place was still at the foot of Bay Street, at the water waiting for the immigrants to come in by boats when they are arriving at the airport. There was no government recognition that Jane Finch and other suburban communities had become immigrant reception areas. Residents knew there were a lot of newcomers without community supports.
Once those issues were identified, how did the community respond to them?
Well, I think that what Metro Suburbs did is made it clear to people in Jane Finch and in other suburban communities that what they knew locally was now being told to the rest of Metropolitan Toronto. They were right about the things that they had talked about. The report really confirmed and changed whole public perceptions about people who had felt abandoned and isolated. Residents in suburban communities like Jane Finch had felt along - that North York didn’t care about them, Scarborough didn’t care about them, and Etobicoke didn’t even know they existed. So the sense that they were part of something bigger was quite important.
How did government, influential people, activists respond to those issues?
Political leaders denied it. Mel Lastman was quoted on the front page of the Toronto Star as calling the report, “baloney.” So, did Gus Harris, Mayor of Scarborough. Paul Godfrey summoned us to a meeting of the Social Services Committee where he was going to cut the funding of Social Planning Council for producing this report. I think he is one of the worse political leaders we have ever had. This is the guy who imposed the Sky Dome on us that has been this horrible failure – this thing that has bled large amounts of public money. He was going to cut us, but we were smart enough to visit religious leaders who spoke to suburban councillors at Metro who were coming to understand what was happening in their own area. Godfrey discovered that he had lost his majority on the committee, that some of his people that he could count on from Scarborough, North York weren’t with him anymore because they were coming to understand that what was being discussed was true. Religious leaders told them that this stuff was real and was happening in the community. So, it changed the political culture in the sense that people at high political levels were compelled to acknowledge the new realities. Mayors like Lastman had never understood what his municipality was about. He thought that if he could keep his political base in Willowdale and Downsview, he didn’t have to worry the rest of North York. Well, all of a sudden, political leaders in the suburbs had to start being concerned about everyone.
The United Way came to recognize that it didn’t know what was going on in the suburbs, even with all its claims for being “innovative” had to start including suburban communities as member agencies and do active funding of new community-based services. Probably the most receptive people were in places like school boards, children’s aid, public health, family service. These organizations saw this as an opportunity to get public recognition for what they had known but nobody had cared to listen to them. For them, it was a boost. For others, it was a prod.
Please talk about the concept of poor planning in Jane Finch.
I think that what Jane Finch reveals is how weak land-use planning was. It was largely done by architects, geographers and physical planners who didn’t have an understanding of what makes a community work. Just like Jane Jacobs, who never understood what made a community work. They all had fables and fictions about community. Jane Jacobs thought that people sitting on their porch looking at the street, made their communities work. I did my graduate work in the inner city of Detroit where people were always sitting and standing around looking at the street - drug dealers and the unemployed. Their eyes on the street didn’t make communities work, they generated fear. The land use planners had no sense that community-based agencies created social environments in which people could provide support and generate contacts across diverse groups. They thought that if you put the trees around the library and people in social housing across a 45 foot road from people in private housing, presto – you had integration. It really revealed how weak the urban planning field was.
There was no concept of the social infrastructure. Even today, few talk about social infrastructure when there are public infrastructure programs, you still can’t get funding for social infrastructure. Nobody understands how communities really work – that you have to have support programs, you have to have a way to recruit people to be involved, there has to be a way in which people can meet, leaders can meet across the groups from which they come to build bonds and networks. Jane Finch reflects all the weakness in the way in which we developed communities. The people who developed communities were very often the people who had limited social understanding of what community was all about and the development of Jane Finch is a testimony to that.
It’s when people who know the family and human side of community start getting involved that the understanding of what you need to really build a strong social infrastructure develops. The planning department often didn’t know who was living in their own communities. They did weak demographic work. They never really presented to public officials a portrait of everyone who was living in their municipalities. They had access to the same demographic data that I had access to – census reports. They could have told political leaders there were as many single parents up north of 401 as there were south of Bloor Street. It wasn’t important to them because they assumed they knew so they didn’t have to go out to confirm it. There was a complete weakness in urban planning and people really thought that they were planning for traditional middle class American suburbs. But, this is Canada and in Canada we have more integrated suburbs.
In the United States, suburbs tend to be economically and racially segregated. Planners believed that Don Mills was the prototype of American suburbs here. They didn’t know that we had a different suburban arrangement here because we had a mix of people living in social housing which they should have known. There was a weakness in urban planning, a weakness in the way in which they understood how you build communities that was quite critical. There was social isolation because of weak public transit connections gave people full access to employment or community resources.
People in the urban planning field were oblivious to what was going on. What they thought they knew was an American model of urbanization and they didn’t understand that this was Canada.
Tell be about the Wind-Tunnels.
In my first visit to 4400 Jane Street, it was hard to get out of the car. It was the winter. I had parked it in the back and I could barely walk around to the front door, and wondered what was going on. I thought immediately of mothers with young kids – how in hell would they ever go anywhere! Then I discovered that nobody had ever wind-tested these areas. There was no requirement at urban planning that there be wind-tunnelling done to see what impact all these different high-rises would have on generating these air-flows that would make it difficult for people to walk. Planners could have insisted that proposed high rise developments be wind-tunnelled. They could have sited them in a way so that the air flows would allow people to walk. I think it was an example of how flawed the urban planning process was, people who really thought that you could talk about building expressways at the water-front. Still today, when many planners talk about what a good city is, they talk about the future of the water-front as if this will make a major difference about what kind of city we have. People who come from all across the world to Toronto come because of the kind of communities we’ve been able to develop and the kind of public services that we’ve been able to create that are more inclusive and responsive than elsewhere.
That’s what the Jane Finch community reflected - a complete lapse in understanding about how cities developed and what makes them work. The story of Jane Finch is the story of a resilient community, a community whose residents generated the kind of leaders who really defied the destiny that was theirs, and built a strong infrastructure. They went out and made sure that the things that they required were pursued, all the while building a good internal community relation. That’s really the strengths of Jane Finch community.
I remember going to the 20th anniversary of the Jane/Finch Community and Family Centre. It was at Northwood Community Centre with about 80 – 100 people in attendance. Four generations of residents were there, and people from many different ethno-cultural groups – from South Asia, East Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. I remember saying to myself that in downtown Toronto, people talked community but in Jane Finch people lived community. The residents and leaders who came to the 20th anniversary were an astounding group of people able to generate the kind of bonds that they did. And here you are, writing a book.
What did you find challenging working with the Jane Finch Community?
It was getting funders to understand the importance of social support programs and the need to fund them on a stable basis. Community based organizations needed strong core funding. Schools needed the resources to deal with kids who required extra support and learning and we needed to convey a new way of understanding and supporting suburban communities like Jane Finch. It was a lot of the work just bringing that message out. There were some who understood, people in Metro Toronto like the Commissioner of Planning, Don Richmond. He understood why community services and supports were very important. People in the Bureau of Municipal Research understood this. They understood that communities had to be able to organize themselves, and so have a resource base through secure funding. They needed it to be able to have a voice and to make sure that public services were responsive and that people felt that they could act and make a difference.
My relationship with the community was less intense after Metro Suburbs. The Jane/Finch Community and Family Centre became strong and carried on in its own. I was available to come if required but I wasn’t there on an ongoing basis but the building of strong community supports was something that we continued to work at. To me, the difficult thing was getting public services, getting local government leaders to really understand the area and the environment and that was a lot of what we did. We did a lot of presentations so that people came to understand that there was as much diversity in suburban communities as there was here in central Toronto. The suburbs were not two car families - only 30% of households had two cars – most were one car or no car. People had common social needs across Metro. This was the message we had to convey.
Every time I’ve come back to Jane Finch, I’ve been impressed with the diversity of young people at the Jane/Finch Community and Family Centre finding a way to work with each other. This is Canada. Sure, killings occur because of the drug economy but they are not cross-racial murders as they would be in Miami or Los Angeles this is what the media doesn’t tell people. When the Caring Community Award was given to Jane Finch in 1998, I thought that for the first time, the real Jane Finch was publicly recognized and that this was an important moment.
You are proud of Suburbs in Transition, tell me more.
At the time, Metro Suburbs in Transition was an important piece of work, but I’m intrigued with how it has stood the test of time. People were still referring to it a year ago - Royson James was writing about it, Shirley Hoy was talking about it. A lot of the supports that we had put in place were taken away during the Mike Harris era. This was a dispiriting and demoralizing thing - building a lot of supports and then one of the first things Harris did when he cut social assistance by 22% was to eliminate the core funding for neighbourhood support centres. Even with these setbacks, the report has stood the test of time. People refer to it twenty-five years later and this was a sign that its value was understood.
I think the importance of the suburbs in the Toronto story is never fully appreciated. People like Jane Jacobs never understood why people can live in the centre of Toronto and can’t in Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Detroit. Because our suburbs were opened up for low cost housing, people who are low-income and newcomers weren’t holed up in the centre of the city in enclaves of despair. Middle-class families could live in the centre, as well as the suburbs, in areas of social and racial diversity. The centre of Toronto benefitted from governments actions taken in the fifties. Provision was made public housing across the periphery of the suburbs. Apartments were an important part of this development. So, we ended up with mixed communities, and with a downtown that was open enough to enable people to come back to live because it wasn’t concentrated with people in despair. Jane Finch is an important part of the Toronto story. People in Cabbage Town or Annex would like to think they were the urban pioneers. They weren’t because without mixed suburbs there would be no return to mixed living in the centre. But, they don’t get it. They have their Jane Jacobs fables and they think it’s what it’s all about. We have the most mixed suburbs in North America – that’s the real Toronto story. When I go to Chicago to visit my grandchildren, I’m struck by how segregated the city is. Here, you go to Sherway, Yorkdale, or to Square One, and there is a range of people there – all over the place. That’s the important part of the Toronto story that makes what happens in the centre possible – it isn’t the reverse. People, who live downtown as I have, came to believe that they are the pioneers, they made it possible. No, they are the beneficiaries of what happened across the Greater Toronto Area. The struggle in Jane Finch to create mixed suburbs where people can make a life for themselves is the great achievement of the GTA, and this being replicated now in Brampton, Woodbridge, Vaughan and Markham. I came here with Ryva (Marvyn’s late wife) and the children in 1970 and when we wanted to live downtown, it was already a mixed community. Metropolitan government meant that people across Metro, city and suburbs could not run away as in the United States, and only give themselves good schools, recreation centres, and libraries. Here in Metro Toronto, they had to pay for everybody.
What did the Jane Finch community teach you?
To respect how community leaders can make a difference and how a committed group of people can help keep people together. I don’t know where the Helen Ede’s and you (Wanda) and Pat and others came from, but clearly they made a difference. Looking at the picture on the front page of the Star with the Caring Community Award, I’d be curious to know where the people came from and what brought them together. Some were people working for social service agencies like Mary Lewis who was part-time community worker and part-time case worker for the Children’s Aid. She took her role seriously and I think that these people helped make a difference as well. Most believed that part of her mission was to make it possible for you to feel part of the community, that you weren’t just a victim. You were somebody who could be active in your community.
I’ve also learned about the importance of cross community alliances from my work on Metro Suburbs. I do not believe that national or provincial organizations can be very effective cross community alliances. This is reflected in the work of Campaign 2000, which I co-founded. Since 1990, the organization has promoted child poverty, not with an office in Ottawa, but by linking communities from Victoria, Vancouver out to St. Johns. When we do work, it is done horizontally. Metro Suburbs showed me the value of this approach of communities coming together. We had meetings in Jane Finch with people from Rexdale, Morningside, Agincourt, the Peanut dome. I learned that cross community alliance could make a real difference in social advocacy. It influenced my approach to child poverty work, and still does today.
What advice would you give people doing similar work in Jane Finch today?
I think we’re still evolving. Public Health now understands what they call the social determinants of health that influence the well-being of families and communities. I would urge practitioners in both community and public agencies to recognize that their agency delivers a program or service but their agency should also be contributing to the social development, social well-being and social infrastructure of the area in which they work. A good agency should contribute to its community as well as provide good services and programs. I call these full-mission agencies, that both works with individuals but also contribute to the community in which they are located. There is no excuse for agencies not contributing to the community. They can attend meetings, send letters, and find ways to demonstrate their commitment. All agencies and practitioners have zones of discretion, they have spaces they can use for community purposes that they regard as important.
Mary Lewis did not have to bring you to a community meeting. She would not have been reprimanded in her work. She could have just gone to local meetings. She used her discretion because she had social commitments and she thought it would be a good way to work with somebody, to help make them a part of the community that they were part of. She used her discretion. As practitioners, we have to be able to determine where our discretion is and to use it in ways that contribute to broad community well-being.
So, today we have public health people who are contributing to poverty reduction, as well as people at Heart and Stroke, teachers and nurses. There are some urban planners who understand, but the field is still disappointing. They think that if they gather social data on demography, they understand what social infrastructure is.
What is your fondest memory?
I liked the people that I have come to know in Jane Finch. I enjoy being with you today. Every time I have gone up to the Centre in I believe intervals of eight to ten years, I just feel like…Mordecai Richler who wrote about going to London for twelve years and then came back to Wilensky’s, the local store. He walked in twelve years later and the guy said, “You haven’t been here lately!”
It’s been a privilege to be in Jane Finch. It enriched my world, I got out of the cocoon of downtown Toronto and as a result of it, and I learned a lot. It made me a better practitioner and thinker so I’m very grateful. I met many nice people. It also gave me knowledge about how cities and communities work. That I’m forever grateful for which I would never have had because it required a lot of learning to take place because nobody was out there giving you orientation.
My fondest memory today is that you and others went to the Children’s Storefront and wanted a Centre in Jane Finch. It made me feel good about Ryva’s work (Ryva was the Director of the Children’s Storefront) and that is something that I cherish. When you mentioned it in your book and I showed it to Ryva, I just thought that it made her work come alive. That’s a very lovely memory because that’s communities – the cross community stuff that I speak about. It’s not the experts coming in and saying you ought to do it, its people coming and seeing something they like in another community and figuring out how they will pursue it so that’s a very pleasant memory.
I think this cross-community stuff is really quite important. It is politically important. Peter Clutterbuck and I have been trying to build a poverty movement across Ontario trying to connect people who work on the ground and who are good practitioners in their communities. I’ve had a chance to see good people in Cornwall, North Bay, and Bracebridge. This is another moment to discover that there is a whole world of decent, committed practitioners and activists who are every bit as intelligent as the “geniuses” in the centre of Toronto.
There are good people writing in the local media out there. You get good write-ups in the North Bay Nugget, Perry Sound Star, and the Belleville Intelligencer. What Jane Finch made me realize is that there are worlds of people, of sophistication, of commitment, of knowledge that existed outside of the insular bubble of Toronto. Jane Finch liberated me from the self-enchantment of Toronto. And so, these worlds keep opening up. When I‘m in Cornwall, I have the same feeling meeting good people there as I had when meeting good people in Jane Finch.