Mary Lewis

Mary Lewis was a Children’s Aid Worker who worked in Jane Finch from 1973 to 1978 and then with North York Interagency Council working across North York including Jane Finch from 1979 to 1982. As of January 2011, Mary is the Director, Government Relations and Health Promotion for the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Ontario.

How did you get connected to the Jane Finch community?

I had a Masters of Social Work degree but my first job was working in co-op housing and for a variety of reasons there weren’t many resources to work in co-op housing so I decided that I had to apply for a regular job and one of the places that I applied was to the Children’s Aid. They said it was for a community work position and it turned out that it was community work and case work but my Master’s degree in Social Work had been about community development work and also organizational development rather than case work. So, it seemed like the right kind of job. The area they assigned me to was Jane Finch.

What was going on in the area at that time and in the City of Toronto?

Technically, it was a full-time job with a combination of case worker and community worker and I guess what struck me when I arrived in Jane Finch was that there had been all this development, all these significantly large public housing projects but there was very little community service, very few of the kind of traditional agency presence and organizational presence a that one was used to in a similar community in downtown Toronto. So, for example, my field placement and the co-op project that I worked on was in Alexander Park and in the Alexander Park area (that’s near St. Christopher House) there were settlement houses, there were a whole lot of different agencies that were providing support for people and here in Jane Finch, there seemed to be very little. There were a few agencies beginning to do work in Jane Finch and there was a little bit of activity among some of the community leaders like Pat O’Neil and Katie Hayhurst.

In terms of what was happening in the city, I can’t think of anything immediately as a big wow…like this is a big trend that was happening. But certainly, as I end up telling the story of my involvement in Jane Finch, the Social Planning Council (now called Social Planning Toronto) was active and one of their issues was housing because I had done some work for the Social Planning Council when I working in co-op housing. So there were housing issues that were going on.

How did you introduce yourself to the people in Jane Finch and what were some of your involvements?

There had been a community worker before me so, in fact, it was Audrey McLaughlin who had been the Children’s Aid Community Worker before me. Audrey later became the leader of the NDP and she was a federal member of parliament. When I arrived, she took on a new role at Lawrence Heights and that’s why the position became open. So, obviously to some people, I introduced myself as taking over from Audrey but mostly I would introduce myself as I’m with Children’s Aid and my job is community development and I’m here to see what the community needs and how I might be able to assist them. Now at that time, I forget whether it was two-fifths or three-fifths as community and the other was case work and case work was entirely new to me so certainly some of the people that I met in the community I met because for one reason or another they were part of my case work assignment. So for them, I would introduce myself as “I’m your new Children’s Aid worker” or “I am a Children’s Aid worker” if they hadn’t worked with Children’s Aid in the past. So it depended a little bit on which hat I was wearing when I met them.

One of the things that Audrey had done is that she had a student placement to run a bit of a children’s and mothers program, in fact, at 4400 Jane Street. And so, I was taking over providing support to that group and it was very weak. There was also a YW group at 15 Tobermory and it was ending. I knew it was ending and I thought, what a shame and maybe it would be good if there was some way for it to continue. About this time, I met someone by the name of Wanda MacNevin and she was in fact looking after the children at the YW Life Skills program and she was interested in staying involved as that program was ending. So I thought that maybe what we could do is support groups that were happening in a couple of places and while I couldn’t get enough money from the Children’s Aid to provide equipment for every location but maybe we could buy a bit of equipment and we could move it around from location to location.

Anyway, I forget exactly all the steps to it but essentially, I brought some people together to say, do you want to continue these groups and how can we support each other and I think it was Wanda who said, lets call it the Tiny Toddlers Club. So, we called it the Tiny Toddlers Club and the story I remember and the story that I tell about this is that by bringing the people that were providing a bit of leadership in these two maybe three different locations together, they encouraged each other. I remember one of the leaders beginning to feel like there wasn’t much point anymore because not many people were coming and I remember Wanda saying, well what day of the week is it that you meet and she said Tuesday. Wanda said, isn’t Shove Tuesday coming up and couldn’t you do a pancake breakfast or something and maybe that would get more people interested and I thought, what a lovely way to encourage this colleague to continue to be involved. So, my role was just to really bring these people together, supporting them and finding them a little bit of resources from the Children’s Aid to support these groups continuing and maybe to find a student to help with the kids.

So, that was one involvement. Then the second one was I would certainly go to Downsview Weston Action Community (DWAC) and I went to DWAC and I said, there were also a group of agency people and we met together and the agency people said what’s really needed here is a multi-service agency similar to what exists in some other parts of the city and so we were beginning to think about that as a group of agency people. But, my training in community development had said its really important to work with the community. You don’t just do to, you work with. And so, DWAC really was the community and it was community people. So, I went to DWAC and said I’m here as the Children’s Aid Community Worker but I really want your direction as to what it is you want me to work on and people had a little trouble understanding the notion that they would give me direction as to what I should spend my time on but I think that enough of them got it.

There ended up to be a sub-group to work on the issue of should there be some kind of Centre in the community. Helen Ede definitely was a volunteer to that sub-group and I don’t remember who all else. At that point, I think I linked Helen and Wanda and we then said we should go and do some trips to other parts of the City to understand what other people were doing so we could have some ideas about what might be most appropriate to Jane Finch. By this time, we’d also linked up a bit with Marvyn Novick. To side-bar and to tell you the story of how Marvyn got involved…as I said earlier I had done some work for Social Planning Council on housing and I’d been over-whelmed when I came to Jane Finch, I mean the Yorkwoods Public Housing has the same site plan as Alexander Park. And I thought, my God, they’ve taken the site plan and just rebuilt it here without any consideration about what this environment is different from downtown Toronto. Tobermory over-whelmed me because it felt like the elevators were freight elevators instead of human elevators and what…how many floors – 25! It just seemed vast for this downtown person. It was a new experience.

At any rate, I ran into Marvyn and I said, “Marvyn you really have to come and see what’s happening in Jane Finch – could I pick you up one morning and take you there and we’ll do a tour. So, one summer day we took a tour and I took him around all the different buildings and all the rest and I said surely there’s a role for Social Planning Council here. So, the initial role was that as we, the DWAC sub-committee were starting to think about what kind of resource centre would be needed in Jane Finch, we’d meet with Marvyn – meet him at Eglinton that was half-way kind of thing or not even half way; we were going further than him, at any rate and we’d ask him his advice and ideas and he then said well I think you should go have a look at Children’s Storefront which was an agency his wife had established which was a child-parent centre – a very, very early child parent centre.

So, one visit was to the Children’s Storefront which we really enjoyed, another visit was to a place called Don Vale Secretariat that was a community office. Those were two of the visits so as we came back and talked about it we came up with this idea that there were three components that were needed for what became the Jane/Finch Community and Family Centre. One was the child-parent drop-in, another was the community office and the third one was to become community development. And so on that basis we got our first $3,000 from the United Way and we hired Wanda to begin the child parent drop-in centre which seemed to be the important piece to get into place. Then I think we managed to get a Local Initiative Project (LIP) grant or whatever it was called in those days but it was a federal make-work kind of project and we hired a team of people and we began to build that up a little bit more, and reinforce the Tiny Toddlers Club concept in the sense of creating environments in other locations. I forget how we did the break through to afford to get Sheena Suttaby (ran the community office) but there was some way we got money for that. Along the way we incorporated the Jaen/Finch Community and Family Centre. Again, trying to establish this principle that I should be accountable to the community but knowing that the Centre didn’t have the resources to hire anybody, I said that what the Children’s Aid should contribute is some of my time and that I should be viewed as being accountable to the Board of Directors in that role of facilitating the early development of the Centre. I can remember proposing that there be an agreement between the Children’s Aid and the Jane/Finch Centre about what my job was. There was some discussion on that but I’m not sure that a formal agreement ever got signed but certainly there was some effort to establish the concept that it was the Board and they would report to the Children’s Aid and I would be accountable to the Board. As I say, it was never full-time but it was sufficient time to be able to support some of these funding applications and so on and then along the way I got a student and that was Peggy Edwards. Peggy’s function was to begin the community develop component. So that’s my memories of the very early days.

Tell me more about DWAC.

DWAC had already formed when I got there so I couldn’t tell you the whole history of exactly how it formed but I think Katie Hayhurst, who had been the Alderman, was probably the instigator and I think that as the Alderman that she would have links from canvassing just to get herself elected. So, she identified a few people that she thought understood the importance of having the capacity to speak about your community and to represent your community at North York Council. So, I really think she helped to form it and then the key player was Pat O’Neill. I think that Pat was probably the chair and then of course later, Katie didn’t run again and Pat became the city council member.

I would say that there were in the neighbourhood of 10 community residents on DWAC but it might have had a larger group than that but I think it was a relative small core group of committed people. They were pretty forceful that it was meant to be community people so some of us agency people may have shown up from time to time but we were certainly reminded that this was a community council not an inter-agency council. As I say, in the early days, there was some kind of inter-agency groupand I’m trying to remember…people like Judy Levcoe from the YMCA and there was a guy Mark who I can physically picture but I can’t remember his last name, Brabrodski or something like that, who I think was with one of the Ministry’s and a few other people like that. We occasionally met and thought about what needed to happen but essentially, it was DWAC that took the leadership.

What were some of the key issues back then?

Obviously there was the issue of poverty. At lot of the people in Jane Finch had very little money, secondly there was already big issues in terms of diversity; people from a whole lot of different backgrounds, there were issues about their children getting the right education, were the schools effective, “Cries from the Corridor” came out about then so there was a lot of worry about that, there was also some sense of there being violence but it was already the reputation – people would say “Oh…you work in Jane Finch, aren’t you worried” and I’d say, no, I’m not worried. I don’t have a strong sense of what that was all about or how significant it was but the overwhelming sense was a whole lot of people living in relatively cramped situations without a lot of support to encourage them to be engaged in their community or to have things to do beyond the absolute minimum of being able to go to school or going to work and needing to go a long distance to work so tired when they got home…those kinds of things and mothers having long trips to get to the grocery store from 15 Tobermory to the one Jane Finch Mall. Just challenges in daily life seemed over-whelming at time.

How did the community respond to some of these issues?

Well, one that I have already talked about was the one I was most familiar with was Jane Finch’s response which was to reach out to some of these parents and try to make sure that they felt nurtured and supported. One of the wonderful experiences was when the Jane/Finch Community and Family Centre got to present at an International Conference and the delegates were just blown over at the way in which people had gotten engaged and the concept that they got engaged initially by coming into the child parent centre. The people in child parent centre got more interested and maybe they got involved in some activity and then they were able to make a contribution to their community and they felt good about making a contribution and I remember one woman, I think from Firgrove talk about how she had been afraid to go into that initial group. It was probably you Wanda that did outreach to her and knocked on her door…she was just scared but you were open enough and re-enforcing enough that you wanted her to come that she actually made it out to come to the group to have a cup of coffee and then she got more involved and she became a group leader within about two years either there or another setting and then she was on her way to becoming more involved in the community. Then some of them got jobs and some of them just gained self-confidence. As you know, we had an evaluation done that actually demonstrated that as compared to a control group in the community, the women that got involved with Jane Finch, there was less depression. They actually demonstrated that. That kind of research was not that usual and really, overcoming depression of young mothers has a huge impact on their children because you are breaking a whole cycle there. So, that certainly was one part of it.

The other part was concern about the children and one of my other favourite stories I remember is you telling me about getting worried about this one kid and how he was really acting out too much in the Centre and you began to think that this little kid was going to need some help but you were worried about how to put it to the mother. You decided that this was the day to say something to her and you went over and sat down beside her and she turned to you and said, “You know Wanda, I’m really worried about my child”, well, what could be better, I mean instead of the Children’s Aid coming in an having a bad experience or saying you’re a bad mother…I mean not that Children’s Aid does that but that’s how it feels. You were there as a supportive person and understood what this person was living with and she felt comfortable enough to seek help. How much more likely is the help going to be successful if the person is reaching out to it. So, those were the kind of basic family things that we were really addressing.

Meanwhile, other things were beginning to happen and particularly through Peggy’s involvement. I think that’s when the Legal Aid Clinic (Jane Finch Community Legal Clinic) got started and then with the issue of women’s violence came the North York Women’s Shelter, not specifically a Jane Finch Shelter, but the people in Jane Finch played a leadership role to help make some of those things happen. (The Jane/Finch Community and Family Centre gave space to Shelter staff and leadership support while it was being built). It was about then that Elspeth Heyworth got working in the community and started working with other groups of women and particularly South Asian women so I think a number of things were beginning to happen and there was a sense of capacity, a sense of ability to make things happen. There had been some earlier work around youth issues and of course there was the Youth Clinical Services which was an important community based service that already existed. Interestingly enough, there was project where the federal government was giving funds for a youth project and it was kind of sad because I do remember this meeting where all the different groups in Jane Finch got together and we all said that if we could all get our needs met if we could get $200,000 for the community, all these groups could get what they needed to operate but instead we all ended up competing with each other to funders and all had to write separate proposals to try to make our particular pitch for funding for what should happen in the community . In the case of this youth one, they ended up making their pitch to the Solicitor General but they ended up having to re-shape what they wanted to do to fit the criteria to fit the Solicitor General’s grant request so when it came to do it, it never really worked so there became a disconnect. They had done some reasonable community work to figure out what they should do but by the time they implemented something, it was entirely different so it felt like money wasted rather than re-enforcing that kind of community approach. That’s one memory I have and don’t know if its entirely accurate but there it is.

How did the government (bureaucrats, politicians) respond to the issues?

We were beginning to get some attention and beginning to get some funding so we were relatively successful in connecting with people at COMSOC, I think it was called that in those days and we got $30,000 for the Jane/Finch Centre which seemed like an enormous amount of money. It wasn’t an overwhelming response by a long short, not by a concerted, coordinated effort; it was more push hard and see if you can get a little bit here and a little bit there. I guess that’s the way I would have seen it. Certainly, Jane Finch was beginning to be understood as an area where something needed to happen but there wasn’t a big response. I can remember in my very early days, I went to meet with people like City Planners and said, in planning Jane Finch, what was the plan in terms of social supports….”Oh well, that isn’t part of our planning, that comes after and isn’t it good that someone like you is going there to work”…and I thought - give me a break! This still continues to be a problem of where planning for the social side of things doesn’t get done.

I mean certainly, one of the places we had to begin to get attention was at Metro because at that point there was both North York and Metro and I think we began to get Metro’s attention and got a grant. One time we wanted to do a comparison of the resources in Jane Finch compared to one ward in downtown Toronto where there might be three settlement houses, each with budgets of several million and this and this and this and this….you know all kinds of resources and then really modest resources in Jane Finch.

The big impact on the United Way was Suburbs in Transition. So Suburbs in Transition was the result of the involvement with Marvyn. He then did get interested and then he took on a major study that was produced and called Suburbs in Transition. He got the Toronto Star interested in his work and there was a fair amount of attention to the fact that the City had developed suburbs that had great diversity in them and pockets where the profile was similar to what was thought of as an inner-city area, not planned for it, and that the assumption that our suburbs were all middle-class people with a car and a single dwelling house was not what Toronto had produced in its suburbs. So, he picked up places in Scarborough, places in the east part of North York, places in Etobicoke to demonstrate the needs. So, that was a major, major study that got quite a lot of attention.

What do you remember as being challenging working in Jane Finch?

I think the challenge was that there weren’t a lot of resources available. Perhaps because of this everything that you did was well-received and people were grateful and you were able to build from there. Distances were a bit of a challenge, the structure of it with the almost highway like big intersection and then sort of not creating a sense of easy access. Those were probably the challenges.

What were you most proud of?

I’m obviously extremely proud of the Jane/Finch Community and Family Centre. If I was ever to write my epitaph, there are three things that I’m really proud of and certainly Jane/Finch Community and Family Centre is really high on the list and with amazing growth since then but it was really a good concept of the child parent centre, the community office, the community development component; the fact that it really was community based (and still is).

What did Jane Finch teach you?

Number one lesson would be that it is absolutely right to work with the community, that you need to trust that process, you do need to give it some time, you can’t be held accountable for results on a very short time-line but it really, really works and that’s the right way to go about it.

What advice would you give workers today in the community?

I’m sure things are much more complex now so I don’t want to think that I know. I would have to go and spend some time understanding the issues but it would be start where people are at, start with the resources that you’ve got but think of ideas, don’t be afraid of testing new things out and build where ever you can and do whatever is right for the group and see where it will take you.

Tell me about the diversity at that time?

I think it was already quite diverse. I think there were people from the Caribbean, there were people from South Asian countries like India and Pakistan. Yes, I would have said it was already quite diverse at the time I was working there. And, probably this was the beginning of the people coming to Jane Finch from the Latin American countries.

What is your fondest memory?

I already referred to one of them and that was the tremendous presentation at the International Conference. We all went out for a drink afterwards and the one criticism the International panel had was….where are the men? So, when we were having a drink afterwards, Donna Wilson made a toast to Mr. John Finch and we thought that was a big joke.

Obviously, the memories are the people and I formed really important relationships then that have continued to be important to me and I always really look forward to when we get together; you Wanda, the two Peggy’s, Faye; I stay in touch with Helen maybe only once or twice a year or I have visited her once or twice out west. So first and foremost, it’s the people and the strong bonds. It’s the sense of achievement of the Centre. I remember being invited back to the 10^th Anniversary and it fact it was cute because we haven’t mentioned in all this but Bruce (my husband) did some legal work for the Centre and I think he was part of getting it incorporated and so we were both invited and there was some sort of game where we had to be the bridge but anyway, it was unusual to get us up like that and playing a game at an annual general meeting.

I also remember a meeting, and this was by the time I had moved on to NYIAC, but we had an annual general meeting at some kind at Northwood Community Centre and it was a blast but the only thing was that we had these high school kids that did a song that was almost risqué but it was very funny. We all had a great time.

Another memory…..by this time I had moved on to North York Inter-agency Council as the Children’s Services Coordinator. There wasn’t, at that point, a staff person for NYIAC but the Children’s Services Committee had gotten enough funding that they had a position and so I was initially loaned by the Children’s Aid to the Children’s Services Committee and took over from the person who had been from Dellcrest before that. Then, somewhere along the way, we decided that we really needed NYIAC which had kind of been there but wasn’t all that active and so I then became the Executive Director of NYIAC.

As part of NYIAC, I organized an event at Geneva Park and it was in fact Gordon Cressey who helped with this and originally we didn’t even plan Geneva Park but what we tried to do was to get the different communities from across North York together to learn from each other and the idea was going to be that we would build a stronger constituency to really demonstrate to the North York Council the needs of the different communities. So there was Jan Timbrell from Flemingdon, some people from the north east part, some people from Falstaff, people from Jane Finch. Anyway, we attempted to bring people from different high-need communities together and our concept had been that there would be both community people and their community workers so that we would learn from each other and build this stronger network. We retained Gordon to help us with this and he was so reasonable about his time that we ended up with a whole bunch of money left over that we hadn’t spent on his contract and he said, “Why don’t we do something at Geneva Park” and we all went up to Geneva Park. And, I remember when you short-sheeted someone’s bed! I just remember that was a lot of fun going to Geneva Park with everybody and building a stronger force across North York.

Jane Finch was a major part of North York and obviously I had built the relationships there and that in fact was kind of the route we took to get the $30,000. So, in other word, we reinforced the link in Jane Finch because we got it validated by the Children’s Services Committee of NYIAC which then got funds from the province. I remember there was some complexity to it all but certainly the idea was that the Children’s Services Committee had a prevention sub-committee that Peggy Birnberg was on and it had another committee and so on and it was an attempt to get the agencies functioning more effectively together and then the notion was that the agencies should understand the community. So, getting people involved from Jane Finch on the committees to make them get a little less agency dominated and a little more of understanding community issues was part of the work we did.

Other Comments

I didn’t really emphasize that one of the roles that I see of the community developer is in addition to working with the residents, is being aware of resources that should be available to the community and perhaps are not, and making the connections so that those resources become available to support the community. So, I made reference to Marvyn and the Social Planning Council which was a key resource but there were other examples over the time like the project like Child in the City was one where we thought there might be resources from the University of Toronto that could support us and there were a couple of other examples over the time where we would connect with groups outside of the community but tried to get them interested in the community and how they might make their resources available to support the community to work on issues.

There is one other story that occurs to me. There was a point at which, I think the issue was how we could get more day care in the community or better support to families. There was a city council member; a Controller so that means one of the four powerful members of council – it was a different structure than now….her name was Barbara Greene and she was a Controller and a single mom. All I remember is that we were organizing this meeting in the community and she was to come and she hadn’t shown up and so you actually phoned her and she said that she was really tired and that it had been a long day and you said, “And we’re all very tired too, we’ve had long days here but we’ve come to this meeting in order to talk to you and we need you to be here” and she then came!