Peggy worked for the Jane/Finch Community and Family Centre as the Child/Parent Coordinator from 1978 to approximately 1988. After a stint at Opportunity for Advancement as their Executive Director, she went on to become the Executive Director for Houselink for nineteen years. In June of 2011, she retired from Houselink and has no specific plans for the future other than serving on some non-profit Boards of Directors.
How did you come to be in the Jane Finch community?
Well, I had moved to Canada from the states, New York City specifically, and thought I would teach because that is my training. When I got here, it became evident that I didn’t have the same credentials as teachers here. So, that was a bit of a blow and very devastating. I was looking in the newspaper for things that I could see that I hoped that I could do and I saw an ad. You were hiring a Child/Parent Coordinator and the details of the ad asked for someone who understood community accountability and I knew this was the job for me. Later I learned that there were not a lot of people who, at that time in Toronto, knew what that meant, to be truly accountable to a community of people. I did because I had been an activist in New York. I had participated in quite a number of movements, big things from the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement, and then small things in my community like organizing parents around the school issues, etc. So, I went to an interview at the Centre. It was the first place I felt comfortable since I had come to Toronto and the rest is history.
What was going on at that time in the community, the City, the province?
The sense I had was that Jane Finch had been organizing. I didn’t have a sense of how long that had been happening but the community was organizing themselves because they knew that in a way they were a forgotten community. I knew very early on that the schools were really inferior, there weren’t a lot of people services, Mel Lastman was the mayor - need I say more. I could just see how those schools and the services were ignored. It was like Jane Finch was across the country from anything else in North York. There were lots of needs. The area was very densely populated, that was so obvious - not well planned, and no sense of neighbourhood but a tremendous sense of people together…, they were in this together. I don’t really remember the broader things that were going on in the Province, I don’t remember what was going on in the City and of course it was North York that was the city – that was way before amalgamation.
As a new worker to Jane Finch, how did you introduce yourself and how did you get engaged?
Well, I had very good mentors and I was very, very fortunate because Mary Lewis had been kind of filling in and providing support to the Centre. She was working for Children’s Aid Society at the time and she mentored me right at the beginning, not from the inside as she was an outsider, but from the community as she was well-loved and well-respected. I always credit Mary with teaching me, in a very short time, how to be as leader, a community worker, an effective person because she had this wonderful quality of knowing where she wanted to things to go, and bringing people along in the process and no one felt or was manipulated. But she got things to where they needed to be. And of course, there was you, Wanda MacNevin, and you took me, in a way, under your wing but at the same time, I wasn’t sure you were really comfortable with me at the beginning because I was an outsider - I was a New Yorker and maybe there was a sense of “what does she think she’s doing here?” So, I had to withstand, not only all the jokes and tricks (there were many of them) including directing me to show up in shorts for the first time in my entire life in a gym to play in a basketball game. But also, you also were someone right from the beginning that I admired so much and without knowing a lot about you at the time, I could see that if I followed your lead, I could learn a lot.
So, how I got introduced to the community. I went to various things that were happening like visiting the child/parent drop-in. I know that I spent time at various buildings and sites like Tobermory and Driftwood Community Centre and each of those places that had a group or a group of people connected to the Centre and participating in some program. I got to know and I really admire people, like Faye Cole, a mom who was very active. Part of my job was to make the schools a better place for the children and their parents. I went to the schools and worked with the principal and some of the teachers that Faye introduced me to, so that schools were more receptive to the community and particularly to the young children. And that was a huge job because, with my background as an educator, I could see how inferior the education system was and at the time, (and even today) good and effective education for ALL children that was a passion of mine. Children should have a chance to be well-educated, to be well respected for who they are and none of that was happening. So, I think change took place over a year. I worked hard in that year, and as I worked, I was realized learning how to do a lot of things.
And, I think the thing that helped was, at the time, we, all the Centre staff were located in a single room that eventually became the child/parent drop-in, and my desk was a chair at a table and everyone sat around the desk and did whatever work they had to do. We had our phone calls and it was like being infused into the work of the Centre.
Tell me about your involvements with the schools?
My mandate was to go into the schools, you may have to help me with the names of the schools - I think Shoreham, Driftwood and Firgrove. Firgrove is the one where I had the best luck with because that’s where Faye’s children went and she was a mom with many children – 6 children, and I think she also led a group but that might have been a little later where she led a life skills group. So, we went into the schools together, Faye and I, and particularly Firgrove and I got introduced to the principal and talked about just where things were at and what my job was. I sometimes had access to teachers and groups of teachers, the classroom, all of that kind of thing. Very soon, I learned that the kids never really had a chance and they weren’t thought of, from my point of view, of being worthy of anything but some kind of childcare. That was a very difficult thing to realize, but a very motivating thing. I remember Faye being very active in establishing the Firgrove Parent Association (the first in Jane Finch). The principal at the time wasn’t rigid, he did allow for us to come in to do some things but it wasn’t really satisfactory and I’m not sure how the schools are now but I hope they are much better.
Eventually, I think I gained the respect of a few of the teachers and some other parents. I also went off to the North York Board of Education where I met Ted Gould who had a senior role and a little later on, I met Karen Liberman who also worked for the North York Board of Ed at the time. Basically, I felt my job was to assist teachers and the education system in that part of North York to understand the life circumstances of the kids who were attending school and how disadvantaged they were, mainly by poverty. I do think poverty is the absolute barrier to everything and limits perception of people and fulfillment of potential. It was very obvious to me that parents, they loved their children; they wanted their children to do well; they wanted to do well by their children but they were disadvantaged by poverty and other things and it was very hard to make changes. You know, it’s interesting because I don’t really remember how effective I was in the local schools. I remember how effective I and you were at the North York Board including, for me, this is one of the big things that to this day I talk about, at some point, organizing parents to march down to the North York Board of Education. During a school trustee meeting, we brought “real live” children with balloons into the Boardroom. I remember specifically at least one trustee called me a communist for taking such radical action and here I was a New Yorker and this was really mild activism for me. They wouldn’t allow us to sit around in that downstairs room. We were relegated to the gallery and of course everyone was so well behaved because we said our job wasn’t to disrupt, it was to support a motion so that it would pass. We were successful and did make an impact. I was at the North York Board of Ed a lot – so I went to various meetings, committee meetings, etc. and my greatest pleasure aside from actually working in the community was occasionally parking in a spot that said “Mel Lastman only, Reserved!”
Another involvement which was very important I was with North York Inter-agency Council which in time became the North York Inter-agency and Community Council. So, I credit myself with really pushing on adding the word community to the name of the council. There were many, many committees and this was an inter-agency network with paid staff and their job was to do work so that all of the communities in North York had the same advantages. I became very active on the Children’s Services Committee, where there was a focus on children and parents and the schools, but the work included looking at all the children’s services, including CAS, in all of North York and especially in the areas where people were marginalized by poverty. Aside from Jane Finch, there were neighbourhoods like Lawrence Heights, and the peanut area. Eventually, I chaired the Children’s Services Committee. We worked really hard to get programs that were more responsive in each community and, as a network of people, who came from different places we were able to initiate change. The Centre had a very high profile there. I think that Peggy Edwards was also active on NYIACC but I don’t remember the committee she was on, so that was another one for sure.
I think, I don’t remember exactly, but Driftwood Community Centre had some group that would talk about the issues. I don’t remember what that was or maybe it was just working with Bill, the Coordinator, and trying to get the space to be more open to the community. I remember one of the things that was big then was their gym which wasn’t open for kids to come in and use it. It was just a whole different time in terms of the way people thought.
Tell me about Child in the City.
Child in the City was a project that came out of the University of Toronto and I think when I came, we were working with Sue Hodgson who was going to do an evaluation of the Child/Parent Drop-in. I think one of the struggles was that Jane Finch was and probably is what is called a prevention program and it wasn’t clinical and it didn’t treat anyone but it provided opportunities for the people who used the services to gain skills, to become more confident, to use their natural potential…all those kinds of things. But we were not well funded at all then and it was felt strongly that it would be good if we could demonstrate what our impact was and especially for the funder which was the Ministry of Community and Social Services at the time. At the same time, Child in the City had an interest in Jane Finch. I don’t know if that was through a connection between Mary Lewis and the evaluator or researcher, Sue Hodgson, but anyway when I came, this evaluation had started and what Wanda kept saying was, “You don’t have to do this, I already know what the impacts are,” and she did but we needed to have it demonstrated. Now I’m trying to remember the Ortho-psychiatric Conference which is an international or North American group and they were having a conference in Toronto and we were going to present the results of the evaluation and the results of our work. Maria DeBoer, Sue Sharpe (parents from the drop-in) presented and we even took the psychiatrists on a tour of the Jane Finch community – I don’t remember much of this. (Note: one of the psychiatrists from Texas was so enthralled with the idea of a Child-parent drop-in that he went back to Texas and replicated the model).
Another involvement I remember because I am a great lover of the arts, and J/F didn’t have the things that a city would have for children; forget the money…they didn’t have a chance to go to art classes or drama classes or view art, etc. So, a connection was made with Dixon Hall and we began to talk about different programs that were being offered in the area…not necessarily at Jane Finch. I remember the head of the music program there was extremely interested in providing a music program at the Driftwood Community Centre and I think it would have been without charge but I don’t know or remember if that ever happened. Some of that evolved after I left but I don’t believe that we ever firmed up the connection with Dixon Hall. And there was Marie from Delta Family Resource Centre and Penny Lawler was involved with them and I think they were definitely focused on children and children’s opportunities and I remember them being out of a school. I don’t mean that’s where they were located but that’s where there were programs and they did more intensive work in schools than I was able to do at the time. I entered and it was all new ground and actually, my job and everyone’s job was huge. We were pretty much the only existing service. And then there was Northwood Neighbourhood Services and there was some activity out of Northwood. Penny Lawler was also a researcher with Child in the City and she worked with Delta to do their research and also I remember meetings with both Sue Hodgson and Penny Lawler. There was a great feeling of we’re all in this together. It wasn’t territorial – I would say that’s another amazing thing because I don’t know how Delta was funded or some of the other services but it was about getting as much as we could for the people in the community, many of whom would be staff in the community. Most of them were staff from the community which was a good thing. I think I was one of the few outsiders except for Peggy Edwards…the other Peggy who was a student who was then hired.
What issues did the community face back then?
Well, I think, in no particular order (although I might order them in the end), poverty I think was the greatest issue. People were living almost exclusively on social assistance and they were living in these huge towers mostly because of the way the community was planned. There was a school in the middle of a number of different communities and there were houses around the schools that were supposed to be for families with children and then there were these big towers like Tobermory. Firgrove wasn’t a tower but there was dense housing but the tall buildings were supposed to be for young couples who would live there and pop on the highways to go downtown to work but it didn’t end up meeting those objectives and it was mostly young couples or affluent people who were buying the homes. The families lived in these huge apartment buildings. They housed more people than some small towns in Ontario at the time. I remember at Tobermory, you had to wait in line for an elevator for half an hour when school let out. I’m from New York and I know crowds but this was just amazing. I should also say that another connection was with Dalton Jantzi and Toronto Housing workers like Terry Skelton and Gail Mercer from Parks and Recreation. All that’s gone as far as I know or at least Toronto Housing definitely doesn’t have Community Relations Workers anymore.
Other issues were density, isolation….tremendous isolation. People were suspicious of each other in these buildings, because they were too large. There was no sense of community and unless someone came in to do some community development, there was no sense of “this is my community.” Also, the planning made it such that unless you were inside near the schools, you were walking down Jane Street with huge buildings and hydro towers and there were no shopkeepers who got to know you, or neighbourhood people, like in many other communities. And so, people were really alone and nothing about their circumstances was their fault. Jane Finch had also gotten a very bad reputation, and in fact when I was fairly new to Canada and told people in my neighbourhood which was downtown where I was working, many people had a very negative response. I remember specifically someone saying “are you going to take a gun to work with you?”
Now we’re going back to the late 70’s and to me it was this wonderful warm community and that’s what I always felt about it so I think those were the main issues…and education was also an issue, lack of services was an issue. If immigration was an issue it wasn’t anything that we paid too much attention to and I think that’s because, in any kind of neighbourhood or community, when you’re doing work there becomes a hierarchy of needs. The one that was the greatest, at least for the Centre, was the fact that there was poverty and most people were just living on bare minimum incomes, etc. So, I think those were a lot of the issues and people were thirsty to come and meet someone who would be their friend. So many friendships developed out of this Centre (Jane/Finch Centre).
How did the community respond to the issues?
The Getting In Touch program was one of the first mental health programs in the community funded by the Ministry of Health with NYIACC’s help that we were able to make happen in the community….that was one response. Another response was it became obvious that well, mental health can’t be good when you were living in poverty and you are struggling and you are alone…it just can’t be so and in addition to that, there were probably many people, who if diagnosed would have had mental illness or health conditions. J/F residents never had access to those kinds of services so we started Getting In Touch which was a non-clinical response to people who identified as having mental health problems; women at the time. That’s the other thing, I believe that the Centre works with both genders and it didn’t then. Women were our target then but we had a couple of men who were mostly the activists like Gary Ede so I think the community came together with leadership; there were natural leaders like Helen Ede and Pat O’Neil and Marie Cerny who had so much to offer and gave unconditionally, and then there were some negative leaders. This is where I figured out that everyone has something to offer, but it is not always possible for that to be offered. My job at that time was to accept the negative leaders for who they were and to build on their energy showing them that they had a lot to offer and that they could make a meaningful contribution. The unconditional acceptance was sometimes a challenge and that was definitely a learning for me - I think for a lot of us...
The Centre’s approach to community development was the best I’ve ever experienced. People came together, listened to what was identified in terms of needs and then with the help of paid, but not really professional staff – (we didn’t really care about credentials) created responses that the people themselves had identified. Another lesson I learned is credentials have very little meaning when you are working with people who are marginalized. What does have meaning is often life experiences, how you feel about people respecting people for who they are and what they bring. The Centre’s response were to come together in different groupings to develop services and to get community centres to be open and to get schools to be more responsive. Our focus was on mostly single moms with children but there were other services that were offered like helping with resumes and taxes and those kinds of things that came out of our community office…typing things for people, helping them to get forms done, that kind of thing and it was a wonderful kind of initiative.
Also, the other thing I haven’t talked about yet was York University. Here we had a university that was tremendously resourced and might as well have been across the country because there was no openness either space wise, mentally or intellectually to working with this community and that was a very difficult reality to deal with. Some of my energy was directed at trying to get the University to be more accessible to and supportive of J/F residents. Eventually, there was a community coordinator working out of York. She, Elspeth Heyworth, got programs for women in the community to start going to - classes which might have been held in the community. I believe this was the beginning of the Bridging Course for Women. Things took a really long time to happen so it was great when these programs started up. So, that’s what the community did. In addition to that, with the help of people like Helen and Mary Lewis, it turned to people who had a lot of skills and a lot of influence like Marvyn Novick who at the time was with the social planning council. He loved Jane Finch. We would go down to the big city and we would have questions or projects that we wanted help with. There were people like that who were very, very generous with their time and wisdom.
I don’t think that governments or bureaucrats responded well at the time. I know that we were funded mostly by the Ministry of Community and Social Services and we won over some of the people who were the connections with ministries. One of these was our program liaison, Celia Denov who come to understand the real issues and respected the community. Working with Celia, ended up in higher levels of funding for the Centre. I think the trick was bringing people in. If you got people to come into the community they could see, they could feel the warmth, they would recognize the talent. But just describing things, did not have the same impact. We tried hard to stay away from having people tell their stories because historically, people were used in that way. You know, tell so and so how disadvantaged you are and then they will give us money or whatever, but at what cost to the storyteller? We were also successful in being granted United Way funding in my time and that was a big help to us. I think we were one of the first non-mainstream agencies to get funding. This led the way for many other smaller, non-traditional services to be funded. At the Centre, we worked together. I mean we worked with all of those services that we needed to work with to do the best job for the people that we could. A good example is CAS, who at the time often took children into custody rather than supporting the mother to do a better job. We also wanted to make sure that if we had to call Children’s Aid to report a mom that we were supporting, that they would be receptive and open and not judgemental and yet do their jobs. That was a very hard fight. But I remember sitting in Bruce Rivers’s office and he said, tell me about the Centre and about your role…where are you in the hierarchy? And I said, well there isn’t really a hierarchy, there are three coordinators who work together to oversee the Centre and that we each have our own area of work. And he said, come on, there has to be a boss…he just didn’t understand that kind of cooperative organization. Going there, I spoke about the good parents that we worked with and that if they had issues or they weren’t behaving exactly as they might have been with their children, it was simply because their lives were basically hell. They had no support; many of them had been traumatized by violence; they lived in these unfriendly places and they needed supports to have a sense of potential. They had a lot within themselves and they all began to show it. I mean, I can’t remember ever, one person or a mom who didn’t want the best for her children, ever.
What do you remember as being challenging for you in the community?
There were different kinds of challenges so I think that one of the challenges was getting comfortable and it wasn’t getting comfortable because of the kind of people in the community. Coming from New York, wherever you go in New York, there is poverty so I was used to that…the size and scale of that was off-putting and sometimes I was a bit frightened to tell you the truth – to go into a building or whatever. This was at the beginning and certainly not at the end but good old Wanda….you would come with me until I actually felt more comfortable.
Working with some of the negative leadership was challenging as was standing up to them. I remember this one woman who weighted maybe 300 pounds and here I was at 90 pounds. But New Yorkers are pretty tough, so I would go chest to chest with her in yelling matches and that kind of thing. It wasn’t about winning anything but it was about showing her that she didn’t intimidate me; we were both women; we both had issues and that kind of thing.
Challenges….there were lots of challenges; getting money, that was a huge challenge, hiring people if someone left. That was a challenge because the Centre’s mandate was really to hire people from the community and yet we wanted, at the same time, people who could do the job, whatever that was and that wasn’t always apparent but in the end, we always succeeded. Gee, you know, I never think of Jane Finch as being a challenge….isn’t that interesting? I just loved it. It was the hardest place for me to leave when I left so many years later. Transportation was a challenge; getting from one place to another and I think that’s changed somewhat.
Another challenge was that the Centre operated from of its heart. It did all the right things because it knew instinctively that those things were right but it didn’t have any kind of a developed framework. I remember a couple of times…remember when we had the first staff from the North York Women’s Shelter (the Centre provided an office for the first worker while the Shelter was being built), which was Peggy E’s project and she, the Shelter staff was a feminist, a very ardent feminist and she would espouse those values and of all these great people, no one could relate. It wasn’t that they weren’t feminists or that they didn’t act out of those values, but rather that things came more from the heart than a well-defined analysis. Sometimes that was a challenge because I would worry that something might turn people off because it was too intellectual and I think that through its years of development, I think it’s developed its own analysis of poverty and that kind of thing. The one thing about poverty in Jane/Finch is that no one ever blamed the victim. Sometimes I wonder if the issue of being gay or a lesbian came up, what the response would have been. I remember having a strong feeling that there was no acceptance of that and again, I know that that’s changed.
What are you most proud of?
I think I always felt that the work I was doing was very meaningful and much appreciated and it wasn’t that people were constantly saying thank you but people were so happy that anyone was doing work with and for the community. I was definitely proud of Getting In Touch. I remember that was a real victory. I was proud, to an extent, of the work that was done in the schools, I mean the outcomes. I was proud of being accepted; I was really proud of that; being a real outsider coming from New York and coming into the community. I was proud of being granted United Way funding and increasing levels of funding from other sources; I was proud of being able to work in a very non-hierarchical setting, not only structurally but it was a working environment in a community that appreciated whatever people brought to it and I was able to work with that very comfortably. I feel like the work I did with groups of women or children, like Tiny Toddlers Club, made the groups more meaningful. more intentional but not too intentional. I was proud of my work in trying to get the arts into the community, although that did fall flat in the end.
I was very proud of my work at NYIACC. I loved working with NYIACC and I thought it was really important work – it was broader than just for Jane Finch but it was for other similar communities.
What did the community teach you?
It taught me a different kind of acceptance and tolerance. I had come with this value but I had never really faced it. In New York, from my experience teaching, I learned that every child has tremendous potential and in Jane Finch I learned that every individual had tremendous potential and it was really a matter of having the opportunities to fulfil that potential.
What advice would you give workers in similar positions today?
Well, I certainly would suggest that they see the potential in everyone and I know that sounds corny after a while but it isn’t…I use it every day in my work here at Houselink; that they work with people, whatever their job is – in partnership. They don’t come in thinking they know more or can advise better or anything like that. I would advise them to share their knowledge and skills and to think outside of the box because I think that’s how a community like Jane Finch develops well; whether it’s getting some of the arts in there or I remember something about a project you did Wanda that was arts…I think I would say that people learn things in different ways and not everyone learns or flourishes around the table at a meeting and there are other ways that people could express themselves better and that it’s important to utilize all the forms of communication and creativity that we can think of that’s appropriate in a situation. I also think that the focus on young children and parents is good but the earlier children have a chance the better they are going to succeed.
Our community is very diverse. What was the make-up of the community back then and what challenges did you have in engaging people from diverse backgrounds?
Back then, I can’t remember, so I could be wrong, we didn’t focus much on diversity as it relates to race, culture or ethnicity. Our focus was single moms living in poverty. I would say that was our focus although there were times, like at Getting In Touch that we worked with older women living in poverty. I remember talking to an older woman living in 4400 Jane Street. OW was changing their rules and for the first times in many years was saying in order to keep getting welfare, each person had to prove they were out there hunting for a job and not having success. This woman was petrified as she hadn’t worked in about forty years. We helped her to understand her rights and also helped her deal with her tremendous anxiety. I don’t remember at all focusing on the issue of diversity when it comes to ethnicity or race, culture or even language. I remember the community as having Italians and some Portuguese and some people from East India and in fact, one of our key staff, Yasmin, was from that community so, did we still attract people if there were people of colour? No, I don’t think we were very good at that at the time because the face of Jane Finch - that wasn’t the face of Jane Finch or it wasn’t a face that we recognized. We were open to everyone and that’s the hard stuff, I think when you operate from your heart. You’re sincere but not able to articulate what the differences are and why they are important.
What are your fondest memories from working in the area?
The people – the people were so warm. It was the first time I felt at home in Canada, it was in the basement of a grungy Ontario Housing building at 4400 Jane Street with this diverse, and I don’t mean culturally, but young and older women and this very smart person, Mary Lewis who was asking me questions. I just felt like I had finally landed. It actually took me ten years to feel at home in Canada but my workplace was a place where I felt more at home much earlier. So, it was my fellow staff; it was community leaders; it was the people who used our programs. There was warmth, it wasn’t like how I experienced Toronto downtown which was a very white, Anglo-Saxon society - where people kept their distance. I mean people even hugged you and so it was the people. And there was the helpfulness; I mean you were never left out to be on your own when you were having difficulty. We didn’t have artificial boundaries. I really felt always cared about and even loved and certainly respected, and it was a very hard place for me to leave for that reason. I had only ever worked as a teacher before that in a classroom so the other thing that comes to mind is that I learned a lot of skills and a lot of ways of doing things that I believe I had in me but I hadn’t had a chance to practice. So, those would be the two things and I would say that my friendship with you (Wanda), even though we don’t see each other all that often, I mean it’s so valuable that I have known you…I mean that sincerely.
Any other comments?
I think that capturing this is a wonderful thing. I know one thing I always wanted to capture and I think I may be too far away from it now is the management model of the Centre in the days that I worked there. The notion of having three Coordinators who worked together; where there was never any issues of power or control but rather a genuine desire to do right by the community and the people in it. I’m dying to see where you (Wanda) land because you now have so much information as well as the desire to keep the wonderful values that described the Centre.