Richard M. De Gaetano

Richard M. De Gaetano moved into the Jane-Finch community in December of 1990. Born in Albany, New York, attended Boston University, and moved to Canada in early 1969 due to opposition to the Vietnam War and the racism of the US of A. He joined the Vietnam Mobilization Committee and organized people across Canada to stop the war, through educational events and mobilizing people in protest demonstrations. As part of a revolutionary socialist group, Richard lived, worked, and organized in Toronto, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Tacoma (Washington), Montreal, and Hamilton before resettling in Toronto. Richard retired from the Community Social Planning Council of Toronto (Social Planning Toronto) in 2016. As of this interview in 2018, Richard lives in the community and volunteers his time in Jane-Finch.

What brought you to the community of Jane-Finch?

I was homeless and staying downtown with a friend in a housing co-operative, in the St. Lawrence district, who was a leader in the co-op, and she heard about a place opening up in Jane-Finch. I decided to check it out as I understood from her that it was possible to get subsidized rent there. As I was in precarious employment and homeless, I felt that I needed to check out any possibilities. So, I visited the co-op and was accepted as a member of the Glen Gardens Housing Co-operative on Jane Street, near Grandravine. I moved in at the beginning of December, 1990 and went to my first co-op meeting in January, 1991.

You quickly got involved in the co-op. Tell me about your first involvement.

When I went to my first meeting at the co-op – I was actually feeling welcomed by some of the people in the building and finding it to be a very friendly environment – and realized that the people in the co-op were very diverse, which made me feel very comfortable as I missed having that in my life for a lot of years. I went to my first general members’ meeting in late January where I sat and listened to folks deliberating on different issues until a young man spoke up about needing to have an emergency evacuation procedure for the co-op in case of attack. He stressed that the attack would likely come because there was a war going on in Iraq and the Iraqi’s had missiles and so we might need to be prepared to evacuate in the case of missile attack. That kind of astounded me and I tried to calmly and quietly – and with a smile – to say that I didn’t think that it would be necessary for the co-op members to worry about missiles coming from Iraq, as they had a very limited range that would barely make it to Israel, let alone to Canada, across the Atlantic Ocean.

People seemed to appreciate that, and I sat down and prepared to listen some more to what was going on and do what I usually do: stay in the background and observe people and to get to know what’s going on. But, then they had elections for the board and somebody nominated me to be on the board and I thought, “Oh well, I guess I could get to know people by being on the board,” so I agreed to stand and got elected as a board member, even though I had only been there a month and a half. I served on that board for most of the rest of the nine years that I lived there, in various capacities. I don’t know if I stayed on the board the full time or whether I was just on committees like the security committee, the newsletter committee, the different things that used some of the experience, skills and knowledge that I had had from the past.

That experience of being on the board led me to become the Glen Gardens Co-op representative to the Co-operative Housing Federation and then to join the founding board of the Upwood Park-Salvador del Mundo Housing Co-operative at Jane and Queen’s Dr. that was building over 300 units of affordable housing.

Social Justice was really important to you. Tell me about a time at the co-op where you got involved in a social justice action.

There was an event that took place sometime in the spring of ’91, when one of the co-op members was driving back to the building and was being followed by the police, who proceeded to handcuff him in our parking lot and then one of the cops took him behind an entrance way that stood out in the parking lot and started beating him. I didn’t see this or hear it, but some of the members heard the member screaming while he was being beaten and went out onto their balconies and yelled at the police and went downstairs to make clear they were watching, and the police quickly took the handcuffed Black man off to the police station. I knew there had been a history of police problems in the community because the community had a large Black population and I had been involved in anti-Black racism work since I was quite young, so this was an important issue for me and even though the guy was known or assumed to be a drug dealer, he was still a member of our co-op community and he was being treated unfairly and unjustly. The people in the co-op felt they had to protest this and, although I didn’t try to take on any leadership position on this, I offered whatever help I could in the organizing a protest, which we did. It involved quite a few people from the co-op and the community. It was quite an interesting first experience in Jane-Finch.

You were on the Board of Directors for the Jane/Finch Community and Family Centre (JFCFC) for 10 years. Tell me about those experiences. What did you do that you feel made a difference and what was challenging?

I guess with having the experience with the co-op board kind of made me think that there was some usefulness with being on a board of directors and Wanda (my friend on the co-op board, who I later married) had invited me to take walks through the community, to get to know the community and in the process of telling me all about the community, about Jane-Finch, what kind of population groups lived there, what kinds of challenges the community had, what organizations she knew of and active and supportive people in the community. She encouraged me to attend an Annual General Meeting in the fall of 1991 of the JFCFC, where she worked and had been a founder. I participated in that and once again found myself getting nominated and elected to the board. Perhaps people saw something in me that I actually didn’t recognize in myself; that I had a lot of life experience, political training in a revolutionary movement, in socialist groups, and a fair bit of education and that was of some value to people in the community and could be put to use for one of the oldest community based organizations in the Jane-Finch community.

Now, my experience on that board – I had many experiences and they were varied. I started off by just being a member, eventually got to be vice-chair, helped get policies changed, then got to be the chair of the board. I had to supervise the three coordinators as the chair of the board. The Centre didn’t have an executive director, they had team coordinators. I helped to get the board trained in [John Carver’s] Policy Governance Model and helped to lead the process to changing our board to a Policy Governance board, and dealing with the United Way, getting to know all sorts of organizations, working with other boards, trying to help bring our efforts in the community together, and various tasks like that. I did most of the orientation and training of new board members.

Lots of things were challenging. Getting to understand how the board could run effectively, recruiting board members from the community who didn’t have a lot of experience or especially board experience and getting oriented and trained, developing the board as a team, supervising the team coordinators, changing [the structure] from a co-coordinator leadership to an executive director one. All of these were challenging problems, what with the loss of funding from the Michael Harris years, dealing with funders, staff issues, trying to help make what we were doing as board members knowable and accessible to community residents who didn’t have much information about or knowledge of the organization. It was constantly challenging and stimulating.

During the time you were on the board, you went to Seneca College, York University and then to the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education (OISE) for your Master’s Degree in Education. One of the placements you did was at 15 Tobermory. Tell me about that experience.

Let me back it up a bit. I had been an industrial worker for quite a few years before coming to Jane-Finch. When I came to the co-op, I was a typesetter and working on my own trying to teach people how to do typesetting, doing typesetting, and working in the printing trades. Before that in numerous other areas of work like a steelworker, autoworker, and jobs like that. It was getting to know the community of Jane-Finch and getting to understand how community functions – the political and personal connections with community that I developed – that made me think about getting into the field of community work and not stay in industrial work or other kinds of private sector employment. It was because of that, mostly through the encouragement from Wanda, that I decided I needed to go back to school to get some [social work] training. I tried getting some jobs in the community field, or sector, but all I could find was part-time, temporary work. I had already gone back to school and finished a certificate in adult education at Seneca College. So, I decided to go into the Social Service Worker program, and while I was in that program, I figured I should finish my degree [at York University] as I was only five courses short of my Bachelors’ degree, counting credits I had taken in the United States and had taken at York in 1970 and 1971, which I then dropped out of in 1972.

I actually started university in 1965 and didn’t complete my bachelor’s degree until 1997. That’s 32 years! But, I had gone to community colleges and taken courses in those years in between. I had already been to three universities by the time I dropped out in ’72: Boston University (I grew up in Albany, NY), the University of Buffalo, and York University. Anyway, I completed a full-time Seneca program, graduated with honours from that, then completed the remainder of my courses in social work, sociology and anti-racism research and practice at York in ‘97. In 1997, I began a masters’ program at OISE and completed that in 1999 – I guess I got faster as I got further on in school and life.

15 Tobermory was my second placement at Seneca College. My first placement was at the Metro Social Planning Council of Toronto, and I was working part-time jobs and temporary contracts in Jane-Finch and in other communities, while doing volunteer work in Scarborough around literacy – printing literacy learners’ stories [and tutor’s guide]. First, I did a four-month placement a Social Planning Council, then the next year I wanted to do a placement that was different, that was more front line and less policy oriented. I checked out places like the Bernard Betel Centre, but decided I wanted to work at Tobermory, where there were some people I had met over the years. Joanna and Dalton Jantzi (from the Mennonite community) were running a program or a [community] ministry, and I thought that would be an interesting place because it was a 25-story building with 1200 residents from all over the world in a building owned by Metro Housing. I got them to agree to take me on as a placement. I got the school to agree to let me be a placement student there, even though they were not social workers and it wasn’t a regular placement site, but I carried a little bit of credibility for being mature [45 years old] and it seemed like an interesting placement, so Seneca let me go there. I began working with the Mennonites and the programs they were tying to run out of there and working with the J/FCFC staff, who supported some of the children’s programs and adult and youth programs. It was all kind of an interesting experience. I got to know a bunch of folks who lived in poverty in public housing, young people who were living there, some of whom were associated with gangs, but that didn’t make any difference to me and I am still able to say hello and have good relations with some of the folks at 15 Tobermory, even today.

You also worked with parents at Derrydown Public School on a project as part of your Master’s thesis. Tell me about that experience.

I did my masters in Adult Education and Community Development. I needed to do a research project and because I was quite excited about participatory action research (PAR), I decided to see if there was something I could do in the Jane-Finch community using that model of research – qualitative research and community-based organizing work combined. I had met a couple of parents from Derrydown Public School and became a community representative at the school, so I got a group of parents who were concerned about issues related to their children – mostly racialized children in racialized families, mostly Black families. We started a research project that was going quite well for awhile but ran out of steam somewhere and I was being told and pressured by my academic advisors to change the kind of work on my final paper to a slightly different approach, rather than the PAR project. We never got too far with that project, but we had a growth of confidence and skills among the parents in dealing with the school board and principal. The principal was really good at that school [at that time], but the school board had issues, especially policies that had negative impact on the kids.

While you were in post-secondary school, you got involved with Ruth Morris’s work (Black Creek FOCUS group) on a project called “Neighbour-to-Neighbour”. Tell me about that experience.

Actually, I was working full-time on that project, but it was a short-term contract. I was coordinating 10 outreach workers doing outreach in their own cultural communities and bringing people from different socio-economic backgrounds and different cultural communities and language groups together to see if there could be a breaking down of the walls, barriers, and divisions between neighbours based on those social and economic differences. The program idea was originated by a group of church people out in the East Coast, who used it to bring Black and white neighbours in communities in Nova Scotia together. We used it to bring Italian seniors together with Black youth, South Asians parents who were Hindus, or Punjabi Sikhs, with Muslims. There were people who spoke eight or ten different languages, together with people who spoke only English as their mother tongue, and people who lived in high-rise apartments that were public housing with people who lived in single-family homes that were fairly well-to-do. It was an attempt to create a peaceful, or more peaceful, environment in the community by having people working on projects together, talking together, learning together, and getting to know each other. It was fairly successful! They had to come out one weekend every month for four months. Residents from the community, who met in schools (had to be in schools as we had up to 140 people at a time), anywhere from 80 – 140 people each month. The Project Rebirth conference had come before this initiative. This was a four-month project I did while going to school. The outcome was that some of the facilitators or outreach people became leaders of the community, joined boards, some of the residents formed relationships with people in the community they had never known before, and some of the projects they did (they had to do for homework between meetings) people would come together and do things like clean up their neighbourhood together.

You initiated the Action Learning Centre. What prompted that and what were some of its activities?

Actually, I initiated an unemployed worker centre effort, trying to set up something with the Red Cross office, even before that. I was unemployed myself at that time and wanted to see if I could get a space for workers without jobs to meet, support each other, and take action for greater unemployed workers supports from government. I had been learning in the masters’ program at OISE about a place in the Appalachian south of the United States called Highlander Folk School, which later became the Highlander Research and Education Center. The kind of community organizing and education work that was done from 1932, when this was established by Myles Horton, who later became a colleague of Paulo Freire from Brazil, a very famous educator and philosopher. I wanted to see if we could start something like the Highlander Center in Jane-Finch, so I approached people I knew from the parent’s program, from the board of the J/FCFC, from my spouse Wanda, and from the Social Planning Council. I had been hired in my last year at OISE to be the Community Planner for Scarborough for the new Community Social Planning Council of Toronto, and one of the people we hired for a research contract was Jackeline Barragan. She was one of the people we recruited to this group, because she came from Colombia [Latin America] and had a lot of political experience. She and I did a lot of the preparation work for our group’s self education and curricula for workshops we wanted to hold. We wanted to go out into the community to do anti-racist and socialist-oriented, working-class oriented training, and community organizing. Four of us drove down to Highlander Center (in Tennessee) for a weekend of training, which was a great experience for all of us.

We [the Action Learning Centre] did a number of things. We tried to do just workshops by ourselves, doing some anti-racism work, a couple of workshops we did in different parts of the community, but then we contracted with Delta Family Resource Centre and Social Planning Toronto for a project they were co-sponsoring to train parents to deal with school boards, called Parents-in-Action. That was a much more interesting and long-term experience that the group had. The Jane-Finch Action Learning Centre was active for about three or four years.

You were also an initiator for the Community Action Planning Group (CAPG). Tell me what was going on at that time and why you think that was important?

About seven years ago, Wanda and I got together with Bob McElhinney and his wife Dorothy, and Stephane Payne [resident and school board trustee] and Errol Young [resident and former trustee] and just sat around in Bob’s and Dorothy’s living room, having tea and cookies and talking about how this community has never really had a voice in the planning and development that took place here. We talked about all the kinds of mistakes that have been made because people outside the community came in and decided things were to be built in certain ways, that people were to live in certain ways, and sometimes it was a catastrophe for residents who had to live in the conditions that were supposedly so great, but turned out to be inappropriate. Then there was a lack of services and lack of infrastructure, a lack of transportation, transit issues, housing affordability issues, quality of housing issues. There were so many issues that just weren’t being dealt with and we felt that residents needed to come together and see if we couldn’t begin to push our politicians and encourage our residents, training residents to be able to speak for themselves and for the community on issues related to planning and development, whenever planning and development were going to take place.

What have been some of the accomplishments of CAPG and who role have you played in those accomplishments?

We began by just meeting in each other’s houses and then we arranged with the library to begin meeting at the library, because it was more central and there was more room and we could become a little more formalized as a group. We initially called ourselves Jane Finch 2020 then changed the name to the Community Action Planning Group (CAPG) of York West and reached out for people willing to join us in looking at the community and the issues the community had been facing and trying to find ways to deal with that. I chaired the meetings for the first couple of years.

When transit changes became a possibility – improvements to transit like a Light Rail Transit (LRT) became a possibility, we looked into that and saw that LRT would speed up people’s commuting time and improve the crowding that we found on buses and just make life better in the community. We decided to try to find allies across the northwest, from Jane-Finch to Rexdale, to see if we couldn’t advocate and push to make sure we got this kind of transit improvement initiative started in our community. So, I did a lot of outreach and got people from all over the city - from TTC Riders and from Code Red (two transit advocacy groups), from York University and Humber College, people who were residents from Rexdale and Jane-Finch, workers from agencies in Rexdale, Humber Summit, and Jane-Finch. We began advocating for the LRT from Jane-Finch to Humber College and eventually we got support from Humber College and York University, from the faith communities and community-based organizations, and from our elected politicians. Then the Province announced they were going to fund LRT development and one of the lines would be the Finch West line. Once they announced that and allocated the resources to it with $1.2 or $1.4 billion, we decided that we’d done enough for that and we needed to do something else as that presented all sorts of possibilities for us.

At CAPG we started talking about [Metrolinx] putting a maintenance and storage facility (MSF) – a big garage for trains – on this piece of land in the middle of our community (Yorkgate Blvd. and Finch Ave. West). We needed to get some community benefits from that, besides just looking at a garage and some tracks. We started pushing to build a community institution or centre, maybe a community hub of services, and then as we talked more and had more artists involved, decided it needed to be not just a service hub, but also a centre to the arts. So, we’ve been working on that for three years now.

We’ve had some real successes, both in terms of advocacy and in negotiations with Metrolinx, the provincial agency building transit, who owned the land. Toronto Community Benefits Network, which we had joined several years ago, got us in to speak to the bidding groups of construction companies (called consortia), at “topic meetings” where people could address each of the three consortia who wanted to win the contract for the LRT construction. CAPG members developed a presentation that four of us made to each of the consortia, calling for a 50-metre setback of their proposed development and to give that strip of land on Finch to us to build a Community Hub and Centre for the Arts. We got a promise from Metrolinx of a minimum of 32 metres, with the proviso that the consortium who won the bid could give us more, if possible.

We’ve been working with our elected officials, and staff from the City and the Province, to begin making this transfer of land a reality and preparing the way to find funding to build the structure.

CAPG got a $75,000 grant for a feasibility study for this project from the Ontario Trillium Foundation and is also looking at other work in planning and development initiatives besides just the hub/centre project.

What is your overall view of “politics” of this community and how does that fit into your overall view of the world?

There’s two kinds of politics – maybe actually one kind that gets expressed in different ways. There’s the politics of the society that we live in, which is a capitalist society – capitalist government, capitalist economic system, and all the values and problems of market competition and individualism that’s created by capitalism. And then there’s the politics of resistance by working people and poor people, by people who are oppressed because of the discrimination against them based on skin colour, based on national origin, religion, based on gender, age, and other differences. Those two sometimes function somewhat in sync and most of the time they function in opposition. Unfortunately, the community’s resistance activities and initiatives that try to make things better for the community, or at least for different parts of the community, are done in silos, isolated from each other, and sometimes in conflict with each other. So, we wind up with things like, for example, the City gives money to the library system, the library sets up an arts facility in the library, a community group comes in, takes over the arts facility and excludes other groups from using it, tries to use it only on their own, and then comes in conflict with the City and the library. Then we have frustration and anger and bad feelings on all sides. You have groups that don’t operate together, don’t talk to each other, don’t communicate with each other, that sometimes work at cross purposes, while aiming for similar improvements to the community. And I see one of the necessities for this community is cutting across those divisions and increasing communication and building solidarity, so that we can actually win in opposition to the capitalist system that controls so much of life in the community.

Speaking of local politicians, its not just the three wards, we have two other levels of government so we have five representatives elected by the community, most of whom don’t talk to each other or talk to each other as little as possible, and kind of operate in their own little fiefdoms, their own little “kingdoms”, but this too is the product of the governmental system that we have under capitalism. It pits individual politicians against each other, even when they come from the same party. There are three councillors, who all used to belong to the NDP. Then one pretty well dropped that and became a Liberal, then a Conservative, and yet the other two are still operating under the capitalist way things are. As though, all we need to do is to make life a little nicer for people and they’ll be happy, when in reality capitalism is constantly taking away from us, leaving us with worse conditions. Our politicians really don’t seem to understand that it’s the system that needs to be fought and that they need to be fighting it together. So, we don’t get a lot from our politicians, maybe more from a few than from the others.

Its very nice that the ward politicians have some impact. I mean there’s no guarantee that any of these things would have happened without them (Finch LRT, subway, new sewage pipes, environmental cleanups, tree planting), it is possible that they had some influence when we got these things, but it took a long time and years of flooding in basements to get the sewage pipes changed, it took an enormously long time to get different transit options for the community and I’m not sure how much of that our politicians got for us. I think it was the TTC bureaucrats who looked at the transit system, and said, “Well, we’ve got this terrible crowding on the Finch line and that’s a priority area for any improvements.” And then the Province says, “We want to get re-elected so we’re going to start making some improvements,” using our tax dollars, and the City tells them that this is an area that needs to have some work done and maybe the politicians had some little impact on that and maybe they had none. So, I’m not sure what we got in terms of the big things.

On smaller things, yes, we get some trees along the side of the roads and we get banners that called our community by different names, and maybe we’ll get some stop lights improved or put in, but if anyone thinks that is going to change the condition of oppression or exploitation that exists for this community, they’re badly mistaken.

I think we need to push for everything we can get and to get our elected politicians to act on behalf of the community more often than they do. They tend to get pretty complacent and comfortable, making a good salary, and I think that the residents – a large percentage who live in poverty and many of whom don’t have work and many of whom don’t have any facilities that you might find in the downtown core – are not getting their money’s worth from their elected officials. I think that if that’s one way to get people active and engaged and talking to each other and joining with others in activity, that will eventually lead them in the direction of thinking that we need to change this whole world, not just the sewers, the lights, and transit, but actually the way the whole country is governed, the way the city is governed, well that’s my end goal. I think you get there by people learning from experience and learning from whatever lessons you can share that you’ve learned.

What accomplishment are you most proud of?

The East Scarborough Storefront community hub is one thing I’m very proud to have been identified with. I wish I could say it there was something that has stayed around long past me leaving Jane/Finch Community and Family Centre, but I think one of the things I’m proud of is we trained a whole bunch of people through my 10 years of experience on the Jane/Finch board and made the Centre stronger while I was there. I think that was a big accomplishment. I think if we’re ever successful in building a Community Hub and Centre for the Arts, that that would be a real legacy, a real accomplishment. Other than that, I think that just getting to know and work with people throughout the community, from all walks of life in the community, has been very important to me. It may not have been important to them but its been important to me. But I think I’ve had some small impact on the community.

What did the community of Jane Finch teach you?

Everything! Everything that I’ve learned about working in community, I learned in Jane Finch (or at least since coming here and getting involved). Everything I learned about working in community from Jane-Finch, I brought with me to Scarborough, and I brought with me to Etobicoke, and I brought with me downtown. I have always been an out-spoken supporter and loyal member of this community since I moved here, because this community is unique, and it’s wonderful, and the people in it are wonderful, even if sometimes they are a pain in the neck. I’ve learned so much about the way community operates and the way social systems at a larger scale impact on our working class through our communities, and how by fighting for change in society through the community, you can actually make it a more long-term sustainable struggle.