An Antidote to Poverty

… we believe community is the solution to poverty. Community can be defined in many ways, but at its heart, community is simply a group of people working together to care for and strengthen one another. By working together, we have the ability to lift each other up, create new possibilities, change lives and transform our city to be one in which everyone is thriving.

Urban Lights. Yonge Street Mission, Newsletter, Summer 2022

These words from a social service agency not only sum up my reflections on the value of community but take my ideas one step further. It is the opening sentence that stops me in my tracks – for it has the audacity to claim that community is the antidote for poverty.

To explore this, I speak with Murshida Samsun Mueen. I always enjoy Murshida’s energy, enthusiasm, and willingness to learn new skills. So today, I’ve come to hear about her latest venture – a women’s support group in Regent Park. Realizing that many women were isolated in their homes, Murshida wanted to create a space where they could express their feelings, find mutual support, and expand their dreams.

To launch their group, Murshida and three friends formed a leadership team. They obtained a small grant and sought some initial guidance from a local social service agency. Since the leadership team was multi-ethnic – from Sri Lanka, Angola, and Eastern Europe – they could access diverse networks of women. As a result, the group’s membership now spans various races, ages, and income levels. Such diversity, though challenging, can enrich a group through its range of skills, contacts, and viewpoints. And so, from an initial meeting of nine members, this women’s group has tripled in size in just three months. Clearly, it is responding to a need.

While too soon to evaluate its impact, I believe that Murshida’s focus on relationships has the power to transform lives. After a gruelling pandemic, what many neighbourhood women now need is empathy and acceptance as they share their stories and articulate their dreams – until from that basis of trust and support, they can walk with courage into a new future. Over time, such relationships can change attitudes and outlooks, allowing women, despite poverty, to thrive.

But the transformative power of community extends not only to individual lives but also to entrenched social systems and viewpoints. To examine this broader impact, I interview Mia Benight. I’d met Mia a few years earlier, and although she was vivacious and fun, she couldn’t concentrate, and her thoughts seemed scattered. Knowing her previous involvement with street drugs, I assumed her brain had residual damage.

Some five years later, when I bumped into her on the street, I was thrilled to discover a new Mia – focused, articulate, and moving forward with purpose. “I have a job as a ‘peer support worker’ at Toronto General Hospital, in their Emergency Department,” she announced. “You see – I’ve had ‘lived experience,’ so my insights are useful in managing marginalized patients.” As she rushed off, I knew I would write her story someday.

Always curious about community, I wanted to know how these highly skilled doctors and nurses interacted with their new peer support workers. Did Mia feel accepted and respected? Was she given opportunities to contribute? Or were staff skeptical, relegating her to the sidelines and ignoring her perspectives?

“It was difficult at first,” Mia admits, “but after I was invited to tell my story at the team’s morning meeting, attitudes softened.” That story begins with trauma. Raped at age 14, she turned to alcohol and cocaine to medicate the pain. Despite periods of sobriety, her path continued downwards until, homeless and suffering from meth-induced psychosis, she realized at age 45 that she needed to change. Our first meeting had been about a year after that turning point.

Mia also gained acceptance from the medical team when they saw how valuable peer support could be. Mia could retrieve a belligerent man who had rushed off without treatment or calm a flailing woman so that her restraints could be loosened. Marginalized patients trusted her because she’d been where they were.

Once barriers came down, Mia was invited to join a series of video calls with a panel of mental health experts. Not only did she learn from them, but it was – in her words – “an opportunity for her to rearrange the consciousness of policymakers and clinicians that treat marginalized populations.” While she pressed them for more holistic care, policymakers were quick to note the cost-effectiveness of peer support workers. In de-escalating patient behaviour, peers freed doctors and nurses to provide more specialized care, and the ER ran more smoothly.

Behind this innovative pilot project to integrate peer workers into hospital ER teams lies an entire network of unusual partners: the University Health Network, the Neighbourhood Group (a social service agency), and the Inner City Health Associates. Coordinated by UNH’s Gattuso Centre for Social Medicine, this partnership hopes to launch further pilots that aim to make health providers more conscious of the social determinants of health so that racialized, housing insecure and addicted populations can receive holistic care.

Meanwhile, Mia is bringing her new-found skills to yet another area of need – the Toronto Community Crisis Service (TCCS), a mobile unit that responds to 911 and 211 mental health and addiction emergencies. Unlike the police, who often escalate such situations, peer workers are now answering these calls – and Mia is at the forefront of this groundbreaking project.

To sum up, both Murshida and Mia seek positive change, one focused on the individual and the other on the societal level. To create such change, both rely on the power of community, particularly those demanding collaborations that cross boundaries and embrace diversity. Such relationships can teach empathy, enlarge perspectives, and, I believe, provide antidotes to poverty.