Change starts here.
Change starts here.
Volunteer housing counsellor Joanne smiles as she leans on her walker outside a mall in New Westminster.
It’s been a long haul, but life is much easier than a few years ago, when everything suddenly spiraled downhill. A bad fall, an angina attack and diabetes forced her to retire from her job as a medical office assistant, and about the same time, her sister passed away.
“It was a bad year,” says Joanne, now 66. She’d been living with her sister for 10 years and after her death, found out just how hard it was to find a place she could afford in the Lower Mainland.
Joanne moved into a basement suite, living on Employment Insurance until it ran out, then moving onto welfare. She put her name on the BC Housing list for subsidized housing, but finally gave up after two years of fruitless waiting. In the meantime, she shared an apartment with another woman, but finally decided she needed a place of her own.
Joanne turned to Century House, which offers counseling for seniors, and to Seniors Services Society, which is funded by United Way of the Lower Mainland. They helped sort out her finances, get her a disability allowance, and gave useful housing advice.
As a result, she now lives in Dunwood Place, a home for seniors living independently, but also offering a support system. “I love it there,” says Joanne.
Joanne has always enjoyed helping people and now wanted to give back to the community. In the fall of 2008, she took the Housing Counsellor Training course, now taught by Lynda Brind-Dickson from the Seniors Services Society.
The nine–week course, also funded by United Way of the Lower Mainland, gives professionals and volunteers a detailed understanding of the needs of local seniors and the services available to them.
She’s now on the society’s executive board, helps out on reception and does a lot of informal counseling. “I can understand what people are going through. It can be hell finding housing,” she says.
Lynda Brind-Dickson, community education resource manager of Seniors Services Society, is with Joanne today at their offices on McBride and Eighth Avenue.
Lynda’s not one to mince words. We’re halfway through the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver and it’s a bright and sunny day, but she sees few reasons to rejoice. She looks around and sees clients that have been abandoned by society. Many of them have led exemplary lives and are now almost destitute.
She says: “We’re not really celebrating the Olympics here because homelessness is still very much an issue. If seniors built these communities then the community should support them now. I think an Olympian effort has to be made to support seniors in a much more tangible way.”
While healthy seniors are served well by recreation departments, age-friendly parks and wheelchair access, three other groups of seniors fall through the cracks – the frail, the mentally challenged and the physically ill.
With baby boomers approaching retirement, it could get worse. “We’re all standing on the beach waiting to see a tsunami. But it’s too late then to decide if we need one life raft or a flotilla.”
She’s critical of the lack of a national housing policy, noting that it’s extremely difficult for seniors in assisted living to transfer between provinces to be closer to family members.
The society constantly sees clients that are homeless, at risk, or ill and struggling to hold on to independence in apartments they’ve lived in for decades. And who can blame them for not wanting to move into assisted living, says Lynda. “Who would want to have a bath only once a week? That’s ridiculous.”
Families who love their aging parents are also often unable to cope, due to the lack of support. They’re even dropping them off at hospitals.
“One poor soul was found sitting on a park bench outside a hospital in the Lower Mainland. ‘My daughter said she would be right back,’ she said. Well, her daughter wasn’t coming back. How heartbreaking is that?”
Shelters aren’t funded for seniors, and seniors on the streets are in serious shape: being preyed upon, beaten up and even raped, Joanne points out.
On a happier note, more young people are getting involved in volunteering, there’s more charitable gifting and estate planning to help seniors’ organizations and non-profit agencies help with funding.
“Thank God for agencies like United Way,” she says.
It’s January 2010 and union leader Bill Gaucher sits in his New Westminster headquarters, figuring out how his union can contain costs and make arrangements for the extra drivers working during February's Olympic Games.
But the unassuming leader of more than 5,000 workers in B.C. and Alberta has a much broader vision than looking after their needs only.
For more than 20 years, Bill has worked tirelessly to help the less fortunate in our communities. He’s coordinated staff donations for United Way of the Lower Mainland, worked at the soup kitchens and, for the last seven years, helped raise funds for Variety’s Telethon for children.
“We’re a social union and there’s a bigger part to play. I believe in giving back to the community,” says Bill, the secretary-treasurer of Canadian Auto Workers Local 114 since 1981.
In 2009, he received the United Way of the Lower Mainland Joe Morris Labour Community Service Award for his efforts.
Bill simply praises the office staff at CAW’s regional headquarters on 12th Street in New Westminster. “I’m just the guy that asks people to help out. I never have to ask twice. I am very proud of them,” he says.
Philosophically, Bill believes the government should pay for people’s basic needs, but the fact remains that there is a gap to fill, and he believes non-profit organizations and the community at large are needed to fill this gap.
“We shouldn’t have to have food banks. They were created as a temporary measure, but they’ve never gone away. I have been looking at food bank lines for 15 or 16 years and there’s a lot more 'regular Joes' standing in line now.”
He adds: “I remember last year, a bunch of us went to downtown Vancouver to work at the soup kitchen. It was very humbling.”
Bill notes that homeless shelters always seem to be the first to lose their funding, and the number of seniors in poverty is now also becoming a widespread and serious issue.
On a personal level, Bill regards himself as a lucky man. He married his childhood sweetheart Michele when they were mere youngsters, aged 17 and 16 respectively. They’ve now been married 35 years, living mostly in Surrey, where they raised three sons.
Bill started out as a warehouseman, and despite coming from a non-union background, moved into the union business in March 1980, with the Canadian Brotherhood of Railway, Transport and General Workers. The union merged with the Canadian Auto Workers Union in 1994, and Bill's been in charge of Local 114 ever since.
He first became involved with the community when he sat on the United Way Labour Board and credits his union work, training and a steady wage with giving him a broader picture of society’s needs.
“It’s important to realize there’s another world out there. I owe a lot to the union: this job opened my eyes to things I might not have seen otherwise,” says Bill.
On a bitter snowy day in 2008, Mariam Larson was busy buying food in New Westminster’s Royal City Centre.
She noticed a well-dressed older lady lying on one of the mall benches, her walker nearby.
Concerned, Mariam approached to see if she was OK. She learned the lady had had eye surgery a few days earlier, and lived alone. She knew it was dangerous to be out on the slippery hilly streets, and was resting from her exertions.
She said to Mariam: “It was scary, but I just had to get out.”
Her conversation with the woman set Mariam thinking about the challenges facing other seniors and those dependent on wheelchairs, scooters, walkers and other mobility aids to get around their neighbourhoods.
A short time later, a grant opportunity crossed her desk as coordinator of the New Westminster Senior Services Task Force (SSTF), also known as the New Westminster seniors planning table.
The task force and the City of New Westminster got together and this spring received funding from the Built Environment and Active Transportation (BEAT) Program.
Using the grant money, the Wheelability Assessment Project kicked into high gear in the summer of 2009. The city is now preparing maps to identify easy, moderate and difficult routes for those with mobility problems in uptown and downtown New Westminster.
Mariam, an energetic and articulate gerontologist, says that an exceptionally high number of seniors live in uptown New Westminster, a hilly area between Sixth and Eighth Street and north of downtown New Westminster. According to Statistics Canada, 24 per cent or 1,855 of the 7,650 population in Uptown were aged 65 or over in 2006.
Her position as planning table coordinator is funded by United Way of the Lower Mainland. United Way supports seven seniors’ planning tables, covering New Westminster, Burnaby, Delta, Surrey, South Surrey/White Rock, North Vancouver and Maple Ridge. Mariam is coordinator for both the New Westminster and Burnaby planning tables.
As she talks, Mariam’s passion for her work is easy to see. So what motivates her?
“I need to keep learning and working with good people to be happy,” she says.
The first seeds of working with older people were planted when she was just 19. She was working, going to school, and looking after frail grandparents. More recently, her husband’s family navigated her father-in-law’s long decline due to strokes, dementia and kidney failure.
This experience helped her recognize the importance of family communication in later life. She was inspired to go back to school and earned a post-baccalaureate diploma in gerontology from Simon Fraser University. She focused on developing ways to help people manage the impact of aging both at home and in the workplace.
“The biggest thing I get is a sense of perspective. These older people -- I don’t hear a lot of regrets,” she adds.
Riho has little in the way of possessions, but he has lived a life that few of us could imagine. As a bright young student he received a scholarship to study engineering at the University of British Columbia. Later he received his PhD in applied physics at Cornell University and went on to a highly classified career. He worked on the US Minuteman missile project.
This is not the face of homelessness that we are used to seeing. “I gave money to people that I shouldn’t have,” he says. After a few bad business deals, Riho was evicted and ended up at Burnaby General Hospital.
He met a social worker there who provides outreach to seniors that are at risk of homelessness or are already homeless. She helped him to find a room. Riho is one of the lucky ones. With a rapidly aging population, more seniors will need housing in the future.
The Seniors Services Society, with funding from United Way of the Lower Mainland, researched and developed a model of temporary housing for seniors.
The program helps seniors one at a time by providing temporary housing. The society’s main goal is to help clients find affordable, permanent housing within three months.
Seniors represent the fastest growing homeless group in the Metro Vancouver region. Almost one in four seniors (23%) in the region lives below the poverty line, and 30% of seniors live alone.
United Way of the Lower Mainland provides hope and opportunity for the seniors community. When seniors suffer from isolation, poverty, and homelessness, we all lose. In supporting seniors services, and allowing older people to stay active and live independently, we lessen the impact on our health system and benefit from a lifetime of experience.
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