(Not-so) radical giving, day 4: Street Health

If you’re a liberal-minded person in Ontario, you were likely upset at the election of our current premier, who soon after taking office got busy turning back the clock on sex ed, cancelling green rebate initiatives, withdrawing the province’s support from the resettlement of refugees, halting the curriculum update that would have made it better reflect the experiences of Indigenous folks, cancelling the basic income pilot project, passing a bill that would see the number of councillors at Toronto City Hall cut in half, and, more recently, halting the creation of new safe-injection sites. (But you might be able to get terrible beers for $1, so #worthit, right?)
If you listen to the news, you’re used to hearing regularly about our opioid epidemic, and that’s because it’s no trifling matter: in Ontario alone in 2017, 1200 people died from overdoses, 300 of them in Toronto. You better believe that if 1200 people died from faulty seatbelts or tainted lunch meat, the government wouldn’t be scaling back what they’re doing to save lives. But unfortunately we see drug users differently, give their lives and personhood less value.
So today I’m giving my $20 to Street Health, a service that provides medical care and counselling to people who are homeless or under-housed, as well as doing case management and harm reduction for drug users. Here are some pretty impressive stats for 2017:
- 1,641 people received nursing and/or mental health care over 10,111 visits
- handed out 223,137 harm-reduction kits
- held 131 harm-reduction drop-ins supporting 4,383 clients
- assisted 1,175 people in getting health cards
- 26,400 clients visited for health care and hygiene supplies
Street Health has a four-star Charity Intelligence rating, and there’s some indication, beyond humanitarian grounds, for it being a sound financial investment: because many of Street Health’s clients would have relied on emergency services, Charity Intelligence calculates the Street Health care they received may have saved $5 million in health care costs.
I’ve donated to Street Health through Canada Helps. (Note: I got an insecure site warning from my browser when I tried to give directly, so I’d recommend using Canada Helps just in case.) This donation is tax deductible for Canadians. They also accept certain gifts in kind (like toiletries and old cellphones + chargers, which can make emergency calls even without a plan).
If you want to get more specific on overdose prevention, you could donate to the Toronto Overdose Prevention Society’s gofundme, who just defied Ford and opened a temporary overdose prevention site in Parkdale.
So many people I know were upset (to say the least) when DoFo was voted into Queen’s Park. But being upset should never be the end: let’s make it the beginning of something better.
