Facts & Stats

• We had 56,263 visits this year. This means that an average of 154 different people came through our doors each and every day of 2008. This number alone is staggering in and of itself in that over 150 people every single day in one of Canada’s wealthiest cities need to come here for their basic needs of food, shelter and clothing. And now that we have completed our 8th year here at Gateway, the kind of traffic that we experience is having some major effects on the wear and tear of the building. Our expenses continue to rise just to keep the building itself operating smoothly and efficiently so that we can provide the best possible care to our people.
• Of a possible 39,528 beds in 2008 (Due to an extra day because of Leap Year), we used 39,604. Yes, that means we were more than 100% occupied in 2008. This can technically happen as at times we will use a bed during the daytime for men who work a night shift job(and are trying to accumulate enough money to pay first and last months rent in their own place), and then use that same bed at night for someone else who needs a bed. We have been using that same practice throughout our entire existence and still have never surpassed a 98% occupancy for the whole year. So having a 100.19% occupancy rate for a year is a staggering statistic. These numbers are a concrete indicator that homelessness is still a growing problem, not a shrinking one. In 1995 we had a 95.11% rate. In 1996 it was 96.54%. 1997 we were at 97.11%. And now this year for the first time in our history we are over our capacity. These numbers should be cause for alarm. The problems are getting worse. We are failing as a society to meet basic human needs.
• As usual, we still have 2 housing specialists on staff whose entire job is to help link our residents to affordable and appropriate housing. This year we housed 227 different men into their own apartments. As we have 108 beds at Gateway, we housed more than 2 full shelters of people this year. This shattered our previous record that we set last year at 196, and is dramatically up from our number in 2006 which was 174. We believe these higher numbers are due to a few potential things; i. We continue to get better at what we do and have 2 amazing housing specialists on staff. ii. With the ongoing glut of condos in Toronto, there are even more vacancies in rental units and more landlords willing to speak to us due to them having un-rented space. iii. The economic downturn may actually be making it easier for us to find apartments for our men, as apartment occupancy rates continue to drop.
  One of the many things I am proud of with our housing work is that we purchase a brand new single box spring and mattress for every person we house. So last year we bought 227 beds for folks, then loaded them up in our van, drove them to someone’s brand new apartment and helped them move in. As you might imagine, this cost alone is very big and we could use more financial support just to keep up with the demand of purchasing all of these mattresses. We yet again seem to be penalized financially for being good at what we do as the budget allotment for this expense does not go up proportionately with the number of beds we need to buy.
• 1259 different people spent at least one night with us in 2008. Of that number, 690 of them stayed with us for less than 2 weeks.  So 55% of the people who stayed here were men who experienced very short term homelessness. These numbers are significantly down from previous years when we reported numbers as high as 65%. However, it still means that more than half of the people needing shelter are men who are experiencing a short term crisis, and do not fit the description that the media would have us believe to be the face of homelessness. The housing and job markets are so fragile that most people experiencing homelessness in Toronto today are those who simply can’t find the means to pay rent. They are working class men who are trying to get by but need to humble themselves for short periods of time by living in a shelter long enough to get back on their feet.  I suspect that this recession will see a dramatic rise in this number as more and more people lose their jobs.
• 547 of the men who stayed here in 2008 had never ever booked a bed with us before. This was their first time with us. So one in every 2.3 people who came here were brand new to us. Some of these will have been people who have stayed in other shelters, (we will hopefully be able to track this better next year when the city’s new shelter database is implemented) but most are people experiencing homelessness for the first time. So while people are obviously getting out of the shelter system regularly, there is a steady stream of new people coming in who are slipping through the cracks of our towns and cities all across Canada. Homelessness is not just a Toronto problem; it’s a Canadian problem.
• The average age of the men who stayed with us this year is 41.7. This has been a consistent number from the day we opened our doors until now. Again, this is clear evidence that middle aged men in our culture have a very difficult time finding meaningful work for meaningful pay and essentially have been declared unemployable. In 2008 we finally took a significant step in helping our people reintegrate into the workforce. We opened our very first social purpose enterprise, Gateway Linens. This program will provide the linen services for all five of the SA shelters in Toronto, and hire four men from the shelters to work and train there. At the end of their 6 month program, our graduates will be offered full-time, unionized work with benefits from a local linen company. We have been in operation since April 1, 2008 and so far this program has proven far more successful than we could have hoped. (I’ll attach a separate overview of the program thus far.) We hope to improve on our programs and support staff to help our men find good jobs and get back on their feet.
• We did struggle this year with our case management structure. Our case management supervisor went back to school in September and we had almost four months of having only one case manager. I think this factor has contributed to some of the other stats being so skewed this year, as we have had less flow through the system than we were able to have when we have full time case managers at work. While this was a real struggle for us, especially our one case manager who tried to manage all of our files on her own, it was a helpful reminder as to the vital nature of having two solid, committed case managers working here at all times. We also went almost the entire year without an addictions counselor and so our supports to our friends with addictions also stumbled along this year. We are thankfully about to hire someone in early February that we have high hopes in.
• This year we served 116,483 meals, up almost 5000 from last year. This stat speaks for itself as to the need in our community and to the rising costs we are facing to simply maintain our existing program.
• Our chaplaincy work took on a new look this past year. Our chaplain was heavily involved with working with kids in street gangs before he arrived here. He brought some of that flavour to us and he really had an impact on some of our younger folks who were connected to street gangs and had been in and out of jails. He resigned at the end of 2008 to go full time in the Jane and Finch community as a street chaplain there. We hired a new chaplain in December who was already a part of our staff as a housing specialist. He is very pastoral in nature and comes with lots of pastoral experience in the church. He has a solid grasp of who our community is. His number one goal is to make more connections with the existing church so that we can connect our people with the local church.
• We tallied 7576 volunteer hours this year. Also a new record high for us. We certainly can use more volunteers to help us serve meals and do other things but we are thrilled that people continue to give freely of their time. If you’d like to volunteer here, we’d love to have you. You can contact our volunteer coordinator Erika at erikagreen@thegateway.ca
• Our health care clinic, consisting mainly of a nurse and a family doctor who come occasionally throughout the week, saw 1103 visits this year. (We had a lot of months without a doctor this year so if anyone knows a doctor that is interested in volunteering for 2 hours per week, we’re all ears) That’s up again from last year’s number 1013 and even more from the previous year of 771. So around 92 people per month get health care here that feels safe and accessible to them.
• Our high support outreach team, which goes out to the streets every day of the year to build relationships with people who live outside, has really evolved into a powerful piece of our program. In partnership with the city’s ‘Streets to Homes’ plan, our outreach work has become far more about quality and far less about quantity. Our workers spend a lot of time with individuals in effort to help encourage people to come in from the street and into housing. We housed 12 individuals directly from the street and into housing as a result of our work on the streets. Our main focus areas are the Don Valley as well as the Danforth. Our outreach specialists are a great team consisting of long time veterans who have worked here for a lot of years as well as two men who have themselves lived on the streets for significant periods of time in their lives.
• At Christmas we did our ‘Christmas Store’. Many of the men who stay with us have no means to purchase a gift for their loved ones. We get around $1000 worth of toys and other gifts and ‘sell’ them in exchange for volunteer time or at very low cost. This provides the resident the ability to provide something to a loved one that they earned rather than something they had to beg for. After all, ‘…it is more blessed to give than it is to receive’. (Jesus)
• Our drop-in centre which is open 5 days a week (including all weekends and holidays) and feeds 18000 meals a year over and above our shelter residents is currently still not funded by any source. We are the only drop-in in our area that is open on holiday Mondays as well as many Saturdays and Sundays. The volume of people accessing this drop-in is constantly rising and yet we are still not funded by any source. We desperately need to find a funding source for this $80,000/yr program.
• Our many other programs that have successes that can’t be counted are still in operation. We still have several fully functional computers online and accessible to our community to aid in email, computer skills, job and housing searches, etc. Our other efforts to build community this year involved things such as a softball team consisting of our residents and staff (this year we came 2nd in the tournament), picnics, BBQs, Stephen Ministry support, ID replacement, special event parties, karaoke nights, clothing distribution (we distributed close to 7000 free articles of clothing this year), a money saving program, and Christmas packages where each man who woke up here on Christmas morning got a bag stuffed with Christmas gifts.
• Our website, www.thegateway.ca, is still up and functioning. We managed to add a ‘donate online’ option so if you’re out there and would like to contribute financially to our cause, we could definitely use the money and would be extremely grateful for your gift.

So it wasn’t our most stellar year in some respects, especially due to our staffing issues around case management. But in other ways, we feel like we have excelled and surpassed our expectations of whatever successes we had hoped for. And we know that we have touched many lives in 2008 despite the many speed bumps along the way.

We are looking to 2009 through lenses of hope. We have our entire counseling team in place and ‘all systems are go’ there. We have our laundry program running on all cylinders. And we’ve done a ton of capitol repairs due to some funding we received through the government which makes our building ready to face the traffic it experiences every day.

But yet our hearts continue to break for the many people who continue to be left behind by our consumer society with its insatiable appetite for more useless stuff at any cost. We’re not in it for the money as there’s quite simply no way to place a monetary value on what we do. The joys and rewards and loss and pains that we each experience every day far outweigh any trivial conversations around money. Having said that, we do need to raise some money to keep this program moving forward and will be taking some new initiatives on that front in the coming year.

For now, we’ll keep on trying to be
The Hand of God in the Heart of the City.

Dion