Nanny Darling

A little less than a month ago my maternal grandmother, Shirley Gleeson, passed away. She was known to us, her grandkids, as Nanny. These past weeks have been a mixed bag of emotions, but the overarching feeling I have when I consider my Nanny is gratitude. I’m grateful for the example that Nanny set, in…

hospitality on Queen St.

Have you ever had an experience that felt too meaningful to describe? That’s how I’ve been feeling about a recent outreach walk in Parkdale. While I know that I won’t be able to paint an adequate picture of the evening, I’d like to try and share what I can. While we saw and chatted with…

a week of wins!

Last week was one for the books! As Erinn wrote about in her latest blog, a dear Dale friend had their (urgent) housing and healthcare needs met in an unusually timely fashion. This was the result of some pretty beautiful teamwork on the part of a variety of agencies; further proof that partnership and collaboration…

Monday moments

This past Monday, during our staff check-in before drop-in, we as a team acknowledged that we were feeling tired. There are a number of folks at The Dale whose lives are particularly tumultuous at the moment, a trend that we often see during the hot summer months. Between intense mental health struggles, housing (or lack…

Camp

This past weekend about thirty of us from The Dale went up to Camp Koinonia. It was an adventure, from start to finish! This year we had a number of strong personalities on the trip, and a couple of folks with significant mental health struggles. The combination of these factors led to some tension on…

Back in the saddle

Happy autumn! I/we are back in the swing of things at The Dale, after a very full summer and then some time away. Thanks to the generosity of a dear friend, she and I were able to spend the last couple of weeks away from our regular lives, doing some traveling: exploring, reading, hiking, thinking,…

John

This week has been a tough one. Just days after having Nicole’s death confirmed, we learned that our friend John had also died. John was a genuine kind of guy. A couple of years ago he was quite a constant presence at The Dale. He was going through a very difficult time, and would come…

Nicole

Nicole was special. The first time I met her was at our Wednesday morning art and breakfast drop in a few years ago. She sat in the corner, quietly creating beautiful pen and marker drawings. She would eat breakfast, continue drawing, and then slip out. It took a number of weeks before we had a…

The spice of life

If variety is the spice of life, yesterday was a flavourful day! We met in the morning to do some admin work at our new “office”, the kitchen of a baptist church in Chinatown that has graciously offered us space, access to wifi, and a coffee maker 🙂 We talked through some logistics, answered emails,…

Grateful!

Today I am very grateful. Grateful (on many levels) that Erinn’s husband Dion has been out of the hospital for a couple of weeks now, and that Erinn has been able to return to The Dale. Grateful that a young man in our community will soon be out of the shelter system, and into subsidized…