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Good food, good company, good spirit as Ottawa Mission opens its doors for Easter meal

By John Stoesser, Ottawa Citizen April 1, 2013

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Good food, good company, good spirit as Ottawa Mission opens its doors for Easter meal

By John Stoesser, OTTAWA CITIZEN April 1, 2013

OTTAWA — Volunteers served up an Easter dinner of roast beef at the Ottawa Mission on Monday afternoon to anyone in need of a good meal. Every day for the past week, about 20 helpers channelled the spirit of giving and prepared gallons of gravy, baked thousands of potatoes, sliced up hundreds of pies and cooked more than 1,000 kilograms of roast beef.

Over a six-hour period, 2,352 meals were served during the annual feast.

Mary Hall’s favourite part wasn’t just the roast beef, but also the conversation.

“It’s great that (the volunteers) really put a lot of effort into the meal,” she said. “But I don’t
come just for the food, but for the camaraderie too. It’s no fun eating alone and amazing what sharing a meal with people can do for your spirits.”

The mission’s food services manager of 11 years, Ric Watson, says he could be working in a restaurant or a hotel, but his current duties are more fulfilling.

“It’s a cause close to my heart,” Watson said. “You spend a day here helping people and you don’t want to leave. I’ve been in bad situations before and people were always there to help me. This is my way of giving back.”

Three hours into the meal and the volunteers had already provided more than a thousand plates of food. Throughout this hectic atmosphere, no one seemed stressed or agitated and the amount of laughter far outnumbered any frowns.

Watson said the best part was seeing families and children smile as they enjoyed a good holiday meal they might not otherwise have had.

In existence since 1906, the Ottawa Mission shelters an average of 255 men a night and also provides meals, job training and addiction treatment for those in need. The mission relied on donations to provide the Easter meal.

Rita McCartney, a volunteer of five years, was plating food in the bustling kitchen. After moving to Canada from Belfast in 1974, McCartney, a retired financial planner, said she’s always volunteered because “it’s an amazing feeling being able to help.”

“Hard luck, like losing a job, could happen to anyone,” she said. “I think you get a sense of how homelessness actually affects people when you work at a place like this.”

McCartney said she could just as easily be on the other side of the counter.

After admitting to finishing his third dessert, Joseph Taaffe said he lives on about $700 a month and feels lucky because “some people don’t even have that.”

“The staff are very friendly, very respectful and make it very comfortable to come here,” he said.

Market researcher and volunteer Melanie Clement added to the ambience with some live entertainment. A one-woman act, she put her singing talents to use with tunes like John Lennon’s Imagine.

Special servers from Ottawa City Hall, the Ottawa Police Service and former a NHLer, Jim Kyte,
also lent a hand

Hockey Helps the Homeless hits the ice

>By Blair Edwards, EMC  March 7, 2013

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Hockey Helps the Homeless hits the ice, Charity tournament raises more than
$100,000 for city’s most vulnerable citizens

Posted Mar 7, 2013 By Blair Edwards

EMC sports – It’s 9 a.m. on a Friday morning at the Bell Sensplex and Barb Gray waits anxiously in the hallway of the Bell Sensplex.

In less than half an hour she and her Freedom 55 Financial teammates will play their first game in the Hockey Helps the Homeless tournament, sharing the ice with Canadian Women’s Hockey League players Haley Irwin and Carolyne Prevost.

This is Gray’s second year competing in the charity hockey tournament.

“I played last year. It was probably one of the best experiences in hockey in the 10-plus years I’ve played recreational hockey,” she said. “It was a real treat to share the locker room on the ice with two women hockey pros: Caroline Ouellette and Anne-Sophie Bettez.”

The players were all treated like professionals as soon as they showed up at the rink, said Gray, with tournament volunteers collecting their equipment bags at the front doors and all participants receiving professionally-stitched jerseys.

It was also nice to know the money raised at the tournament would help some of the city’s most vulnerable citizens, with the funds going to the Ottawa Mission and Ottawa Innercity Ministries, she said.

“It was very worthwhile to get an in-depth understanding of the needs of the community,” Gray said.

Amanda Shaw, a defenceman with the CWHL Toronto Furies, greeted participants at the door of the Sensplex for the March 1 tournament, helping organizers with registration.

“I was part of the very first (Hockey Helps the Homeless) women’s event, which was in Toronto,” she said. “It’s an amazing cause.”

The tournament helps educate people about some of the causes of homelessness, such as mental illness and abusive home environments, she added.

“I think it’s really important to get the word out about homelessness in the community.”

THIRD-ANNUAL EVENT

Hockey Helps the Homeless is an annual event played in major cities across Canada. It allows hockey enthusiasts to play three games on a team with National Hockey League and CWHL alumni, such as former Ottawa Senators Laurie Boschman and Brad Marsh.

Eight men’s teams and six women’s teams suited up for the third annual Ottawa tournament.

For a $150 registration fee, participants received a team jersey with their name on the back and an invitation to a dinner and a silent auction.

In addition, every participant was expected to fundraise a minimum of $150.

Every year, the event raises between $150,000 to $200,000 in each of the participating cities such as Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, with 35 per cent of the money used to pay cost of running the tournaments.

At the Ottawa tournament, each team played three games with a championship final at the end of the day for both the men’s and women’s sides.

The event also featured a game between the NHL alumni versus the CWHL pros.

The Ottawa tournament almost didn’t happen last year. Organizers were forced to postpone the event because of a lack of interest from participants and volunteers.

But interest in the tournament picked up after the media reported on the charity’s organizing problems, with several volunteers stepping forward, including Kanata’s Dave Edgecomb, cochairman of last year’s event.

This year’s co-chairperson is Judy Thompson, a former chairwoman of the HOPE volleyball charity tournament and several other charities.

Thompson said she decided to volunteer when she heard about the tournament’s organizing difficulties in the media.

“Ottawa’s a very generous town,” she said. “We have a lot of volunteers.”

This year, Thompson and co-chairman Mike Coughlin headed up a team of eight core volunteers to organize the tournament and 25 event-day volunteers.

This year’s tournament is expected to raise more than $110,000, said Thompson. The final numbers weren’t immediately available.

Most of the money is collected through registration fees and individual fundraising, with a smaller amount coming from corporate sponsorship.

“We’re certainly over the $100,000 mark,” she said. “It’s a great day for a great cause.”

HOMELESSNESS

Organizers were hoping to raise $150,000 at this year’s event, with the money going to support the Ottawa Mission and Ottawa Innercity Ministries. Last year’s tournament raised $106,000.

Almost 8,000 people used Ottawa shelters in 2011, said Ken MacLaren, executive director of Ottawa Innercity Ministries.

Organizers of the tournament estimate there are between 150,000 and 300,000 homeless people in Canada, with children and young families comprising a growing segment of the homeless population.

“It’s going up,” he said. “There’s been an increase in the number of youth, the number of children and the number of single-parent families. I think the economy has something to do with it.”

Ottawa Innercity Ministries received $8,000 last year from the tournament, using the money for its Passion for Youth art program.

A group of 20 youth – many with experience living on the street – participated in the program and their work was put on display at an art show and auction.

“We’re looking to build self esteem in kids,” said MacLaren. “We also work with them with volunteer mentors.”

The mentors help the youth participants realize personal goals such as completing high school or getting a job.

The Ottawa Mission used its share of the funds raised by last year’s tournament for its food services training program, buying classroom supplies and textbooks.

Hockey Helps the Homeless also raises awareness about the problem of homelessness in Ottawa, said Shirley Roy, a spokesperson for the Ottawa Mission.

“It draws in people who might not come down to the shelter,” she said. “Hockey Helps the Homeless is a great community event to educate people about some of the issues surrounding homelessness.”

How one man discovered the art of ascending from depression

By Kelly Egan, The Ottawa Citizen January 18, 2013

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How one man discovered the art of ascending from depression

By Kelly Egan, The Ottawa Citizen January 18, 2013

Richard Cole tries to illustrate life with untreated depression, one man’s descent to
bedrock.

“I once spent an entire week,” he says, pausing as though using an imaginary highlighter, “an entire week, at the Hull casino. Living on coffee.”

No sleep, no gambling, just wide-awake, nowhere to go, nothing really to do but hide from the cold.

It’s just after lunch at the Atomic Rooster restaurant on upper Bank Street. A pitcher of beer is being served at the next table, an early start for a couple of the boys on stools, Seahawks highlights playing on a sports channel.

Cole, 61, is in a corner booth. A thin man, he wears big, windowpane glasses, a cableknit sweater, a newsboy hat. An electric cigarette dangles from his neck.

It’s a good week for him. He is part of a three-person art show that just opened on the walls of the Rooster. It’s official: he’s a struggling artist.

“I don’t have spikes anymore,” he says, moving his hand in a long wave motion. “For the last 14 or 15 months, I’ve been flatlining, and that’s fantastic.”

For a long time, his mind raced, this engine that just wouldn’t turn off. “Up until two years ago, I thought chaos was normal.”

He worked with computer systems most of his life. Banks, the CBC, Canada Post, the feds. He was twice married, but generally unsettled and angrier than was good for him.

He split up with his second wife, had “a nervous break-down.” This was followed by months and months of couch surfing, until he landed, near rock bottom, at the Ottawa Mission on Waller Street. “My life was a muddle.”

He was put in touch with medical staff. Diagnosis? Depression. Cole was put on medication for the first time.

He also began attending the Mission’s day program, an opportunity to talk about his history and outlook, and stuck with it for a full year.

There was a lot to cover. Cole says he grew up in a dysfunctional family where alcohol played havoc. He was four, he says, when his parents decided it would be a good idea to hitchhike across Canada. With him in tow.

He grew up in a hurry, later having to care for younger siblings. “I went from hell to hell in servitude.”

At age 16, now in Toronto, he left the house. He eventually enrolled at the Ontario College of Art, but worked nights at a big brokerage firm, reconciling accounts on earlydays computers. He was good at it.

Computers and financials would be a big professional preoccupation for him for the next decade or two.

He once held jobs in Toronto and New York, commuting to both weekly from Ottawa, where he had a wife and stepchildren.

You bet his mind raced. “I have to fight all the time to get these things under control.”

Dr. Simon Hatcher is a psychiatrist at the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre who does rounds at the downtown shelters.

Undiagnosed depression is a big problem in the general population – as many as a third to half of sufferers don’t get help – possibly more so in a hard-to-house population.

“Stigma is a big one,” Dr. Hatcher said, when asked about the barriers to treatment. “Lack of recognition. People who self-medicate.”

The illness also “presents” in ways other than a simple feeling of sadness: poor sleeping, agitation, restlessness, loss of pleasure in regular activities.

There is good news about depression, which tends to be recurring.

“The bottom line is depression is very treatable.” Indeed. Treatment has turned this one man around.

When it comes to art, Cole draws on simplicity. He has on display eight abstract pieces that use a poured acrylic method and simple shapes, often primary colours: a red square against a blue background, a green triangle against a red sky. They don’t have fancy names, but numbers.

The pieces are glazed to look like glossy ceramic. Not so easy to do: four coats of varnish daily for 10 straight days. They sell in the $125 range, unframed.

They are, in a word, joyful, a tone that suits his present station in life, the calm port he’s arrived at.

“I don’t worry about being thrown off the top of the mountain any more. I am the mountain. The top, the bottom, the middle.”

The show continues at the Rooster, 303 Bank near Somerset, until Feb. 10.

Health Services

Many homeless men and women suffer from illnesses that go undiagnosed and untreated. Their physical symptoms can be complicated by addiction and mental health issues making it difficult to access health care.

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