Community Services will pay for the cab for a person who is getting released from day surgery if the person cannot take the bus home. But finding someone to accompany you home who the hospital approves of is sometimes difficult, Kendall Worth reports.
“I had just turned 60 and I knew I had to make some drastic changes in my life, if not I felt certain I would not have a life, or my mind would be so completely gone, that I would not have been any good to myself or anyone else. I should have been looking forward to retirement and a relaxed future but instead I was sleeping with my phone under my bed clothes ready to dial 911.” Devorah Rivkah writes about the life-changing powers of Adsum for Women and Children.
In September several MLAs from all three parties attended a screening of My Week on Welfare at the auditorium of the Nova Scotia Art Gallery in downtown Halifax. This is what Aron Spidle, who is featured in the documentary, told the MLAs. “When a friend asks me to do something with them, the first thing that occurs to me is to ‘how can I get out of this gracefully?’ because most of the time I cannot afford it.”
Kendall accompanies four friends who go shopping for Thanksgiving dinner. “I guess you can say that this story, along with my recent Thanksgiving story, show the amazing efforts people living in poverty sometimes make to keep themselves out of social isolation,” Kendall writes.
Whether it’s postal banking, grocery delivery, affordable broadband internet access in communities that currently lack it, and postal-worker check in on seniors so that they can live longer in their own homes, postal workers have been pushing for better postal services for everyone, writes postal worker Mike Keefe.
Governments are increasingly using Social Impact Bonds as a method to finance what are broadly called social services. With social impact bonds governments repay investors only if the programs improve social outcomes, for example, lower unemployment or prison recidivism. The approach has been tried in Justice and corrections, skills training, public health, child welfare, services for seniors, early childhood development, education, homelessness, supports for people with physical disabilities, and mental health to name a few. But really it’s just another flavour of privatization, writes Danny Cavanagh.
Poverty advocate Kendall Worth asks his friends and acquaintances about being grateful despite all the problems poverty brings. He gets some amazing responses, and learns how people are teaming up to support one another.
With Nova Scotia now officially the province with the lowest minimum wage in the country, some 100 folks gathered at Dalhousie University’s Killam Library this afternoon to demand a raise in the minimum wage, better working conditions altogether, as well as higher social assistance rates. Here is what community activist Lynn Jones told the protesters.
One of the many hard things about having to depend on social assistance is the stigma. People often assume you’re lazy, even though invisible disabilities stop you from working. The other day poverty advocate Kendall Worth talked with one such person, who got verbally attacked by her fellow passengers on the bus.
Kate, a fearless mother who we have written about before, fights Community Services and gets the glasses (with warranty) her autistic son requires. It was hard and scary, and it looks like questions the NS Advocate was asking made a bit of a difference. This story has a happy ending, but you can’t help but wonder how many people would just have given up much earlier.