3 | SCARBOROUGH MIRROR | Thursday, December 26, 2013
community
Beary Merry Christmas HOSPITAL VISITORS: Right, Metroland Media Toronto’s Cathie Orban brings some holiday cheer and gifts to Christina Balduini, 6, at The Scarborough Hospital - General campus on Friday as part of the annual Beary Merry Christmas campaign. Below, Metroland Media Toronto’s Colleen LeBlanc, right, and Orban bring some holiday cheer and gifts to Nicholas Josiah and his mother Brizia Sequeira at The Scarborough Hospital - Birchmount campus.
Photos/WILLIAM MEIJER
CARES program trying to restart in new year Program run on shoestring buget that helped divert people from crime now on hiatus MIKE ADLER madler@insidetoronto.com CARES, a Scarborough agency that gave hundreds of local young people a way out of welfare and crime by helping them get a high school diploma, will try to re-establish itself in 2014 after a hiatus. Its hopes of a longterm survival, however, appear faint. Run on a shoestring budget in a former Eglinton Avenue dance studio, the alternative education centre was short of money for several years. Only personal contributions from volunteers and other supporters kept CARES going. Finally, changes at Ontario Works, its main source of clients, meant CARES’ director Maryann Poulos had to collect money from clients directly, and that proved too difficult. “She came to the conclusion it was pointless to keep working this
way,” and closed the agency’s office in June, Hedy Baker-Graf, a retired teacher who has volunteered with CARES for eight years, said. Opened in 2003 as the Centre for Addiction, Recovery and Employment Services, CARES found success preparing young people for a high school equivalency called the GED, or General Educational Development. small groups GED is a faster route to a diploma than earning conventional school credits, and taught in small groups, CARES clients started to turn their lives around. Baker-Graf said she worked more than 1,000 youths at CARES, and though many had been on a criminal path, most passed their GED exam and some went on to apprenticeships or college. One CARES graduate got into
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The goal is to eventually find new quarters but we also have to find a steady source of funding. – Hedy Baker-Graf, volunteer with CARES
York University, and started there this fall, she said. “We know that the program works.” But the province, which grants the GED diploma, doesn’t fund preparation for the GED exam, saying GED preparation services are unregulated and funding them would require a change in law. Poulos, who was unavailable for an interview, tried for years to get political support for that change, arguing her clients, if they passed the GED and got off welfare as a result, would save the City of Toronto and the province millions.
Glenn De Baeremaeker, local councillor for the strip plaza west of Markham Road where CARES operated, said the agency can’t be replaced and its loss is particularly felt in Scarborough Village, an area the city recognizes is short of social services. ‘weaker’ “That community, and our c o m m u n i t y, i s n ow w e a k e r because they’re missing,” said De Baeremaeker, adding CARES was doing something special, if unconventional, for people with more than one problem. “They really were a lifeline to those people.” While De Baeremaeker said he would be happy to help CARES if there is something the city can do, the agency has continued some of its GED preparation work in a temporary partnership with Native Child
and Family Services of Toronto. Native Child and Family would not comment on the partnership, which will end when the students write the GED exam in January, but Baker-Graf said Poulos was able to bring some of her Scarborough Village clients to a GED program at the Scarborough Child and Family Life Centre on Galloway Road. Volunteering there as well as teaching credits for Toronto’s public school board, Baker-Graf said she is donating her pay to allow CARES to exist until January. She said she’s still hopeful the agency can find a home, adding a Kingston Road church has offered a free basement space. “The goal is to eventually find new quarters but we also have to find a steady source of funding,” said Baker-Graf.
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