Charity Cafe That Employs At Risk Youth Can’t Open Due To Strike

Mike Wood Daly peers out onto the street through the huge rain-smeared windows at the front of the Ground Level Café in Parkdale, and he’s confronted with a troubling symbol of a daunting reality.    It stands out like a sore throbbing thumb — one of the city’s increasingly grotesque garbage and recycle bins teeming with coffee cups, banana peels, and other assorted blends of rotting trash.  

It’s never out of sight — a constant reminder of the mess we’re in. 

For Wood Daly, however, that mess transcends trash.  

As executive director of Ground Level Youth Ventures, a non-profit, charitable foundation aimed at helping street youth find meaningful employment, Wood Daly knows that for every extra day the civic workers’ strike drags on, a young person could be slipping farther and farther away from the stability and self-confidence that a steady job can provide.   He wants to provide that opportunity, and has been for the past 10 years at the Ground Level Café, which was housed at two previous locations before finding its current home at Queen St. West and MacDonnell Avenue . 

Unfortunately, the café’s permit application for the new site was in the midst of being processed when city workers walked off the job, leaving Wood Daly unable to legally open to the public.   After a slew of costly renovations to ready the establishment, the news was devastating.  

“The renovations took pretty much close to a year and the building inspector didn’t end up signing off until I guess about a week to 10 days before the city strike,” he admits.  

Ground Level Youth Ventures Executive Director Mike Wood Daly

“At the licensing office they need to see that the building permit is no longer active before they issue our licence to be open to the public and serve food, that didn’t happen before the strike…there’s nobody who has been able to do that so basically we had staff hired, we had three youth hired and another three that we were ready to take on, we’ve had to just sort of lay off the three who we had hired.”

“Everything is complete,” he adds, referring to the permit application,”  “Yet it’s sitting on a computer on someone’s desk somewhere.”

It’s a heartbreaking reality for the former Minister, who also boasts a doctorate degree.

“It’s a huge challenge for all of these kids to find employment anywhere and that’s what the program’s about.  So to have a situation where they’ve got an opportunity and we’ve got to either suspend or slow that down, that’s pretty challenging.”

Over the years Wood Daly has seen first hand how the program can enrich a young person’s life, now he feels handcuffed by the labour dispute.

“We’ve had about a 75% success rate with our youth going on and finding other employment and we’ve had youth who have gone on to be employed by Public Health, Parks and Recreation, private business, we’ve had youth go on to be martial arts instructors, so it’s a wide range. 

“The basic premise of the café is not simply to turn out kids that are going to go work at Tim Hortons or Second Cup or whatever, it’s really an opportunity to give them a chance to get stable, get some income, identify what it is they really want to do in life and create some connections so they can explore those other employment opportunities.”

The alternatives, he notes, are too costly, to the individual, and society as a whole.

“We’d much rather have them working when the stats say that the majority of kids who are living on the street are going to be involved in crime at some point and when you look at the cost of incarcerating kids as opposed to employing them it’s a huge discrepancy, it’s far cheaper to employ them than to keep them in jail.”

Wood Daly and Board member, Stephanie Quinlan

Ground Level Youth Ventures board member Stephanie Quinlan feels equally frustrated by the situation.

“I have so many people coming up and saying, ‘When are you going to be opened?’ People want this café to be opened.   When we tell them that this isn’t just a nice little café, it’s also a café that has a social purpose behind it they get even more excited.

“It’s so frustrating to know that that support is out there and ready and waiting for us and knowing that due to circumstances beyond our control we are not able to harness that.”

“We thought this strike would be sort of a minor deterrent, we never thought that this would go on as long as it has and would impact us as severely as it has.”

So while the garbage builds up and the youths who would have been employed at the café seek out other, possibly more nefarious sources of cash on the streets, the doors remain closed.   The headlines may focus on the mounds of trash, but Wood Daly wants us to realize the full scope of the strike.  

“It’s a lot more than a garbage strike,” he stresses.  “It impacts the most vulnerable, those who are living closest to the line, those who are having challenges with raising kids and that sort of thing, and I think that’s the thing that really gets lost. 

“It’s not just an inconvenience.  It’s not having to drive our garbage to a dump site, it’s impacting real lives in ways that can be detrimental for years.”

michaelt@citytv.com

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