“Most of us would do something to help people journey out of poverty, if only we knew what we could do.”

This was YSM President & CEO Angie Peters’ premise when she invited 34 leaders from 5 different sectors across Toronto to participate in a half-day Poverty Hack-a-Thon in 2022. Together, the group could begin to identify how to address the problems faced by single-parent families, who are experiencing disproportionate levels of poverty in Toronto right now. What might residential developers, large-scale employers, social policy experts, and philanthropists be able to do if they worked together?

As an essential component to ground the conversation in lived experience, Angie invited four courageous, gifted single parents to help design and lead the event as part of a Single Parent Advisory Review Panel.

MELISSA’S STORY

“It was a great feeling when Angie reached out to me to be on the Advisory Panel,” Melissa says. “She knows the way I can empathize with people and that I’m a very passionate person. If I put my mind to something, I will do it.”

As a single parent living in rental housing in Toronto, Melissa was working constantly, but found after she paid her rent there wasn’t enough money left for clothing, food, or her daughter’s needs. “You shouldn’t have to choose,” she says. As the strain of her finances negatively affected her mental and physical wellbeing, in 2017, among other losses, Melissa lost her job, and her daughter was placed into care. She reached out to YSM for support. 

Now Melissa is living in a rent-geared-toincome apartment, and she is able to make ends meet. This means she is able to focus more of her time on being
a parent, with more money in her pocket at the end of the day.

“When Angie asked, I decided to put one foot in and see where it went,” Melissa explains. “We are going to see what we can do to take action.”

GIULIANA’S STORY

Giuliana had just retired from her job as Deputy City Manager for Community and Social Services for the City of Toronto when Angie invited her to join the conversation at the Hack-a-Thon.

While her career spanned both the private and public sectors, she says, “I loved working in the public sector, helping communities become more resilient.” Born and raised in Toronto, Giuliana noticed that as prosperity rose in the city, it didn’t benefit every community. She saw, too, how even as the city tried to help, “You make a difference, but we weren’t eradicating poverty. I firmly believe no one sector is going to do that on their own. We needed a deeper understanding of what we were all doing, of the systems and barriers.”

WORKING TOGETHER 

At the Hack-a-Thon, participants worked together to identify possible solutions to the key challenges single parents face. Afterward, many of the participants and lived experience leaders were eager to stay connected and continue to advance the work into actionable plans.

The lived experience leaders reviewed the Hack-a-Thon content and prioritized the ideas developed, then the group established three #HackPoverty Working Groups in the areas of Housing, Community Supports and Income & Benefits. Each group is co-chaired by a person with lived experience of poverty and a leader in the relevant sector; in the Community Supports group, Melissa and Giuliana are now co-chairs. Their group is tackling how to help community residents navigate the services available to them. “There are so many people struggling in the city with no idea of where to go for help,” Giuliana says.

“This group is developing ideas that I wish I could have had at an earlier point in my life,” says Melissa. “I’m all about helping our group, because I know what it’s like to feel like the whole universe is sitting on your shoulders and there’s not a single thing you can do to help fix the situation. Maybe by helping the group, I can help someone else.”

“I really commend Angie for bringing everyone together,” Giuliana says. “As an individual I look at something based on my knowledge, and someone else will look at it totally differently. No one individual can look at everything. But when you look together, you can find a way forward.”