Our guests today are Jennifer, a 5-year resident of St. James Town, and Nayanthi Wijesuriya, who is the intake lead for Health Access St. James Town and also a member of the operations team at Community Corner.
Community Corner has a network of partnerships with grassroots groups in St. James Town as well as with other service provider agencies and faith-based organizations. Their ties with the grassroots groups has helped them to identify people in need, and to delivery grocery boxes to those people in the 19 high-rise buildings of St. James Town, as well as residents of nearby rooming houses, also called multi-tenant homes.
Our guest Jennifer volunteers in her building with Community Resilience to Extreme Weather (CREW), which plays a vital role in this initiative by helping residents to organize for emergency preparedness. CREW has been working in St. James Town for about two years and has remained active during the pandemic period, helping residents to support their neighbours in this grocery delivery initiative.
In April, CREW volunteers in their building placed notices in all the residents’ mailboxes to let them know that grocery box donations were available. Forty boxes of groceries were delivered next day.