By 11 a.m. Friday Downtown Mission Executive Director Rukshini Ponniah-Goulin will have spent 24 hours outside in solidarity with the homeless population the organization serves.
The annual Bench Talk is meant to gather community members to discuss finding meaningful solutions to reducing the number of people who are homeless in the community.
"To talk to them about how we can maybe do better for our community, do more for our community. Maybe other individuals have ideas and suggestions about how we can do different things and how we can work together with other organizations," said Ponniah-Goulin.
Ponniah-Gouilin said like many organizations, they are having to do more with fewer resources as the number of people accessing their services continues to grow.
"We've seen a pretty significant increase, about 55 per cent over what we did last year in our food bank," said Ponniah-Goulin.
She also indicated the mission is in need of volunteers as many people stopped serving during the pandemic.
"The last two years we've been very low in terms of human resources and at the same time have had more and more people coming from help," said Ponniah-Goulin. "So we're trying to get back to what we had before to build up our volunteer family again."
The Downtown Mission is celebrating its 50th anniversary in the community this year. In honour of that, the organization is hoping to raise $50,000. The money will go towards services at the mission and making the space more accessible.
