If you’re looking for someone with a glass-half-full outlook, Renee MacKillop more than fills the bill.
“Calgary is an amazing place and people here are so generous,” says the energetic young woman. “I think that this year they have been even more supportive, because they can relate more to people who are struggling to put food on the table.”
Indeed, it’s been tough times for our city, tougher even than the fallout from the 2008 worldwide financial crisis. Tens of thousands of oilpatch workers have been given pink slips, the city’s 8.6 per cent unemployment rate now leads the country and — well, you get the picture.
It’s not that MacKillop suffers from naive optimism, though. For the past year, she’s been on the front lines of the war against poverty in our city.
As the manager of the Community Food Centre in Forest Lawn — a partnership between the Alix Community Health Centre and Community Food Centres Canada — she works every day to make the concept of eating healthy accessible to low-income families.
“It’s the first in Calgary, the first in Western Canada,” MacKillop says of the centre that offers everything from cooking classes to, by next year, a community garden. “It’s a new approach that we already see having an impact on the community.”
MacKillop and her organization are among the many profiled in the 2016 Vital Signs Report produced by the Calgary Foundation, an organization that has been helping Calgarians for more than six decades.
Now in its 10th year, Vital Signs has been used by the foundation to, as its senior communications adviser Kerry Longpre explains, “take the pulse of our community and measure the vitality and spirit of Calgary,” as well as help the foundation to make decisions for future grant funding.
On Tuesday morning, the Calgary Foundation holds a news conference at the new Remington YMCA in Quarry Park, to talk about the findings of this year’s report, along with announcing a $2 million gift to YMCA Calgary for its Power of Potential campaign.
While the current downturn might have many expecting to see Calgary receive its lowest overall grade in years, it gets a B from the hundreds of respondents surveyed, the same grade as both 2014 and 2015.
In fact, says Taylor Barrie, the results were pretty much the same from last year in just about every category, with the exception of the environment, which went from a B- in 2015 to a C+ for 2016.
Barrie, director of communications for the Calgary Foundation, begins her talk on the report’s findings by citing a long laundry list of the city’s current ails, from a 16 per cent youth unemployment rate that is now the highest in the country, the 4,000 businesses in the city that have closed their doors in the first seven months of 2016, along with the 60,000 more people accessing the Calgary Food Bank over last year.
“So, are you depressed yet?” she asks with a smile, speaking to the crowd assembled in the Remington YMCA’s main hall, before adding, “We have lots we can celebrate this year.”
For one, the area of Arts and Culture received its highest grade of the report, a B. A new category, called Sense of Belonging, also found 79 per cent of Calgarians reporting a strong sense of belonging to their community, a number slightly higher than the national average. Despite challenging times, 58 per cent of Calgarians agreed with the statement that this city is the best place in the world to live (for the full report, go to calgaryfoundation.org).
While some may accuse the Calgary Foundation of being stubbornly optimistic in troubled times, people like Jean-Claude Munyezamu share that stubbornness.
“The study says we are going to have nearly 500,000 immigrants in Calgary by 2020,” says Munyezamu, a native of Rwanda who started the charitable sports organization Soccer Without Boundaries (soccerwithoutboundaries.org) seven years ago. “It’s so important to get them involved in every aspect of life in this city, and sport is the key.”
Munyezamu, a Calgary Foundation funding recipient also profiled in the 2016 Vital Signs report, does acknowledge that keeping a small sports charity going in a downturn has been “very, very tough.” Still, he’s been doing it long enough to see the kind of success that made him start his organization back in 2009.
“It is crucial to make sure these children are integrated properly,” he says of the mostly immigrant kids in the organization’s soccer leagues. “Playing soccer serves as a connector — they meet other children, their neighbours. They find a community.”
MacKillop says she’s also seen great results at the centre that also benefited from funding this year by the Calgary Foundation. “Food is a powerful way to build health for people and the community,” she says. “When times are tough, what we do becomes even more important.”
vfortney@postmedia.com
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