This woman is a friend of some friends of ours. It’s sad to see systems that are supposed to be helping give people a hand up fail the very people who are trying to take that hand. If you can help out by sharing, donating or both, I know it would be appreciated. They’re looking to raise $8000 to help her pay back rent and such, and at the time I’m writing this they’ve already gotten almost $1800 in less than a day. That’s impressive and gives me hope that everything is going to work out as it should. Wendy Fuller rent arrears fund.
My friend Wendy Fuller has been living in the Downtown Guelph Matrix building for almost 10 years.
She is developmentally challenged. On Friday morning the sheriffs came and escorted her out of the building and changed the locks. She has been being helped by social workers at Community Living but they really dropped the ball on her case. She was given an eviction notice and had a tribunal to dispute it. Her worker did not attend . Wendy went alone and had no idea what was going on. She was on geared to income and only paying $130 a month which was fine for years. Wendy is a proud person and wanted to work so she got a part time job dishwashing at Coras restaurant. When she started to work her rent up to $300 and that was fine too. She had to report her earnings to ODSP with a copy of her pay stub. That worked out too until Wendy started getting paid by direct deposit. She then had no way of reporting her income with out that stub!
She got kicked off of ODSP and her rent went up to over $800.00 . I have no idea how much she became in arrears because the building manager would not share this with me. I am so disappointed that the social workers at Community Living and ODSP failed this hard working lady. The manager at matrix failed her too! She knew that Wendy had this mental disability. Thank goodness the drop in Center has given her a voucher for 5 nights in the Royal hotel. I just don’t understand why they would evict an 48 year old mentally challenged lady a week before Christmas! This has seriously traumatized this disabled woman. I have emailed friends and many are willing to pitch in to pay her back rent. I know we can straighten things out to get her back to geared to income rent.
I will be her advocate and make sure this doesn’t happen again.
Sadly I can’t put a dime towards this or I’d probably be shoving a bunch that direction, but… can I use this post the next time I get an email about just how awesome ODSP is and how absolutely positively greatful we should be it exists? Because no. Seriously, just no.
I don’t know where people get the idea that you can’t be grateful for something’s existence while simultaneously expecting those responsible for administering that thing to do their jobs competently and getting upset and saying something about it when that doesn’t happen. So long story short, yes, you can. This is a perfect example of things needing to be better. No matter how grateful somebody’s supposed to be, when every aspect of the system fails that person something somewhere needs to change.
Go for it. And it looks like she’s almost at 3 grand. Gogogogogogogo!