Riley Brandt

Demand at the Calgary Inter-Faith Food Bank is up 40 per cent from last September and up 74 per cent from 2007.

With the heady days of Alberta’s boom long gone, local social agencies say they’re being stretched to the limit dealing with one of the thriving economy’s after-effects: debt.

Agencies across the city are coping with increasing demand for their services, including requests from Calgarians who don’t typically use social services but are now struggling under debt they racked up in boom-time. “If both breadwinners in a family lose their jobs, then they’re really hard off,” says Walter Hossli, executive director of Momentum, an agency that offers employment programs to low-income earners. “They find themselves unable to make the payments on their high debt.”

Hossli says demand at Momentum is up by about 45 per cent from last year. “In some cases we’ve had to turn people away.”

Brown Bagging for Calgary’s Kids, a program that provides school lunches to hungry children, is seeing a similar trend. Executive director Bob McInnis says the program has recently expanded into schools in well-off neighbourhoods — areas “where the average household income in 2008 might have been $150,000.”

“If you have a $2,500 monthly mortgage and an $850 car payment and somebody gets laid off, and you’re now down to a $2,000 or $2,500 a month income, the only place that’s flexible at all in all of our budgets — regardless of what our economic situation is — is food,” says McInnis. “That’s the kind of new demand that we’re seeing.”

Demand at the Calgary Inter-Faith Food Bank is up 40 per cent from last September, and up 74 per cent from September 2007 — “a very significant increase,” says spokesperson Nollind van Bryce. “I think it’s very telling of what the economy is doing to folks right now.” He says the food bank is seeing more first-time users, specifically laid-off single workers and parents struggling to make ends meet.

The unemployment rate in the Calgary area went down slightly from seven per cent in August to 6.9 per cent in September, but it’s still significantly higher than it was in September 2008 (3.8 per cent).

At Aspen, a local agency that works with low-income families, executive director Shirley Purves says employees can’t keep up with the increased requests for help. “Our staff are just going flat out,” she says. “It’s really tough.” Purves says her staff is seeing more “crisis poverty” in families that haven’t needed help in the past, but the recession has “thrown them for a loop.” People who got laid off last year and have run out of their year’s worth of employment insurance need help with basic needs like food and shelter, she says.

In response, the United Way, Aspen, the Calgary Homeless Foundation and other agencies are cooking up a program to keep these people afloat. “This funding is sort of a last-ditch attempt to keep people out of the shelter system and put them back into their own housing, whatever form that was,” says the Homeless Foundation’s Tim Richter. “But that’s still in its infancy. We’re working out what that looks like.”

At the Calgary Drop-In & Rehab Centre, executive director Dermot Baldwin says the shelter took in an additional 200 people after the snow started flying earlier this month. He’s expecting that number to grow as a result of the province’s plan to cut mental health beds to deal with its billion-dollar health deficit. “We’re going to feel that terribly,” predicts Baldwin. “We’re going to get at least half of that population sent to Calgary and then we’ll have to deal with what happens.”

Like most agencies, the Drop-In Centre is coping with a drop in donations. The United Way of Calgary and Area, an organization that funds about 120 local agencies, dropped its fundraising goal by $5 million this year. Last year the group was hoping to raise $52 million, but came short at $49 million. “That was the first year they hadn’t made their goal in like 20 years,” says Loreen Gilmour, director of the United Way’s poverty reduction coalition.

This year, the agency is hoping to raise $47 million — a “realistic” goal, says Gilmour. The campaign slogan is: “We need you now more than ever.”

Gilmour says the United Way hasn’t yet had to cut funding to agencies because of the downturn. “But we’re not making any promises into next year until we have the final numbers,” she says.

On the plus side, the recession has allowed most agencies to hang onto employees, something they struggled to do during the boom. “We are seeing a reduction in staff turnover, which is helpful,” says Purves.

Agencies are finding other positives as well. “The situation right now presents a really good opportunity for social agencies here in Calgary to take a look at themselves and figure out, ‘Where can we gain some efficiencies?’” says Melanie Mitra, CEO of community agency Prospect, which offers programs to unemployed Albertans, at-risk youth and people with disabilities.

McInnis believes the key to recovering from the recession is the same for both agencies and individuals alike: austerity. “We all need to begin to live within our means,” he says.