We have about 100 different programs across three different health authorities, as well as B.C. Housing, which is our housing entity here in the province of British Columbia. They're all great supports, trying to do the best thing and asking for inventory and what we need for PPE.
We're not an organization that's going to require N95 masks or that type of thing, but having just your regular disposable masks or cloth masks, goggles, hand sanitizer, gloves, those kinds of things, are all super important in what we do in sheltering and providing food for folks.
With the sheer volume of people and sites we have, our PPE requests are quite great, so we put those requests to our funders and we get a response saying, “We can't get as much as you need. We can only give you pieces of that.” We're then put into the situation of working with suppliers and volunteers. We have a great immigrant program here locally that's made cloth masks for us for a small donation towards materials, so we're cobbling it together. I'm telling you that's a full-time job plus at this point, for the one person trying to pull it together.
Recently, B.C. Housing announced here in the Downtown Eastside that there would be a distribution centre to procure community donations and then spread that out to non-profits. I think it has started. We're starting to see a little more support, but our PPE asks have largely gone unaddressed. If it weren't for that full-time worker, our local connections and great champions in the community, we would probably be in a much worse situation.