For what friendship centres have contributed to Canadian society and what they do every day, I want to start seeing that recognition and that trust instead of hearing about it.
We hear a lot that friendship centres do great work. They support people every day and they make millions of client contacts each year, with 3,600 employees, but we have seven days to prepare a national proposal to support our organizations on the ground when we have people chasing down commercial sanitation trucks to get enough supplies to keep their homeless shelter sanitized. Then we're told to write a proposal and to have our measurements and our data collection strategy in place. As someone who used to be an executive director of a friendship centre, I couldn't expect our organizations to do it, and I felt bad for other urban organizations that may not have had the capacity.