A lot of people ended up with nowhere to go for food, nowhere to go for diapers for their babies. A lot of people ended up feeling lonely, stigmatized, with nowhere to go for support or companionship. We recognized the great need in the London community and we committed ourselves as well as we could to pushing onward, because we chose to expand our support to other oppressed, impoverished, criminalized, dispossessed people. We did receive some emergency funding grants, which have supported us to attain PPE and proper sanitization, and we have received some additional support for providing hot meals and other basic-needs items.
As a result, the number of people coming to us for assistance has increased dramatically. We do this, despite what it costs, because we feel that nobody, regardless of who they are, regardless of our particular area of focus, should be abandoned and left to die. Indeed, it costs us. We've literally pooled our own money together to house people when they were turned away from full shelters and couldn't access other organizations to help with funds for hotel rooms. It cost us as individuals as we are trying to meet a far greater need, who are volunteering longer hours without any compensation, all while many of our own jobs are being legislated again, and many of our own bodies are being treated as high risk or dangerous to the public.
Our hours have been expanded from being open three days a week and serving 80 unique individuals before COVID, to now being open five days a week. We went from serving no hot meals pre-COVID, as doing that is not a core mission of our service delivery, to now serving hot meals six days a week to 200 unique individuals. It costs us because we are people who care. We are doing everything we possibly can just to help anyone and everyone to survive.
We are still working through the repercussions of these costs.