Boyle Street Shoe Drop-Off

Today me and two of my friends (Rebecca and Zoe) went to drop off the shoes at Boyle Street that I said I was collecting a couple weeks ago.
Boyle Street is a centre in downtown Edmonton where homeless people can go to eat, get stuff (like the shoes that we donated), or just to stay warm during the winter. When we were there my mom's friend Matt, who works there, gave us a tour of the place.
He started off at the youth section, where he works. He explained to us that the youth part is for people aged 14 to 24, but is mostly used by people who are over 18 years old. What I found interesting was that Matt told us that when they try to help people who come in who abuse drugs, or do other stuff like that, they do not right away tell them to stop doing drugs, they just try to make it safer for them by giving them clean needles or something.



Then after that he went to showing us the room where Child and Family Services is, which, interestingly, is right in Boyle Street. This is interesting because some of the people who go to Boyle Street that have children may think of Child and Family Services as "the baby stealers" or something. So, now Child and Family Services has taken a new approach where, for instance, if they go into a house and see that the family has no food, they wont just take the children away. Instead, they will try to understand why they don't have food, and then help them to get food.
Then, Matt took us to see the place where the homeless can go and get food. There were quite a lot of people there, but Matt told us that it was fairly empty. He said that some mornings, there can be 300 people eating there!
I thought that the tour was very interesting, and was an eye opener to how some people in our own city live.



Oh, and of course, the shoes! Well, after a couple weeks of collecting shoes from school, my mom's work and family members, we ended up collecting around 50 shoes!
So, I thought that this was a great experience and I thought it was great to bring my friends along for them to help in this experience aswell. I hope that maybe in the future, like possibly even next year, I might be able to get my whole class to come and help out for a couple hours at Boyle Street.
By the way, Boyle Street has a new website: http://www.boylestreet.org Check it out to learn more!