Caritas' My Second Home in need of a funding source

YorkRegion.com
Dec. 14, 2015
Adam Martin-Robbins

An “enormously successful” mental health program, dubbed My Second Home, will be shuttered unless a funding source can be found, says the head of the organization who started it.

“We don’t want shut the program down, at the same time we can’t afford to keep running it on the basis that we have to fundraise for it,” said Michael Tibollo, chairman of the Caritas Foundation and Caritas School of Life, which created the drop-in program after recognizing a growing need for mental health services among its clients.

“As it is, right now, for us just to run our addiction program, because we don’t get enough funding from the provincial government, we’re having to fundraise close to a third of the cost of our operation and our budget is $1.2 million a year.”

Caritas, a non-profit agency offering support services to those aged 16 and up struggling with addiction and mental health issues, launched My Second Home in January as a six-month pilot project with a $65,900 grant from the Ontario Trillium Foundation.

The plan was to run the program until June to gauge the need for its services including life-skills training, career help and counselling.

Additional referrals
Early on, My Second Home served about a half-dozen or so clients on a regular basis out of Caritas’ facility on Hanlan Road in Vaughan. But as word spread more people started showing up, many referred by area doctors and hospitals, Tibollo said.

At its peak, there was a core group of about 25 people regularly getting help through My Second Home and about 100 more dropped in from time to time for a total of more than 1,000 visits, he said.

Based on those numbers, Caritas officials concluded the program was desperately needed and used fundraised dollars to run it until the end of December.

In the meantime, they applied for a $100,000 grant from the Region of York through its funding program for local non-profit agencies dubbed the Community Investment Strategy.

“We thought York Region would be very interested in having the program running because it was, in effect, helping other service providers deflect some of the less serious cases,” Tibollo said.

But, late last month, Caritas was informed My Second Home is not among the projects approved for funding by regional councillors based on a recommendation from municipal staff.

“For some reason, the bureaucrats at York Region wrote a report and basically said they didn’t think the program was worthwhile, that it was too expensive to run the program for what it was delivering in terms of benefit to the community,” Tibollo said.

Highly competitive’
Lisa Gonsalves, York’s managing director of strategies and partnerships, which oversees the Community Investment Strategy, said the funding program is “highly competitive” as the region gets far more requests than it can support.

“We’re always oversubscribed,” she said. “We already know there’s about $3.5 million to allocate. … We’re very clear with the agencies, up front, to really diversify their funding options because the region’s program is no guarantee, it’s highly competitive.”

Gonsalves noted the Community Investment Strategy provides funding to agencies for programs that meet certain criteria including being community-based, fostering innovation, improving collaboration between agencies and organizational development. 

Back in the spring, the region received 97 “expressions of interest” from local agencies requesting more than $9.4 million in one-year funding, she said. 

Those requests were reviewed against the criteria and whittled down to 57 projects totalling $5.4 million.

Caritas made it through the first round of evaluations, but, in the end, regional staff did not recommend My Second Home as one of 34 projects that regional staff recommended for a grant.

“Basically, those projects that most closely align with the outcomes the region is looking for; have identified a need and a gap and have a very strong and clear work plan and a budget that’s feasible and reasonable — those are typically the projects that get through,” Gonsalves said. “If we could fund them all or help them all we would love to, but the funding is capped.”   

She noted that regional staff offer to work with organizations that don’t receive a grant to strengthen their applications and help them connect them with other potential funding agencies.

Regional councillors approved the staff recommendation to fund the 34 projects Nov. 19.

Writing to chairman
In response to that decision, Tibollo wrote a letter to Regional Chairman Wayne Emmerson expressing his disappointment and asking council to overturn its decision and provide funding to My Second Home.  

“I’m going to do what I can to try to keep the doors open because I really believe that people need this service,” he said. “There’s people in our community that are suffering because they don’t have access to a program like this.”

Tibollo is hoping to get support from Vaughan’s four regional council representatives – Mayor Maurizio Bevilacqua, Deputy Mayor Michael Di Biase and regional councillors Gino Rosati and Mario Ferri.

Di Biase said in a phone interview he’ll speak with Emmerson and the commissioner in charge of the funding program to see if it’s possible to allocate some money to My Second Home, but he’s not optimistic. “It’s kind of difficult because councillors are not prepared to make changes,” he said.