by: Alanna Quinn, Business Development Coordinator
On Oct. 27, volunteers and interpreters from MCIS returned to Ryerson’s Mattamy Athletic Centre for the 7th annual Homeless Connect Toronto event.
The event was held to provide typically costly human services, such as dental care, eye care, foot care and haircuts, amongst over 30 other types of services, free of charge to those experiencing or at risk of homelessness. MCIS’ role at the event was to connect native speakers of other languages with English speaking service providers and eliminating any language barriers. This year was unique to previous years: aside from providing services in the commonly requested languages such as French, Spanish, Farsi, Arabic, Mandarin and Cantonese, our volunteer staff members and interpreters were also able to cover languages of lesser diffusion such as Romanian, Russian, Portuguese, Korean and Tigrigna.
Located close to the entrance, the MCIS team was able reach and connect guests, services providers and volunteers during the entire event with a timely manner and assisted over 50 guests to their requested services.
We appreciated the difficulty in distinguishing people who are at-risk of homelessness from those who are experiencing it, provided there isn’t a default visual representation of homelessness to identify people in need of community support. With each year of attending this event, our eyes, minds and hearts are open bigger than ever, as we actively connected with the Toronto Community, which we’re gratefully deeply rooted in.
MCIS wishes to thank Amal, Alex, Alanna, Lester, and Veronica for graciously donating their Sunday to this wonderful cause, which is representative of the type of social impact MCIS wishes to enable and promote. We also would like to thank our phenomenal interpreters Lidia (Spanish); Yuan Lily, Ben, Yanyan Nancy and Emily (Mandarin/Cantonese); Mojgan (Farsi) and Rita (French). We look forward to next years’ HCT event to give back even more to our community!