Social Policy in Ontario

How keeping the child poverty promise might have changed one life

Posted on November 19, 2014 in Inclusion Debates

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TheStar.com – News/Canada – Sarah Vanalstyne, 26, grew up in poverty and says her life would have been very different if the Government had kept its 1989 vow to eradicate child poverty.
Nov 19 2014.   By: Olivia Carville, Staff Reporter

Sarah Vanalstyne was just a baby living in a Toronto slum in 1989 when Ottawa made a bold vow to eradicate child poverty.

She was one of the children the government promised to save — one of the first few who would have benefitted from the resolution unanimously passed in the House of Commons to end child poverty within a decade.

But the promise was broken and Vanalstyne suffered for being the child of a teenage mother too young, too poor and too unstable to care for her.

Now 26, Vanalstyne says she has managed to break a three-year cocaine addiction.

But she has not broken free of the poverty cycle.

“If they did what they promised they were going to do back then, those of us affected might have had a better chance now,” she told the Star.
In her 26 years Vanalstyne has overcome more adversity than most would see in a lifetime.

At the age of 3, she says she was taken from her mother’s Regent Park apartment by social workers and she became another file in the city’s foster system. Her childhood was spent bouncing between foster homes and passing through eight schools.

“If they did what they promised they were going to do back then, those of us affected might have had a better chance now,” Vanalstyne told the Star.

By 2000, the year child poverty was supposed to have been eradicated for good, Vanalstyne was 12 and, she says, a few months from beginning her cocaine addiction.

Her teenage years were spent running away from foster homes, sleeping on the streets and relying on drop-in centres to eat, she said.
At 16, she says, she woke up naked in a strange man’s bed with no recollection of how she got there.

At 17, she became pregnant — and lost the baby five months later from a miscarriage.

At 20, she says, she got married, but soon separated from her husband.

After more than a quarter-century living in poverty in Toronto, Vanalstyne holds a powerful opinion on the politically charged child poverty debate.

“If they’d actually done something, I wouldn’t have grown up feeling so alone. I wouldn’t have had so many problems and abandonment issues,” she says.

“I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I got into drugs and I ended up making poor choices that I should not have made. If I had had a proper mum teaching me the right and the wrong, if I had lived in a proper home and made friends in school, my life would be a lot better now.”

Vanalstyne is now a welfare recipient living in Regent Park — just two blocks from the apartment she says the foster system pulled her out of.

She has her own suggestions for what the government could have done to help her family in 1989, and what it could be doing to help other families living in poverty now.

She believes more funding should be available for parenting classes to teach young people how to change diapers, bottle-feed and cope with children suffering from behavioural issues or learning problems.

Young parents should have the financial support to buy their children life necessities, such as food and clothes, and support groups should be offered to single parents to give them a chance to talk to others facing similar hardships, she said.

Academic upgrading programs should be offered to parents who didn’t get their high school diploma or do not have basic writing skills or computer literacy, to help them create a resume and apply for jobs, she said.

Counselling should be made available to children from lower socio-economic backgrounds who may have behavioural issues, but don’t have an outlet to discuss their problems, she said.

Social assistance doesn’t provide families enough money to survive, she said, and the government should be supporting parents to get off welfare and find a job “to bring some stability into their children’s lives.”

At age 16, Vanalstyne was reunited with her birth mother, whom she had come to believe was dead. At a social housing complex in Scarborough, her birth mother told her how she had never wanted to give up Vanalstyne or her brother. She told Vanalstyne it was a lack of support that had left her without a choice.

“I’d spent my whole childhood thinking it was all my fault. The people who said they loved me would end up leaving me, and I felt like it was because there was something wrong with me,” Vanalstyne told the Star. “Now I see that some of the people left because they had to; they didn’t have any other choice.”

Vanalstyne has vowed to dedicate her life to helping others facing similar struggles.

She is participating in a transition program at George Brown College that prepares people who have suffered mental illness and addiction to enter the workforce.

Vanalstyne says she may struggle with mental health issues associated with her upbringing, but refuses to allow her past dictate her future. Instead, she wants to use her life experiences as motivation to succeed.

“I am using what I went through to try and become a better person,” she said.

Vanalstyne and her boyfriend are currently living together and both receiving assistance through the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP).

The couple gets $1,445 a month and pay $400 rent for an apartment in Regent Park, Canada’s oldest and largest social housing complex.

“I don’t want to be back here. It’s dirty, people are all over the place and heaps of buildings need repair, but it’s a necessary means. It’s better than living on the streets or living in a shelter at the moment,” Vanalstyne said. “Hopefully, I won’t have to be here for very much longer.”

< http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2014/11/19/ottawa_and_child_poverty_how_keeping_the_promise_might_have_changed_one_childs_life.html >

Tags: disabilities, Health, ideology, mental Health, poverty, standard of living, youth

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