Imagine a community with no soup kitchens, no Out of the Cold programs and no homeless shelters. No support groups, community counseling, legal aid clinics or social assistance satellites.

Only a food bank and the Ontario Provincial Police.

Welcome to Wasaga Beach. Home to the world’s longest freshwater beach with 14 kilometres of white sand beach. Located on Southern Georgian Bay, it’s one of Ontario’s favourite four season tourist and vacation destinations.

“Our quality of life and our safe and friendly community has attracted a steady stream of new residents and season dwellers to our town over the years,” said Cal Patterson, Mayor of Wasaga Beach, in the 2010 Wasaga Beach Visitor’s Guide.

Like other small communities across Ontario, Wasaga Beach also has its share of homeless and poor people trying to survive without the resources that are available in large urban centres.

“In a rural community, fighting poverty is so much harder because it thrives in silence and lacks the resources necessary to get people back on their feet,” said Amy MacPherson, founder and executive director of Wasaga Cares, a recent not-for-profit startup trying to help people living in poverty gain access to a broad range of social services.

MacPherson said the Salvation Army will provide shelter in a motel room for up to three days “but even that is in a remote location with no transportation and you’d have to find your way to Barrie, ON (50 minute drive) for emergency accommodations after that.”

For a family, the nearest shelter is located in Newmarket which is 1.5 hours’ drive away.  “So if you have no vehicle you can either hitch a ride along the 400 Hwy with the kids underarm… or… beg I suppose,” she said.

Trying to remain anonymous in a small town is next to impossible. So there are no buskers or panhandlers. Lining up for a food bank (if one were available) isn’t an attractive option for fear that neighbours, friends and prospective employers will find out that you’ve fallen on hard times.

“And the resentment is personal if it comes to that level,” said MacPherson who grew up in foster care and years later was left disabled after she was seriously injured in an automobile accident involving a drunk driver.

“Whereas city folk view the poor as more of a group, in the country they look you straight in the eyes.”

Eventually, most small towns deal with the situation by exporting their homeless and poor to the cities.

MacPherson hopes to change all that by establishing a Wasaga Cares Community Resource Centre. But her immediate challenge was making residents and politicians aware that poverty and homelessness exists in Wasaga Beach.

“(Because of) the invisibility of the poor due to small town structures, our businesses and community leaders are resultantly unaware,” she said.  “They believe if you call 211 it has the answers to all your struggles.”

So MacPherson put a twist on the ‘Wasaga Cares Food Bank Challenge’, which asked participants to rely on a diet that a person on social assistance might receive from a food bank for three days to a week, by assigning each person a composite profile based upon situations she’s seen firsthand.

So it wasn’t just the meager monthly income that each participant was forced to survive on. MacPherson worked in a host of mental and physical health issues along with other obstacles each had to overcome during the week.

The participants shared their experiences online as they tried to make it through the 7 day challenge in early December.

“Hopefully after the team has tried to solve their social equation, they will come to the realization we need a resource centre to provide basic services at the very least,” said MacPherson, who was on her way to becoming a lawyer before the car crash left her with permanent nerve damage and chronic pain.  

“They’ll run into the same brick walls our poor do every time they have a problem.”

John Bonnar

John Bonnar is an independent journalist producing print, photo, video and audio stories about social justice issues in and around Toronto.