Three years ago, life was good. He had a nice job, paid his taxes and contributed to the local economy.
Unable to work, his savings ran dry. Richard Dalton was living in poverty, treading dangerously close to homelessness. He relied on Ontario disability benefits to keep a roof over his head.
“I never thought this could happen,” he says.
He’s ashamed to admit that he thought that slipping into poverty was something that happened to others.
Never to him.
He now realizes it could happen to anyone.
AIDS service organizations, local food programs, libraries and local community centres kept him afloat. Health promotion programs helped him rebuild his life.
Today, he’s healthy and back at work as an HIV prevention speaker and frontline worker at an AIDS service organization.
The social safety nets that prevented him from crashing on city sidewalks three years ago also gave him a chance to find new meaning in his life.
Before long, others may not be as fortunate.
The city of Toronto is considering deep cuts to these presently underfunded services.
“It’s shortsighted, disgusting and inhumane,” he says.
As a frontline worker, Dalton works with vulnerable people every day. People looking for a hand up. Not a handout.
His organization’s volunteer-driven HIV prevention program, partially funded by the city, sends people to speak to university, college and high school students about the importance of safe sex.
Over a two-month period last fall, he personally talked to almost 500 students.
“By reducing the number of people getting HIV, we’re saving our city money while we’re saving people’s lives,” he says.
He worries what will happen if the funding disappears. He worries about the costs of short-sighted policy decisions.
Most of all, he worries how we’ll ever clean up the mess the current administration leaves behind.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
