As the cold winter winds blow in, I can feel it in my bones – my Foundation is facing a tsunami of need unlike anything I've seen in my lifetime. For almost 40 years now, we've been reaching out our hands to the homeless and forgotten souls of our community, but what we're seeing today breaks my heart.
Right now, we're dishing up nearly 427,000 meals a year – that's thousands of hungry people coming through our doors every week. My dedicated case workers are performing miracles to find safe beds for those sleeping rough, while our medical team tends to the sick who have nowhere else to turn.
I lie awake at night thinking about them all. The truth is, we're seeing faces we've never seen before. Good people who never thought they'd need charity. People on disability pensions whose payments don't stretch to cover the basics. Hard-working people in casual jobs whose hours keep getting cut. Families whose rent has skyrocketed, forcing impossible choices between feeding their children or keeping a roof over their heads. And the women – brave women fleeing violent homes with nothing but the clothes on their backs and children clutching their hands. They come to us desperate, afraid, with nowhere else to go.
What I'm witnessing is a society splitting in two – the haves getting more, the have-nots slipping further behind. The ladder that once helped people climb out of poverty has had its rungs kicked away.
In this darkness, my Foundation stands as a beacon of hope. When I look into the eyes of those we serve, I see the same spark of humanity that lives in you and me. They're not statistics – they're our brothers and sisters who've fallen on hard times.
