COVID-19 Services- We are open Monday to Friday from 11-1pm- Our Community Relief Kitchen offers lunch from our west doors, along with toiletries, survival equipment and other essentials. Church of the Holy Trinity has been an island of love and justice in the core of Toronto for 173 years. Throughout this time, Holy Trinity has given home and been shaped by many cultural and social movements, now
becoming a hub for a variety of groups and organizations making impact in their communities. Our worship is focused on collective leadership, breaking conventions, deepening spiritual pursuit, and finding a faith rooted in arts, culture and song. We have been rated by Toronto Star's Readers Choice Awards as the best Church/Temple in the city, and here is why.. We work with our partners, Toronto Urban Native Ministry, to support daily outreach and community development within our downtown core. Our partnership together has led us to become active participants in decolonizing both our community work and our faith. Similarly, we work with our Latinx partners, Parroquia San Esteban and TransEsteban, who keep us in touch with the points of view and needs of the global south, especially those of migrants and refugees. Our partners at Toronto Jummah Prayer Hall host midday prayers every Friday in our chapel and we are proud to be engaging in cross-cultural ministry together, be it interfaith services and vigils, to direct community engagement. We regularly host art exhibitions, concerts, and readings in our space- making room for young and aspiring artists to develop their ideas in a supportive environment. Our Music Mondays program brings classical, jazz, world and fusion performances to our downtown core for a noon-time series throughout the summer months. Our long-running Christmas Story pageant engages folks from across Toronto as actors, bringing to life the story of the Christmas, and encouraging community participation in theatre. It is well loved year-to-year, and has formed a dedicated audience. We also share our space with Echo Women's Choir, who are a lively and large group that pair love for singing with forging long lasting relationships among women. Since 1991, our congregation has sponsored over 120 refugees fleeing persecution and violence in Afghanistan, Burundi, Cambodia, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and Sudan. Our refugee committee helps to train faith and neighbourhood groups in the sponsorship and refugee claimant process, and help to land refugees in their communities. We have a long-standing engagement to the rights and determination of LGBTQ2sp people and families--it is personal for so many of us. We were the home of the first gay and POZ dances in Toronto and have supported and led in many other aspects of this struggle including marriage equality, right to ordination and public office, and the visibility of gender non-confroming and trans people. We have rallied for change within the church and governance at all levels, to ensure that our communities are represented within our faith and society. We have a small campus across three buildings in Trinity Square, the heart of Toronto, where we host many organizations working for social good. We are proud to work alongside Trans Pride Toronto, Rittenhouse Transformative Justice and Harm Reduction, Butterfly Asian and Migrant S*x Worker Support Network, Toronto Distress Centers, and many others who use our campus as a hub for community connection, outreach and social development. We also are home to Trinity Square Cafe, who are staffed by neuro-diverse members of our community, and have won Toronto's best soup many times. The Toronto Homeless Memorial is an anchor within our campus. Every second Tuesday of the month we host a memorial for the lives lost to the streets, and call for action on social housing, harm reduction and an end to the criminalization of the poor. It's presence helps to guide our work and mission, to offer a radical welcome to all who need it, and to lift up the oppressed in whatever way we can. COVID impacted the Downtown East in a very pronounced way, in a neighbourhood that has an extreme wealth divide, and a high concentration of homeless, under housed, and individuals living in supportive/community housing. Originally an indoor drop-in, we shifted our focus during COVID, where we did not close and became the only community service open in the downtown core. Our campus has become a hub for grassroots community relief efforts. We remained open to serve the hundreds of individuals who came to our doors looking for support. We gathered a network of faith and community groups to prepare and serve 200 meals a day, in addition to warm clothing, hygiene equipment, and survival supplies. Eventually a large encampment grew around our church of individuals searching for safety and shelter. We worked with our community leaders to ensure that all who came to Holy Trinity found the support they needed even in face of threats of eviction and harassment from authorities. During this time, we collaborated with our partners to pilot the first mobile low-barrier COVID testing program for houseless and marginalized people, as well as the first low-barrier COVID vaccine clinics for individuals who were non-status, s*x workers, drug users and other criminalized groups. Both projects saw attendance of 1000s of individuals who otherwise would not have accessed testing and treatment. Through this work we were able to inform best practices for public health. Supporting the health needs of all of our community members is important to us, and with our colleagues at Sherbourne Health Bus, we are providing basic healthcare and referral on site each friday. We supported our encampment community to advocate for rapid access to housing, causing the initiation of a human rights framework to be applied to City services relating to individuals living in public spaces. We also advocated together for the creation of the shelter-hotel system, and for its continued growth and refinement, as well as pathways to permanent housing. We also partnered with community organizations to offer on-site midwifery, cancer support, mental health crisis support, and many other services necessary for the emerging needs we saw in the community that has grown around Unity Kitchen. We have been able to deploy peer based programs for overnight crisis support, material access, and overdose prevention. Along with meeting our communities physical needs, we were able to support the emotional, mental and spiritual needs of our community during this time with in-house crisis counselling, and by supporting our street-involved community in creating their own outreach projects- serving meals, providing first aid, system navigation and harm reduction across the downtown core. This work continues today, and with a dedicated team of volunteers we maintain our community outreach kitchen that serves upwards of 180 people per day. We work to support the determination and the needs of our downtown community, by continuing to hold space, provide the necessities, and deliver access to counselling and companionship through the best and worst parts of life. All of this is possible through our collaboration across faith and community groups, that each bring their own gifts to our whole together.
