The first apartment hadn't worked. That was the honest version of what happened to Marcus. He'd been placed in a bachelor unit in North York after eight months at a men's shelter, and he'd wanted it to work—badly, consciously, with the…
The day Amara got the keys to the apartment, she cried in the parking lot of the building before she could make herself go in. Three years. That's how long she and her kids had been moving. Between shelters, a cousin's couch, two different…
I've been volunteering with Furniture Bank on Tuesday afternoons for three years now. I get a referral sheet with a little bit of background — agency name, family size, what they need — and then I meet the client at the front and walk them…
Margaret, 71 — Donor, Leaside I bought that table in 1987 at an antiques market on Queen Street West. A Saturday in October, cold enough for a coat but not yet for gloves. It was solid maple, probably 1940s. Four legs, two leaves that…
After 8 years and almost 800 kilometers, Diana finally knows what safety feels like. "I've seen evil. I lived with the devil. There's an awful, ugly kind of life that people live. And, are continuing to live. But, I'm definitely one of the…
When she finally got the keys to her apartment, she stood in the middle of four empty rooms and felt, for a moment, like she'd made a mistake. "A shelter has noise, people, activity. An empty apartment is just — quiet. And when you've been…
Two more reports landed in my inbox this week. Both cite Furniture Bank as a case study. Both analyse our 2022 AI photo campaign. Both get the same things wrong. I stopped counting external references somewhere around fifty. Academic…
Courtney was fifteen years old when her life broke open. One day she had a roof. The next she didn't. Kicked out of her house with nothing but the clothes she was wearing and a secret she didn't know yet — she was seven months pregnant.…
I don't know how to explain what an empty apartment does to you. We had keys. We had four walls. We had a window that looked out over a parking lot. And I stood in the middle of that room and I cried. Not because I was sad. Because I…