How community services save money, not just lives

Supporting community social services is a matter of both decency and dollars and sense.

As the article below illustrates, services that provide meals and food to those in dire need result in a dramatic reduction in 911 calls. 

That means big savings. Kelowna RCMP estimate the basic cost of responding to a 911 call at $200. If the situation is complex, or fire and paramedics also respond, costs quickly soar.

In addition, the call can result in incarceration or a trip to the emergency ward, adding thousands of dollars more.

Providing support isn’t just the right to do.

It’s the smart thing to do.

Make sure the political parties and your local candidates understand and support the value of community social services in B.C.

And check here for information on how to let them know how you feel.

How a decent meals can keep people from brink

Research on people with mental illnesses in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside links better nutrition to fewer 911 calls.

By Colleen Kimmett

TheTyee.ca

On an empty stomach it's easy to find fault with my fellow transit passengers, even the littlest ones. I'm sitting on the 99 B-line trying not to openly scowl at a toddler who is planted on his mother's lap gnawing at a cracker. His chin is shiny with saliva, and soggy crumbs stick to his fat cheeks. Gross. I look away in disgust as his mom lovingly strokes his hair.

Karen Cooper

By the time I arrive at my destination -- a café in Kitsilano -- and wolf down a croissant, I'm feeling much better about the world. It's an appropriate start to my interview with Karen Cooper, who can relate to the anecdote.

Cooper, a professor at Corpus Christi (a small Catholic college on the grounds of UBC) understands well what happens to most people's thought patterns when they are deprived of glucose. For the past five years, she has been poring over scientific literature on the relationship between nutrition and mental health and conducting her own original field research in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

Cooper is trying to quantify what most working and living in the neighbourhood already know: food, or lack thereof, has a big impact on people's moods and behaviour.

And she's found a novel way to measure this: by looking at the number of 911 calls to the neighbourhood's single-resident occupancy (SRO) buildings, before and after the introduction of meal programs.

Her research so far, she says, indicates that "Basically, anytime anyone introduces food, you get this enormous decrease in 911 calls, police fire and ambulance."

How much of a decrease? Although Cooper says she hasn't completely finished crunching and analyzing her data, conservatively, she says, the average drop in the total number of critical incidents involving all services (police, fire and ambulance) fell between 25 and 33 per cent across the residences she looked at. That's between a period several months before the introduction of meals on site, and a period 18 months to two years later. Police calls alone saw a drop of between 40 and 50 per cent, says Cooper.

Cooper looked at seven residences in total, and warns me that she needs to collect data from more in order to make her findings statistically relevant in an academic context.

"Having said that, I feel all the time like I'm trying to prove the obvious," she says. "Which is, if you don't feed people, bad things happen. If you don't feed mentally-unwell, addicted and often physically-unwell people, even worse things happen."

Read the rest here.