Dave’s Story: Growing Hopes

Interviewed and written by Gelek.

Dave has been helping around the garden ever since he heard about it from his pastor at the local Parkdale Neighbourhood Church, in Spring of 2008. “I was in a rough shape at the time,” says Dave, referring to his drug addiction, panhandling, and instability. Dave was a regular drop-in member of the church, and after he found out that the church had a group plot in HOPE garden, and was looking for members to take care of it, he volunteered himself right away.

His enthusiasm didn’t go unnoticed by the Greenest City staff. After speaking to him and getting to know him better, Dave was entrusted with tasks like cleaning up the garden shed, fixing the gate and fence. Because he didn’t have a phone or email, he came by regularly to make sure that he was available for anything that needed to be fixed, moved or dug.

“I was taking baby steps,” says Dave, referring to his being around the garden and helping Greenest City. “The steps were getting away from drugs, towards things that are more meaningful. They [the staff] saw that I was around all the time, and they saw how happy I was doing all these things around the garden that needed to be done.”

Dave has been taking a harm-reduction course at CAMH, which he feels would’ve been impossible without the support he received from the staff of Greenest City. “I started to rub elbows with people who were doing productive things for our society. And it sorta brought me back to life. I started to think about what things were important and what weren’t. Is me getting high important?”

“I didn’t have to think for very long.”

Dave now has a stable address, something he wasn’t used to in his 35 years of drifting around various part of Toronto. And over the summer, he says, he started bouncing out of bed. A sign, he felt, of how much things were starting to look better for him. “My hopes grew.”

With his renewed sense of optimism, and the confidence that came along with it, Dave now has hopes of instilling these vibes on other people who are in situations similar to his.

“I see people in CAMH, in my group therapy sessions, who want to be better people,” he says. “I want them to experience the forward step that I experienced: working for a couple of months in the garden, meeting all the great people there, making new friends, all of that stuff.”

He believes having more gardens like HOPE garden around the city would be a tremendous boon to the many underprivileged and vulnerable residents of Toronto.

“It’s like a church, in a way,” he says of HOPE garden. “People gather to take care of themselves. The nature of the garden becomes the nature of the people: the bonding, the caring, everything.”

[Dave has now graduated from his course in CAMH. He lives with a friend that he met in the garden, and plans to stay involved with Greenest City.]