Cathy Crowe has been a street nurse and advocate for the
homeless for nearly 20 years. She was co-founder of the Toronto Disaster
Relief Committee and was heavily involved with the homeless people in Tent
City, who later became housed. Her book was written during the last three
years, when she was the recipient of the Atkinson Foundation’s Economic
Justice Award. Although she works in Toronto, she is well-known and
well-respected throughout Canada. At a recent nursing history exhibition at
the Museum of Civilization in Hull, her nursing bag was displayed, with a
person present to explain its contents and Cathy’s work on the street.
The purpose of the book is to educate. It traces the
history of social housing and its demise due to lack of funding and lack of
interest on the part of politicians. Cathy Crowe hopes, “that you will be
angry that our governments are not working together to fund the right to safe
and truly affordable housing. Your anger is vital to the momentum needed to
create the wind for social change.”
The main body of Dying for a Home is the result of
interviews with ten people who have been homeless, and puts faces to the
homeless condition. Two of the people have since died. Not written exactly
in interview style, it is more like the person telling his or her story – the
hows and whys they became homeless, the real-life conditions of life on the
street, and, in each case, the belief that homelessness is unnecessary and can
and should be fixed.
At the end of the book, there is a list of anti-poverty
groups and organizations working to build social housing. There is also a
bibliography and filmography. Each is neither too extensive nor daunting,
just enough to want you to read more on the subject, or watch the films, if
you’re not a print person.
I found this a good “primer” on the homeless subject. It
is an easy read. It conveys the passion of the author, and, hopefully helps
make the reader think and perhaps change the widely-held opinion that homeless
people like to live on the street and they are lazy and don’t want to help
themselves.
