Bearing a 30-pound backpack filled with essentials, Jennelle Slywka connects with our city’s houseless population, even in extreme temperatures.
Slywka was inspired by her collaborative experiences with front frontline workers at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, when her Boyle Street Community Services team was often the sole link to critical services. Practitioners and workers visited folks in the river valley and brought them medicine, food, checked in and did paperwork.
“It was so cool to see everyone come together, and we would go visit people right in the river valley if that’s where they were safely isolating to bring whatever was needed,” Slywka says. “It’s our ideal way of reaching people and we all just rose up and did it so well.”
As the manager of outreach for Boyle Street Community Services, she now mentors other outreach case workers, and works hard to instill her values of inclusion, dignity and empathy in her team. She’s all about community and bringing everyone into the community with joy and humour. Regardless of their situation, “we deal with challenges, but we laugh a lot too. That’s how people connect.”
This article appears in the Nov/Dec 2024 issue of Edify
