It has been a summer of highs and lows for the staff at the Gathering Place Soup Kitchen in North Bay.
Bottom line. It has been busy.
"We started on an uptick, maybe from adrenaline as we were all doing 50 hour work weeks," recalls Dennis Chippa, executive director at the Gathering Place.
He says running their regular service along with providing meals to the emergency homeless shelter at Pete Palangio arena put a significant strain on their workload.
"We took on the extra meals and whenever there was a challenge we tried to accept it We were doing 90 meals a day for the Palangio Arena as well as our regular meals," he said.
"We hit a down where we were all very exhausted and that's when we started to try to get people to take some time off, and I took some time off, and we just took some time to reflect. Now we are on an uptick again."
Chippa believes a lot of clients were getting the Canada Emergency Response Benefit.
"Some of that isn't there any more," Chippa said about CERB.
"A lot of the money that may have been coming in for them, and they've been kind of getting used to it, and now the money is not there. We know the numbers are there, there's a lot more people that we've been seeing, families and a few more people that we haven't seen before."
While everyone has had to adapt to the "new normal," Chippa believes the homeless have had to make the biggest adjustment.
"Our folks are amazing on how well they have adapted to this," said Chippa.
"These are folks who have no place to go - during the day they have no place to go there are no restaurants, there's no drop-in centre, there's no place for them to go. I think the vulnerable population has been the most affected by this and I think that's part of it."
He also says some of the Gathering Place's programming has changed.
"We're doing some work in Ferris, we're expanding our outreach program," said Chippa.
"Our food outreach program is now going to a couple of different apartment buildings in the city to deliver cooked food. We know there are still a lot of people in isolation, they are a vulnerable group."
