CarHub 2020 Charity Donation: Why We Made A Change This Year
Posted on January 20, 2021
It’s that time of year again! The season holiday cheer is upon us and in the spirit of giving, we are continuing our annual CarHub holiday tradition of donating to a worthy charitable organization.
2020 has been an abnormal year. The COVID-19 pandemic has affected each and every one of us and no one has been immune to the stress that it has caused. We’ve decided to do things a little bit differently this time around.
This year, we want to give our holiday charity allotment to an organization that is dedicated to providing resources for mental health advocacy and services. We’ve decided to give the entirety of our holiday donation amount to a great service that does so much for people in need: Distress Centres of Greater Toronto.
We researched many excellent organizations as potential candidates for the 2020 CarHub Holiday Donation. We landed on Distress Centres of Greater Toronto because of the incredible contribution that this organization has provided to the community of Greater Toronto. The very same community that CarHub works to provide for and wants to see safe, healthy and happy.
To give the CarHub community a better sense of what Distress Centres of Greater Toronto does and how they make an impact we’ve put together some notes about the finer points of DCGT’s contributions toward the mental health wellness of the people of Greater Toronto.
Distress Centres of Greater Toronto
Since 1967, Distress Centres of Greater Toronto has offered a valuable community service network to individuals in our community who are at risk and vulnerable. It is Canada’s oldest volunteer facilitated crisis and emotional support service agency. In addition to offering support for all degrees of mental health crises, Distress Centres of Greater Toronto specializes in suicide prevention, suicide intervention and postvention.
How Does DCGT Provide its Services?
The Distress Centres of Greater Toronto offers crisis and emotional distress services by hotline, online chat, and text. They also provide in-person individual and group support counselling to individuals who have lost a loved one to suicide or homicide and are working to cope in the aftermath of their loss.
Impact
Distress Centres of Greater Toronto fields more than one hundred thousand community calls, texts and online chats per year. The service also places more than fifty thousand outbound calls per year to individuals who are considered vulnerable and potentially at risk. Outbound calls of this nature are often integral to offering preventative support for a person in need of mental health assistance.
Why Now?
The COVID-19 pandemic has created innumerable changes for organizations spanning every industry. The charitable service sector is no different. Distress Centres of Greater Toronto was forced to make a quick transition to fully remote services after the lockdown orders in the GTA this year. Transitioning systems and personnel to a remote work scenario was both costly and time consuming. It was also of dire importance to make the transition as efficiently as possible, to allow the Distress Centres of Greater Toronto to continue to offer support to individuals in crisis within a particularly high time of need.
We sat down with Robert Ridge, the Executive Director of Distress Centres of Greater Toronto to discuss the services that the DCGT provides, the impact that the pandemic has had on these services and the need for CarHub’s 2020 holiday donation.
You can watch an abridged version of the interview here. You can watch the full interview here and you can read a full transcript of the interview here.