Paintbox Offers Free Groceries to Regent Park Residents - Regent Park News

Reports by Fred Alvarado and Adonis Huggins

(Adonis and Fred are journalists with the Focus Media Arts Centre. Fred's position is funded by the Government of Canada under the Local Journalism Initiative)

Episode 18 for January 20th to January 27th

Welcome to RPTV Weekly News Show. We present news that impacts on Regent Park and the surrounding areas.

In this episode we present the following news for the week of January 20th to January 27th

• Paintbox Bistro offered free groceries to Regent Park residents after the restaurant went out of business
• Ontario to begin lifting COVID-19 restrictions on Jan. 31
• Toronto students head back to classroom after COVID remote learning, snowstorm
• Lindsay Jackson to Leave the Regent Park SDP for a new position with the City
• The Evaluation Benchmark Committee Presents at the SDP Planning Committee
• Canadians with disabilities fell through the cracks in the pandemic response.
• Shelter System in Collapse: Toronto Residents Demand Action, Gather Supplies to Address Emergency
• City of Toronto providing more than 310,000 N95 masks for clients in the shelter system

Events and Jobs in Regent Park.

The following are three of the profiled reports.

Paintbox Bistro offer free groceries to Regent Park residents after the restaurant went out of business.

Chris Klugman, owner and founder of Paintbox Bistro offered free groceries to Regent Park residents after he announced last week that the beloved neighborhood restaurant closed “effective immediately”.

Since April 2020, Paintbox Bistro & Catering located at Dundas St. E. and Sackville St., was transformed into a food store through a partnership with a local grocery start-up called Nibbly, filling the former restaurant space with shelves of product.

Free food, supplies and books were given away this week from the Nibbly store -- with the shelves accessible to anyone passing by Paintbox Bistro.

During lockdowns, Paintbox operated as a grocery store until larger competitors started offering same-day delivery and they lost their advantage. They also partnered with charities to produce 2,500 meals per week for people experiencing food insecurity, preparing over 35,000 meals total during lockdowns.

Paintbox also became an incubator for food startups including Batch Cookies, Spike Your Food and Do Good Donuts.

"With a new surge and other variants on the horizon, with a renewed government lockdown and cancelled catering, Paintbox is out of financial resources and no longer tenable," reads the letter.

The bistro-style restaurant known for its social and environmental impact was run by chef and George Brown instructor Chris Klugman, who signed the announcement.

"Catering, which has been our bread and butter, started to return in the fall of 2021. Omicron changed that, it felt like March 2020 all over again " Klugman said. "I haven't heard back from the landlord regarding the future of the space. As far as myself, I intend to do something fulfilling and impactful in the new year, don't know what." he said in an interview.

Lindsay Jackson to Leave the Regent Park SDP for a new position with the City

The SDP also known as the Regent Park Social Development Plan, is a community wide initiative consisting of various city funded projects and activities aimed at ​building social cohesion and inclusion. The role of the SDP Planning Committee is to set the agenda for the SDP Stakeholder Table, which is the main decision- making body for the Social Development Plan. The SDP membership is made up of TCHC residents, Market residents, Agency representatives and Grassroots groups.

On January 13, 2022, the SDP Planning Committee held their regular weekly meeting over Zoom.  This week’s meeting of the SDP Planning Committee was facilitated by Lindsay Jackson and Lloyd Pike, a long-time resident of Regent Park.

The first item on the agenda was Lindsay’s announcement that she will be leaving the SDP to take on another position with the city. Lindsay Jackson was a community development worker with the city tasked with the responsibility of supporting Regent Park and the Social Development Plan. Over the past two years Lindsay has been working with members of the SDP Planning Committee and the SDP Stakeholders Table to guide its work and help in the implementation of activities.

Lindsay new position at the City as an Agency Review Officer with the Community Funding Unit will begin following a two week transition period.

Lindsay’s last meeting will take place on Thursday January 20th. Richard Kirwan, a Community Development Officer with the city who was present at the meeting stated that the process for hiring a new community development worker to replace Lindsay will take place in the next couple of weeks. In the mean time, he will support the SDP Planning Committee until a replacement has been hired and supervising the position when a new community development worker is hired. Lindsay will also be developing a transition report to help the new person get up to speed.

The Evaluation Benchmark Committee Presents at the SDP Planning Committee

The other major item presented at the January 13, 2022, SDP Planning Committee was a presentation by Janine Hodgson and Sanjura Sharma, who are support staff from Young Street Mission involved in the Evaluation and Benchmarks Committee.

​The role of the Evaluation and Benchmark Committee is to evaluate the progress, success and challenges of the Social Development Plan and its various committees and activities.

As part of the presentation, Sanjura reviewed the work done to date by former evaluation coordinator, Pavathra Sulanthar, including the success of the pilot evaluation report that was published in July 2021.

Janine reported that they will be meeting with the SDP working groups in February to begin the co-development of self assessments tools that will help evaluate the performances of the SDP working groups. The Evaluation and Benchmark committee will also be exploring how to assess the impact of the projects that the SDP are implementing.

Based on the learnings of the pilot evaluation report, the Evaluation and Benchmark committee hopes to adopts standardize assessments tools across all the working groups that can be carried out semi-annually.