- Start playing the video
- Click CC at bottom right
- Click the gear icon to its right
- Click Subtitles/CC
- Click Auto-translate
- Select language you want
Toronto's Street Haven—Canada's first women's shelter launches Smart Community Hub Room to Serve Women at Risk
By Fred Alvarado
Fred is a community journalist with FOCUS MEDIA ARTS CENTRE
Street Haven is a multi-service agency that provides emergency shelter, supportive housing, an addiction centre, and a learning centre.
On Friday May 26th, Street Haven, Canada’s first women’s shelter, launched the first SMART community hub room at 87 Pembroke St, near the intersection of Sherbourne St and Dundas St East. Community members, clients, staff board directors and City Councilor Chris Moise were at the grand opening ceremony to celebrate the inauguration of this community space.
The new community hub room is equipped with technology in a renovated atmosphere with a bio-wall, coffee machine, projector, chairs, and more. It is designed to better meet the needs of vulnerable women in the Downtown East communities and serve as a space for recreation, socializing, workshops, trainings, and counselling.
RPTV reporter Fred Alvarado was at the event and interviewed Siu Mee Cheng, Executive Director for Street Haven.
“This is Canada’s oldest women shelter and we have recently developed a SMART community hub room. Today’s event is extremely special to us because we actually renovated this whole space. We renovated it so it can serve several purposes: it will provide a nice safe meeting place for training and workshops for our clients and their peers, it also act a as a counselling room so we can provide social services, it will also be a nice recreational space for our clients to hang out, socialize, and build social networks with each other. We can also have movie nights in this room. This room is actually quite special because it is a SMART room, we are moving towards digitalizing and technologizing the whole room so it will have Microsoft smart community hub screen, so it is going to be an exciting place to us.”
Add new comment
FOCUS Media Arts Centre (FOCUS) is a not-for-profit organization that was established in 1990 to counter negative media stereotypes of low income communities and provide relevant information to residents living in the Regent Park area and surrounding communities.
We seek to empower marginalized individuals and under represented communities to have a voice, through the use of professional training, mentorships and participatory based media practices that enable the sharing of stories, experiences and perspectives on relevant matters and issues. In brief our mandate is to empower marginalized individuals and under-serviced communities to have a voice and tell their own stories.
Recent Media
Regent Park Town Hall: Councillor Chris Moise Updates Residents on Key Issues
Regent Park Marks 34th Annual Sunday in the Park Celebration
Building Healing Pathways for Families: Inside Native Child’s Work in Toronto
We encourage comments which further the dialogue about the stories we post. Comments will be moderated and posted if they follow these guidelines:
The Community Media Portal reserves the right to reject any comments which do not adhere to these minimum standards.