MIND @ Sun Life's Campaign Launch
We had the honour of giving a speech at Sun Life's Campaign Launch (in support of United Way) yesterday alongside Sun Life CEO Kevin Strain and United Way CEO Heather McDonald. M.I.N.D. was invited to share about the impact of United Way's support on the communities we serve. About 800 Sun Life employees attended both in person and online.
M.I.N.D.'s Exectuive Director, Grace Chan, speaks about the impact of United Way:
Hello everyone,
My name is Grace Chan. I run a Scarborough-based community meal program called MIND. If you missed the acronym in the intro, MIND stands for Moving in New Directions.
You’ve just heard about how United Way works at an incredible scale - touching more lives over the course of its history than any one of us could count. Right now, I want to take you somewhere smaller:
One house. One phone call. One plate of food.
Picture a house at Parliament and Carlton Street right here in downtown Toronto.
By September 2023, 3,400 refugees in this city needed shelter. Shelters were full. People were forced to sleep on the streets. In response to this need, one house was singled out to become something else: a landing place for people who had fled their home countries, like Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Nigeria. People carrying more than luggage — carrying trauma, mental illness, carrying the particular exhaustion of starting a life over in a language, culture, and a climate that wasn’t theirs.
A Director of CMHA, Maria Boada, said it this way: "The goal {of Carlton House} is to provide more than just a roof over their heads. It's about cultivating space where clients can establish a sense of belonging and security as they navigate the path towards housing and a new beginning."
A roof isn't enough. Safety isn't enough. She knew that. And she knew what was missing.
Food.
It is so challenging and sometimes impossible to focus in a counselling session, job training, resumé writing, learn a new language, while your body is quietly screaming for something to eat.
This is what the MIND Program does. We provide free, culturally appropriate, health-informed meals to frontline agencies working with low-income, marginalized communities. These agencies see food insecurity for what it is — a barrier standing between someone and their own healing. Our partners don't have kitchens for this. They don't have the food safety certifications. They don't have the budget. What they have is a nurse, a case worker, telling us the same thing, over and over: nobody heals on an empty stomach. So we step into that gap. Utilizing surplus food donations from local businesses and partner food banks, we feed the people they're trying to help — from within the programs — so that care has a chance to actually land.
So, Canadian Mental Health Association Toronto called us. They requested one hearty meal, every day, for each resident. We found a donor, applied for grants. We sourced halal ingredients, culturally specific ingredients, health and allergy-conscious ingredients. We built a kitchen rhythm to include twenty-five strangers who were about to become our Canadian neighbours.
And it didn't stop when they moved out. When Carlton House residents graduate — we still provide meal supports to get them through the transition. Because rent is due. Because medication costs money. Because a bus pass costs money. And when we take food off the list of expenses, even for a little while, we hand people the money needed to cover these bills.
Here's why I'm telling you this story first before MIND's story.
Eight years ago, MIND Program was cooking in an eight foot -by- ten foot kitchen, in the rec room of a Toronto Community Housing building with just one employee doing everything.
United Way found us there. And they didn't hand us a cheque and disappear. They gave us multi-year funding — the kind that lets us stop surviving month to month and start actually building something, becoming an organization capable of answering a phone call and saying yes.
More than just a basic human need, food is a universal language. Whether we notice it or not, no matter what income bracket you're in — food is the unseen force that builds community. Whether you eat with a fork and spoon, chopsticks, or your hands — food gives expression to who we are, what we need. When you get to choose what you eat, that tells us something too — medically, economically, religiously, personally.
And when someone does not have that choice — when they’re standing in a food bank line for hours before the doors even open, hoping there's still milk or eggs left by the time they get inside — hunger is not the only problem. Dignity is being stolen.
I think about Ted. A resident in one of the Toronto Community Housing buildings where MIND serves. Ted lived in poverty, homelessness, and addiction from the time he was young. And what changed things for him wasn't just a MIND program meal. It was the neighbour who started showing up to share that table. It was the conversations that followed. The friendships borne over regular meals. It was the invitations to AA meetings. Food building blocks that formed the foundation for people to get help, get clean, and stand tall.
Suffice it to say, then — the lack of food tells a deep and painful story. What do you do when the medication you're supposed to take three times a day says "take with food," and you have nothing to eat? What happens when a senior, barely scraping by, is ravaged by arthritis and can barely hold a pot, let alone a spoon to cook a meal?
United Way moves through this country — coast to coast — and it looks. Really looks. Into the places most of us drive past without noticing. And when United Way sees an agency like mine, standing in a gap nobody else is filling, it doesn't just fund us. United Way makes sure we're strong enough to keep standing there. It builds the training, the connections, the community of agencies — We are boots on the ground, working where poverty hits hard —
United Way makes sure we're never doing it alone.
When Sun Life stands behind United Way, you are not funding one house on Carlton Street. You are not funding one small kitchen in Scarborough. You are funding the entire infrastructure that turns "we don't know how" into "we said yes."
MIND is just one agency. Multiply that by every single agency United Way supports, in the cities and provinces that they touch, and you start to see the shape of what we are talking about in this room today.
This is what I want you to picture when you walk out of here.
Today, in a house on Carlton Street, twenty-five full plates will find their way to twenty-five people. In a rec room across the city, one more chair gets pulled up at the table. And in both places, the same thing is happening - food is the ground beneath every kind of healing - because no one steadies their mind, or rebuilds their life on an empty stomach.
Food gathers people.
And a gathered community is a community that heals.
That's what United Way does.
That’s what Sun Life makes possible.
Together — you do it phenomenally.
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