The community sector is at a breaking point.
Several Valley organizations, including the CDC du Haut-Saint-Laurent, posted messages on social media last week announcing they would be closing their doors. The publications were an April fool’s day joke, but imagine the shock that would have reverberated throughout the region if even one of these messages had been true.
From March 23 to April 2, numerous community groups were on strike as part of the Communautaire à Boutte movement. None of the organizations took the decision lightly, knowing full well that closing their services for even a day would impact their users or members. For many, adopting a strike mandate was a necessary step to ensure the long-term survival of their individual organizations and the province’s community sector in general.
Statistics suggest one third of the Quebec population will turn to a community organization at some point in their lives. According to the Institut de la Statistique du Québec, there are approximately 10,300 community action organizations in the province, which employ upwards of 137,000 people. Around ten per cent of these organizations are in the Montérégie, where 1,800 participated in the two-week strike.
Over 90 per cent of Quebec’s community organizations work directly with the population, with just over 50 per cent targeting specific clienteles including families and children, women, and teenagers/young adults. The sector is growing in rural Quebec, with positive job growth, but behind these stats lies another reality.
As Marie Rachel Charlebois of the CDC du Haut-Saint-Laurent pointed out during a demonstration outside their Huntingdon office, local organizations are contending with exhausted teams, management spending more time preparing funding applications than supporting their mission, and high staff turnover due to a lack of stable funding. Meanwhile, demand keeps rising, situations are becoming ever more complex, and public services are under so much pressure the community sector is forced to cover the gaps.
Those who depend on community organizations for different services know how important they are to ensuring the Valley’s safety net remains intact. The Communautaire à Boutte movement was a cry for help and recognition. Let’s hope our community workers made enough noise to reach both the government and the public’ s ear. Our social safety net needs to be wide enough to protect those working to help others, and right now, our valiant community workers are slipping through the cracks.
Sarah Rennie