Provincial Recognition for Café Graffiti’s Many Missions

By Colin McGregor

The Quebec Minister responsible for Social Solidarity and Community Action and Minister for the City of Montreal and its Region, MNA for Pointe-aux-Trembles Mme Chantal Rouleau, recently visited Café Graffiti with some very much appreciated good news.

Recognizing the Café Graffiti’s role in helping people reintegrate into society through the arts and professional skills development, she awarded the Café Graffiti with operating grants for the next few years. Usually, community group such as ours have to run after funding on a project-by-project basis. Minister Rouleau’s generous finding, almost $200,000, means the Café can operate on recurrent funding for years without having to chase individual project funding quite as much.

Since the Café receives no other government funds, this money is a welcome recognition of the good work we are doing.

There are over 4,500 community groups in Quebec. Café Graffiti is one of 18 groups honored with such operating funding, which like the other groups act within the ambits of a number of ministries without being pigeonholed into one sector alone.

“The Café Graffiti is well implanted in its community,” Minister Rouleau observed. “It does a number of things, most importantly finding a place for youth to express itself, getting youth to be more elf-reliant and confident.” Returning people on welfare back into society is one of Minister Rouleau’s top priorities.

Community Links

“The community organization sector is an important link in the community fabric, a community foundation. It’s not part of a social safety net, it’s part of a foundation. Things slip through a safety net, but you can build on a foundation.”

Her ministry’s spending on the social sector has doubled over the course of the two majority mandates of the current government, to 2.2 billion dollars – 1.1 billion of which is mandated in the Government Action Plan for Community Action 2022-2027. She points out that her government has boosted the wealth of Quebeckers so that they are now number one in Canada in terms of gross per capita income, and the gap between this province and Ontario has disappeared.

As minister responsible for the Island of Montréal, she is active creating programs that work to lift prejudices against welfare recipients and the homeless, and get them off the street to enter the workforce. For example, social workers are now on the job around downtown Montréal’s Parc Émilie-Gamelin, where often the park’s people find refuge in the nearby Grande Bibliothèque on cold days. Students, children and other library users are often worried about these itinerants, who bring their gear with them.  “The security guards in there don’t know what to do with them. Why not give them a book? Why not get UQAM students interested in volunteering to help them? What better opportunity for social work students?”

Another future project is called “Le poids du préjugé” the weight of prejudice. It is aimed at getting people to relieve themselves of the burdens of bias against those in difficulty.

Minister Rouleau says the media often focus on the bad points of a government, without touting its successes. She has worked hard at her ministry to lift as many people as possible out of poverty and despair. She looks for ways to stop kids who leave the DPJ (Youth Protection) from going on emergency welfare, L’aide de dernier recours, at age 17 ½ when they are first eligible; and remaining marginalized, victims of prejudice, throughout their adulthood.

If Café Graffiti can help turn that tide, all the better.