There has been much press of late about “social housing” in our area. I remember well the first time I became aware of social housing in our neighbourhood. Joan MacKinlay was working in a group home and I wanted to give away a piano. She introduced me to one of the residents there who was a pianist. Voila! The piano was gone, and I gained a new awareness about this particular social housing. I had passed the house repeatedly through the years, and never noticed it. It was unremarkable even to other residents who lived nearby. The yard was well kept, the police were not there on a regular basis, and responsible people took care of things.

McCauley Apartments is another social housing project in McCauley that is both inconspicuous and a benefit to the community. In fact, I was shocked to learn that McCauley Apartments is run by E4C. I did not learn that until probably three or four years after I began working as the Volunteer Coordinator for the newspaper. An inordinate number of residents in McCauley Apartments volunteer for Boyle McCauley News. For starters, David Prodan, Drea De Klerk, and Dan Glugosh, just to name a few of the E4C employees who have worked at the building, have also been invaluable volunteers in this community, reaching out to help wherever they can.

Many residents at McCauley Apartments have been long term, dedicated volunteers. Most can be seen at the yearly McCauley Clean Up that has the apartments as a central collection point. At every casino the community league and the paper have held in recent memory you will see Don working in the count room and David as a chip runner. Barry and Shari have been carriers for many years. Chris writes and takes photographs for us, while George used to do anything that was asked of him when he lived there.

This writer and several people mentioned in this piece are people living with disabilities. We all have the ability to volunteer and to make a difference in our community. Perhaps the next time we talk about social housing we might rearrange our thought patterns to think about how much we can learn about how to live in society from the sociable people who live there!