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Nicholas Slawnych is a third-year student studying Ethics, Society, and Law, Philosophy, and Russian Language at the University of Toronto. He is especially interested in ethical representation in the literature of Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Melville.
Tarik Bacchus graduated from Ethics, Society, and Law and Criminology from the University of Toronto in 2006, and has since worked with various non-profits with foci on poverty, employment, food security, homelessness, and harm reduction. Tarik is currently the Vice-Chair of the Board of the Toronto Hostels Training Centre and the shelter manager at University Settlement’s Out of the Cold emergency shelter in downtown Toronto.
In a wide-ranging discussion, Nicholas and Tarik focused on the intersection of ethical theory and practice, the moral reasoning employed in responses to Toronto’s housing needs, and the value of interdisciplinary education.
N: How did you discover your current line of work?
T: I was raised with some concepts of equity and political consciousness and all that kind of stuff. My father was an immigrant and my mother was born here. Her family lived here for many generations, so seeing that blend gave me a unique perspective. Through U of T and ES&L specifically there were a lot of courses that allowed me to have more of a critical lens on a lot of structures. After I graduated there weren’t a lot of ethicist jobs posted and I needed to earn some money. At that time, the plan was to take a year, earn some money and write the LSATs and you know, do the normal thing. I ended up taking a job at a non-profit working in the employment department, and just through a series of fortunate of steps, absences and gaps and things like that, starting out there from employment services I got into homelessness and hunger.
In general, I was thinking of doing probations and parole as one avenue, law as another, but again I was young and idealistic, I was thinking legal aid law, or some sort of advocacy. I worked a lot in poverty but not in homelessness per se, so precarious housing and things like that were up there, but they had never occurred to me as a potential career path. So I spent a couple of nights seeing how things ran there, and I realized that was what I’m supposed to be doing.
N: What does an average day in your line of work look like?
T: “Out of the Cold” was a little more wild west. It was a part-time shelter and I was the only full-time staff with a very dedicated team of part-timers who came to staff ships. It was extremely low barrier; many of the individuals who used it were reluctant to access more traditional shelters because of safety concerns, or they weren’t ready to cooperate with case management, or they weren’t ready to work on housing from their perspective, so we were just a comfortable place where people felt safe. Along with that came some behaviours, a fair amount of alcohol use and drug use, and other self-medicating options that people take, but it was a very tight-knit community after all that. All of the residents and the staff felt very strongly about the program and its value.
Shelter services are structured because they’re better resourced by the community. In most cases there are people whose job it is to undertake each task, as opposed to “we gotta figure out how to get this done.” The structure is good, but you do sacrifice some seat of the pants capacity building. Again, great dedicated staff, still a good community of clients, although it is different, because in the shelter there is strong case management support and a lot of engagement with that process, but, also, a lot more housing getting done, a lot more people getting into housing.
On an average day I’ll review what happened over the past 24 hours, I’ll look at any incident reports, and if there are clients who are on the radar for any particular reasons—either they’re close to housing, or they’re not working on their housing. I’ll look at case notes, follow up with staff on any outstanding issues. There’s a lot of work that isn’t just at the shelter level as well: working on policy development, trying to create better processes for things like staffing and training. Most of the policies that I’d be working on day-to-day would typically be at the level of sites that I supervise, but in some cases, at the divisional level—things that we want to apply across the board. I provide a lot of escalation training for the staff as well.
N: What role do you see ethics playing in your current work?
T: There’s an antiseptic character to academia in general which you are confronted by when you enter the work environment, although there is ethical content every day in my work. When we transition people into other shelters because they’re not working on case plans and things like that, there are times when we are putting them at greater risk, so we have to balance that with who is going to be benefiting from the spot that is now created in the program, and just in general, ethics is very important in understanding the effect of homelessness in a wealthy country. I think what ethics theory gave me is the ability to take 10 steps back and look at the repetition and recapitulation of inequity throughout society, whether it’s within a corporate structure, within in economics, within housing and homelessness, within racial dynamics … ethics is there everywhere.
There’s an element of trying to make sure that people have access to the program from which they will reap the greatest benefit at any given time. Sometimes a particular program, which may have very similar structure to another program, will be a greater benefit to one person than another, and we respond to that benefit. We start with “nobody sleeps outside,” and then try to accommodate individual needs as best we can after that.
N: If there’s one piece of advice that you could give to current ES&L students, what would it be?
T: Don’t marry your path too hard. There are a lot of paths, and a lot of them are serendipitous. Small avenues you’ll take, large avenues you’ll take, there is a lot that you can’t predict. Don’t be sad about that.