EDMONTON — The desperate calls for help come before Mark Cherrington can roll out of bed.

His typical morning routine is to wake up to a long string of texts from single moms in need of diapers and baby formula, families in crisis who need help with transportation, or a parent who is pleading to be reunited with their child.

With COVID-19 closing daycares, schools, libraries and putting tremendous strain on charitable organizations such as food banks, advocates say people who were already living on the margins are being pushed past the brink of survival.

Last week, Cherrington ran into a young man he has been helping for years. He was in tears. It wasn’t because he was homeless. It wasn’t because he didn’t have an ID, bank account or financial supports from the government.

It was because downtown was so barren he couldn’t find any empty bottles to salvage.

“The bottle guy really affected me because I hadn’t even thought of that,” Cherrington said. “All these ripples of chaos that are coming from this pandemic are really highlighting where our safety gaps are.”

Cherrington, an Edmonton youth and family advocate who has helped vulnerable people for more than 25 years, said many of the families he deals with have used their monthly food bank quota and don’t know where to turn.

“Everything with these moms is compounded,” Cherrington said. “They’re dealing with no child care, the schools closing down have had a huge impact ... They don’t have these strong family supports that many of us have. And of course, poverty really comes into play.”

For single mother Freda Ballantyne, it also means having to go without her regular medical appointments because she can’t reach her specialist for a referral. She needs weekly injections of cortisone and methotrexate to manage symptoms of arthritis and an inflammatory disease that causes severe pain, but the clinic won’t provide them without the referral.

Ballantyne is an Indigenous community advocate and writer who has held rallies for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, spoken at anti-racism events and written about the impacts of the Sixties Scoop.

But now she finds herself needing to ask others for help. She and her three-year-old daughter are currently couch surfing at a friend’s home while she helps with babysitting. She says she’s not receiving child tax benefits, welfare or other financial supports due to a dispute with her child’s father and complications with her child’s birth certificate.

“I can’t work right now because my knee is filled with fluid, and it leads to a lot of arthritis in my ankles,” Ballantyne said. “So with my with my no-work order, it’s depressing for me. And then to have on top of that to have to go ask for help, it’s a lot.”

What provides her some comfort during this time of need is helping others. She helps moderate a Facebook group that has sprouted up in response to the pandemic called YEG Community Response to COVID19.

When it first started about a week ago, it had just four members, Ballantyne said. By Friday, the group had grown to more than 12,000 members. At first, most of the posts were requests for kitchen staples and medical supplies such as alcohol swabs and thermometers.

Now Ballantyne is noticing more people posting that they’ve been laid off and need help accessing employment insurance as well as those who say they’re worried about paying their rent. She even saw a post by someone who said they couldn’t access their cancer treatments because the local clinic was closed.

“What they need now isn’t just staples and food supplies, it’s ‘I need a link with a physician whose office will accept me so I can get my son in to get his medication.’ So it’s really become a sense of urgency really fast,” Ballantyne said.

Cherrington has heard from some of the single moms he works with who say they’re sacrificing their own meals so their children can eat.

“I could show you a whole line of texts from moms who haven’t eaten and are going hungry ... they’re going days without food,” he said.

He said he appreciates all orders of government are moving to provide additional funding for vulnerable people. But many low-income people don’t have access to the internet to apply for funding nor transportation to seek help.

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“So for someone trying to do this on an iPhone 3 with a cracked screen, it’s almost impossible for some of these moms.”

Glenn van Gulik, a spokesman for the Salvation Army, said they’ve seen increased demand at their branches across the country, especially from people who are “on the cusp” of poverty.

“(Until now) they’ve been able to stay above that line ... It is a very dire situation,” he said.

“To those that are out there that are on the edge, that perhaps are struggling with the decision to ask for help, now is the time. Don’t wait.”

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