Dawn Hemmingway, Board Voice Director and Chair of the School of Social Work at UNBC participated in the ‘Chili Blanket 12 Rally’ in Prince George on Saturday Dec. 6th, to bring attention to poverty and violence against women. Hosted by the ‘The Northern Women’s Forum’ of which Dawn is also a founding member, the rally included speeches, donations of blankets and winter clothes, free chili, buns and hot chocolate.
“We’re doing two main things: one is bringing clothing, health kits and food to people in the community who need help and equally, if not more important, is we’re talking about what can we do about this situation,” said Dawn.
“It’s frustrating. Things like food banks were only supposed to be temporary measures, yet persist decades after they were introduced,” she said. “Why are the governments (provincial & federal) not doing something about these things? We’ve been told so many times that we just need to build the economy and extract more resources and somehow that is going to trickle down. The fact is there is no trickle down and things are getting worse.”
One of the recipients of the donated clothing, Michelle Rhodes, left feeling grateful. “This is really good. I live in BC Housing and being on disability there’s not a lot of money to buy brand new stuff so I came here looking for a new comforter for my bed and I found a couple of fleece jackets and lots of socks.”
You can read the newspaper article here.