HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 1987-10-14, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 14, 1987. PAGE 5.
Homemakers saluted Oct. 18-24
Homemakers keep people happy at home
Jean Young, executive director of Town and Country Homemakers
and chairman of the Ontario Association of Visiting Homemaker
Services has been at the helm of the Huron County agency since its
inception. She passes her deep capacity for caring and commitment to
excellence on to administrative and field staff alike, earning her
workers the reputation of being “very special people”.
BY TOBY RAINEY
Atexactly 10 a.m. this Saturday,
hundreds upon hundreds of gaily
coloured balloons will be released
simultaneously from prominent
locations in each of Huron Coun-
ty’sfive towns, Wingham, Clinton,
Seaforth, Goderich, and Exeter.
The high-profile event is intended
to pay homage to the more than 200
Visiting Homemakers in the coun
ty, as well as to kick off the special
week set aside in honour of their
6,000 sisters across Ontario who
every day “help to keep a good
home going.”
The week of October 18-24 has
been declared Visiting Home
makers Week by the provincial
legislature, the first time that a
period has been set aside to
celebrate more than 50 years of
providing homemaking services to
ill, handicapped and frail elderly
persons all across Ontario. The
services today are provided
through 51 non-profit, community
based agencies right across the
province.
Huron County’s own Town and
Country Homemakers of Wing
ham is one of the very best of these,
providing service to approximately
650 clients a week in every single
community and throughout all the
rural areas of the county, making it
possible for many people to live
happily and independently in their
own homes instead of having to
spend weeks, months or years in a
hospital or long-term care facility.
Homemakers are trained per
sonnel, usually women, who pro
vide a wide range of health,
housekeeping and personal ser
vices which enable their clients,
who can range all the way from
babies to the frail elderly, to
remain in their homes: a concept so
simple in its impact as to be almost
overlooked.
* ‘The strength of the Homemak
ing service is bound up in the value
mostpeopleplaceonliving in ‘a
homeof one’s own,’ where one can
feel dependent, useful and se
cure,’’says Jean Young, executive
Director of Town and Country
Homemakers and chairman of the
Ontario Association of Visiting
Homemaker Services (OAVHS).
“A home is a place of comfort
and security, a place of memories
and a reassurance as to our place in
the world; a place to retain a sense
of dignity, a sense of challenge, a
sense of independence.”
Mrs. Young herself is the major
reason that Town and Country
Homemakers has achieved such
outstanding success since its
beginning less than 10 years ago;
the reason that the Huron County
agency is the only rural-based
agency in the OAVHS; and the
reason that the quiet, middle-aged
woman from Tees water heads one
of the most effective social organi
zations in the province.
A kindly and honest woman,
Jean Young exudes strength and
confidence that is passed on to her
entire staff, both in the administra
tion of her office and to the
homemakers in the field. A
workaholic who thinks nothing of
putting in a 50 or 60 hour week
herself, she nevertheless does
everything in her power to keep her
staff from being overworked, even
as she demands that they give their
jobs everything that they have to
give, to be the best that they can be.
Individuals and families who
have received the services of Town
and Country Homemakers often
speak of the workers as caring
individuals who bring far more to
their jobs than just their homemak-
ingskills, peoplewhotimeafter
time are able to make a very
important difference to a life which
may, for whatever reason, be
falling apart at the time the
Homemaker is called in. Mrs.
Young herself sets both the tone
and the standards for her staff, and
it is obvious that each one of them is
proud to live up to that standard to
the best of her ability.
Originally trained as a home
maker herself in 1974, in the days
when such people were self-
employed, Mrs. Young quickly
saw the need for an agency to
co-ordinate the services of the
independent homemakers
throughout the county.
In 1976, after discovering that no
county agency or other institution
was interested in starting a
Homemakers’ agency, Mrs.
Young joined forces with Betty
Cardno of Seaforth (who was then,
as she is now, Executive Director of
‘ 'They re wonderful, they
have so much love in them, you
can t explain ...I often wonder
how I got along without them.
the Huron County Home Care
Program under the Huron County
Health Unit). Working entirely on
their own time, the two women
gathered a committee of communi
ty leaders from all across the
county to investigate the feasibility
of the program they envisaged,
and later to apply for a grant to get
it off the ground.
They wanted an agency which
could provide homemakers with
more employment opportunities,
wage guarantees, benefits, per
sonnel policies, a code of ethics, job
descriptions and moral support,
and that could at the same time
provide clients with quality care,
given by supervised, trained per
sonnel.
In early 1978, Town and Country
Homemakers applied for, and got,
a Canada Works grant to cover the
new agency’s administration costs
for the first year; then immediately
set out to obtain a charter as a
non-profit organization.
On May 26,1978, after months of
hard and dedicated work, Town
and Country Homemakers was
incorporated and registered as a
charitable organization under the
Canada Income Tax Act. The
following November, a public
meeting was held to elect a board of
directors and to appoint an execu
tive, and in January, 1979, the new
agency opened in temporary quar
ters in Wingham, with an office
staff of two, including Mrs. Young
asdirector, andsome60trained
Homemakers throughout the
county.
In June, 1981, the agency moved
to its present permanent position
at 92 Victoria Street in Wingham,
where it now operates with an
office and administrative staff of
13, and employs more than 200
Homemakers and Home Support
workers.
The agency saw an enormous
spurt of growth in 1986, following
the establishment of the new
provincially-funded Integrated
HomeCare Program, which meant
that clients in need could get all the
care they required from one
agency, rather than shopping
around for individual contracts.
Today 85 per cent of Town and
Country Homemakers services are
purchased by the Health Unit’s
Home Care Program, while the
remaining 15 per cent are purchas
ed privately through individuals,
or by clients such as Huron County
Community and Social Services,
the Cancer Society, the March of
Dimes, or Veteran’s Affairs.
Today, with more and more
branches of both federal and
provincial government recogniz
ing the vital role Homemaking
services plays in the community
and in the health care system,
access to these services will
continue to improve, as will
training opportunities, working
conditions and wages and benefits
for Visiting Homemakers.
Over the pastyear, the services
offered by Town and Country
Homemakers have expanded to
include more services and pro
grams, including a corps of Home
Support Workers who provide
services such as heavy houseclean-
ing and handyman skills on an
hourly basis, while an enthusiastic
group of volunteers, under pro
gram co-ordinator Bev Brown,
provides transportation where
needed, friendly visits and tele
phone reassurance to the home
bound, andanexpanded meals-on-
wheels program in some communi
ties.
It is obvious that Ontario’s
Visiting Homemakers will hold a
secure place in our future. It would
be well to take time during Visiting
Homemakers Week to salute
them.
Student forum hears about farm debt crisis
The farm crisis is real and is
affecting people around them
every day, students from Central
Huron Secondary School were told
by a panel of farm spokesmen in a
special debate at the school
Thursday in Clinton.
An audience, made up mostly of
grade 12 students, filled the
cafeteria at the school to hear five
speakers discuss the current situa
tion of agriculture. The program
was arranged by CHSS teacher Jim
Barnes who earlier had taken the
students to the Bly th Festival to see
‘‘AnotherSeason’s Promise” a
play about the farm crisis. The
panel discussion had been arrang
ed, he said, because some students
doubted some of the things in the
play, especially the seizure of farm
records by police, could happen.
Lead-off speaker Brian Ireland,
a Tees water area pork producer
and farm counsellor, assured the
audience that everything they had
seen in the play had happened to
someone he knew. He had, in his
counselling business, talked two
people out of commiting suicide.
One teenager he knew had tried to
commit suicide twice because of
stress in the family.
He asked how many students
came from farms and many hands
went up. He asked how many
planned to go into farming and only
a few hands went up. He told those
who were considering farming
they should get a good education
and get a good career but never
take theireyes off farming because
someday things would turn around
and they’d be able to get into the
business and make a living at it.
He then asked how many of the
children of farms had parents that
went to farm meetings. Only one or
twohandswentup. Hesaidthat
farmers must learn to work
together if they’re to get a decent
deal in society. The reality is, he
said, ‘‘as long as I’ve been farming
and as far back as I can read,
farmers have always been pitted
against farmers” in a divide and
conquer strategy that has kept
farmers from having a strong
united voice that would mean
farmers get a proper reward for
their work. There has never been a
time when all farm commodities
have been in trouble at the same
time so some farmers in good
shape have always been willing to
sit on the sidelines and watch their
neighbours go down.
‘‘If farmers could get organized
the way teachers are we wouldn’t
have afarm crisis, ” he said. He
described the kind of “cannibal
ism” that sees farmers waiting to
pick the bones of their neighbours
to get good deals on land and
machinery.
Programs like the provincial
government’s “Farm Start” pro
gram will make him angry he said
because they are only bringing in
“a whole new batch of suckers who
will go broke sometime down the
road but in the meantime will
produce a whole lot of cheap food. ’ ’
Mr. Ireland said he was known
as an activist and a little bit of a
radical but in a democracy, “if you
have an opinion and you ’ re the only
one who has that opinion, you have
the right to speak that opinion.”
There is a pressure to go along with
the status quo these days, he said,
but he told the students they
shouldn’tletit happen. Good ideas
can win acceptance against con
ventional wisdom.
He recalled in the early 1980’s
having an idea with a group of other
farmers that with so much surplus
grain being produced, it would be
good to plant more trees on
farmland to reduce the surplus and
save the land. When the proposal
was taken to an Ontario Federation
of Agriculture meeting it was
laughed off the floor, he said, but
recently Jack Riddell, Ontario
Minister of Agriculture, had intro
duced a policy to encourage
farmers to plant trees on farmland.
Brenda McIntosh, Tuckersmith
township poultry farmer and a
member of the Ontario Farm Debt
Review Board, explained the
fu nction of the board which was set
up to negotiate settlements be
tween farmers and their creditors
with the aim of keeping as many
farmers on the land as possible.
She said that in the more than one
year of operation the Ontario board
had had 847 applications, includ
ing 84 new ones in September. Of
these, 91 had resulted in signed
agreements between farmers and
their creditors, 384 had reached
some form of agreement, 357 were
under active review at present and
65 had withdrawn their applica
tions for help. Most applications
had come from the cash crop and
specialty crop areas, she said, with
beef and swine next in line.
‘‘If all commodities grown in
farming made their costs plus a
reasonable profit,” she summed
up, “there’d be no need for farm
debt review boards, and 1 could
stay home on my own farm.”
Paul Klopp, president of the
Huron County Federation of Agri
culture, said that there seems to be
an opinion among urban residents
that if you live in the country you
have your own food and fresh air
and you don’t have to have money.
He quoted Theodore Roosevelt
who at the turn of the century had
said that cities should not prosper
at the expense of farmers.
He said in 1979 he had borrowed
money andpaid 12percentinterest
at a time corn was selling for $4 a
bushel. Today, he said, farmers
are being asked to pay 13 per cent
interest while corn is selling for
$2.40 a bushel. Everybody else has
had a raise since 1979, he said, but
farmers are expected to make do
with less.
He said that the problem comes
down to the fact Members of
Parliament and Members of the
Provincial Parliament don’t want
to act on behalf of farmers; that
they are tied too tightly to the
interests of big business which
profits from the farmers problems.
Tony McQuail, a farmer who
farms with the emphasis on
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