Mary
Morgan, an international consultant in developing countries, was
brought in to head up Partners for Economic and Community Help (PEACH).
Photograph by: Arlen Redekop, Vancouver Sun
VANCOUVER
-- Mary Morgan has seen the worst the world has to offer. Guatemala,
Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Afghanistan, Zambia, Zimbabwe — her
consultancy work in developing nations has given her first-hand
experience with war, poverty and disease. She has worked for CARE, CIDA,
and the International Rescue Committee, among others.
But nothing prepared her for Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
In
2002, she stepped into the job of executive director of Partners for
Economic and Community Help (PEACH). The previous executive director had
left, and Morgan was hired for the job.
PEACH was an initiative
of the Vancouver Agreement, a joint program funded by federal,
provincial and city governments. Its aim was to revitalize the Downtown
Eastside. It has since been shut down, but there would be similar
programs replacing it.
PEACH’s role was — and I quote from the
official bumf — “to give residents of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside the
tools to improve their situation by furthering community capacity
building, enhancing entrepreneurship and business development, and
creating employment and employment training opportunities.”
Hear
that, Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer? The high-minded public relations babble?
The complete absence of measurable goals? If you suspect that perhaps
PEACH was not, in fact, peachy, you would be right. This fruit was
rotten.
Walking into the job, Morgan found an agency without any oversight.
“I
was stunned. ... There were no lending policies, (and this) for an
organization that was solely dedicated to disbursing loans.”
The
PEACH program was divided into two parts. The first was a $1-million
grant fund, all of which had been given away to various DTES “projects”
by the time Morgan had arrived. The second part was a $1-million loan
fund. Morgan found it in disarray.
“Just to give you an idea of
the mess the organization was in, two business loans of $100,000 had
been disbursed with no contracts being signed because there was no
lending procedures or lending policies in place. Without these
procedures in place, the organization essentially handed out free money.
“In
my first three months, I had to write off $350,000 of our $1-million
loan fund that came from Western Diversification (the federal agency
involved in the Vancouver Agreement). Western Diversification told me
that it did not matter if the $1 million was written off. They would
give me another million dollars!”
Among the organization’s board —
which included Mark Townsend, executive director of the Portland
Housing Society — was chair Peter Fairchild, a property manager and
consultant who had worked in the Downtown Eastside (he now lives on
Vancouver Island). He disagreed with Morgan’s view of the control over
loans.
“All of the paperwork,” Fairchild said, “was done with the
best due diligence possible. The money was in the local bank (Four
Corners Community Savings bank) and they wouldn’t have loaned out any
money without the appropriate paperwork being done and everything signed
off.”
(Four Corners was shut down by the provincial government in 2004 after posting annual losses since its inception.)
But
PEACH employee Melanie Buffel, pressed into the position of loans
officer by Morgan, agreed the organization’s oversight procedures were a
mess. “Mary and I ended up working together to close a number of loans
that had really gone nowhere and were never going to be paid off. And
then (we tried) to establish a very rigorous process for giving up new
loans. ... So just the process of making decisions of who was going to
get a loan was very messy and unclear, and so we spent a lot of time
getting a policy and procedure manual in place.”
Said
Morgan of those loans: “They were giving loans up to $100,000 (later
reduced to a maximum of $50,000) without any checks or balances. For
$100,000, you have to get people in there who know how to run a
business. But it was essentially a last-resort lending option, which
means you get the people of highest risk. And so you get people coming
down who wanted free money, and (they) didn’t get penalized.”
Morgan
resigned after 13 months on the job. The last straw came, she said,
when the board of directors killed a pilot project to encourage Downtown
Eastside women to save money. For every dollar they saved, PEACH would
kick in two, with the proviso that the money would go toward helping
them become self-sufficient.
The board, Morgan said, voted it down
because the money could not be considered a loan. “And that’s when I
quit. The loans weren’t working ... and there was no interest whatsoever
in real economic development. When you are working with marginalized
people, there are appropriate business products, and business loans of
$50,000 are not appropriate products for that population.”
The
real issue for Morgan, however, was the lack of oversight by the
government. It was that lack, still continuing today, she said, which
leads to spending scandals like that of the Portland Housing Society.
“The
fact that the government is giving out that kind of money and they
don’t give a damn about what systems are in place, that’s the issue.
“They’re throwing money at (the Downtown Eastside) ... but it hasn’t improved.
“Listen,
I’ve been to some bad places in the world. When I got off the plane in
Liberia, there was no electricity in the whole country. And that place
is moving forward.
“But this is Canada, and (the Downtown
Eastside) is a 10-block area. And why don’t we have better services down
there? And why aren’t we dealing with the real problems?”
pmcmartin
