As Canada's largest and oldest emotional crisis and support agency, Distress Centres of Greater Toronto is taking immediate steps to ensure that our essential services are accessible to as many people as possible.

As you might imagine, the demand for our services is at historically high levels; more people need our support, and more people are experiencing severe issues because of the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on our economy, relationships, and normal social supports. Year over year, demand for our programs and services always grew but in 2020 exploded with the onset of Covid-19. As the pandemic has spilled over into 2021, our expenses attributed to remote responding, virtual training and additional Covid related activities/preparations will once again increase our annual expenses again in the range of $100,000+.

 DCGT responded to over 170,000 call/text interactions, supported over 500 survivors of a suicide/homicide loss and trained 500 new volunteers and experienced an average call increase of 1,175 additional interactions each month between April and December 2020 across our existing programs and services. These higher levels of call interactions and additional expenses have continued into 2021 as Covid-19 Pandemic has continued.

We can only hope that the community will continue to partner with us in 2021 with a gift of any amount. Your gift will be contributed to the costs associated with training over 500 new volunteers in 2021, the continued technical improvements such as our website, improved volunteer mentoring program, virtual volunteer communication portal, volunteer shift scheduling software and assistance with continued Covid-related expenses such as remote lines. Without support from the community, it becomes harder and harder to meet the needs of the most vulnerable people experience mental health crisis.