For nearly 30 years, you have known Ve’ahavta as the Mobile Jewish Response to Homelessness, our outreach van program. Over the years, you have demonstrated your deep care for people facing homelessness by funding the program, volunteering, cooking meals, making sandwiches, and donating clothing. With 1,600 volunteers each year, our vans have become one of the most visible expressions of our work and our values.

Because of that visibility, many people associate Ve’ahavta primarily with homelessness and ask why we do not “do housing”. The answer lies in how we define the problem.

Homelessness is one of the most visible expressions of poverty, but the root of poverty is not the absence of housing. It is the absence of income. If homelessness were simply a housing problem, the solution would be obvious: Give people homes.

The problem is that even if housing were immediately available, without sufficient income a person remains trapped. A roof may change an address, but it does not create the ability for people to meet basic needs, build stability, or truly thrive.

The numbers make this clear. A person on social assistance receives less than $9,000 per year. In the GTA, the poverty line sits at approximately $27,000. The gap is overwhelming; a housing solution alone cannot close it.

Poverty at this depth is never only financial. When people rely on charity or social supports for a long period of time, it can erode dignity, weaken self- confidence, and narrow a person’s sense of what is possible.

We’ve all experienced times when we have doubted ourselves, but imagine that feeling not as a passing moment, but as an ongoing reality. Years of instability reshape identity and it is this emotional toll that is the deeper cost and symptom of poverty. That is the problem we are helping people solve at Ve’ahavta.

In Judaism, the highest form of charity is helping a person earn their own living so they can rely on themselves rather than depend on others. This is the moral root of our approach to poverty, because it protects dignity, affirms agency, and recognizes that every person is capable not only of standing on their own, but of thriving.

At Ve’ahavta, we do not simply help someone get a job. We help people rebuild resilience, confidence, and self-awareness, so that employment becomes possible and sustainable.

When a person begins earning their own income, something shifts that goes beyond a paycheque. They regain choice. Even at minimum wage, full time work generates over $36,000 a year and although this does not create wealth, given the cost of living in Toronto, it does create stability, and from stability, a person can grow. Pride returns. Confidence strengthens. Children see independence modeled before them.

When someone moves from social assistance to employment, they move from dependency to contribution. They participate in the economy, pay taxes, and begin to see themselves not as recipients of support, but as contributors. It is that shift – from receiver to giver – that may be the most important one of all.

So why doesn’t Ve’ahavta do housing? Because while housing can stabilize a crisis, internal change and sustainable employment is what transforms a life.

We are grateful to the organizations working to increase affordable housing in our city. That work is necessary. Our lane is different. We exist to help people develop the skills and confidence to earn their own living so they can decide for themselves who they will be and where they will live.

Thank you for walking alongside us in this work.

With gratitude,

Cari Kozierok,
CEO, Ve’ahavta