Social and crisis support services are now available in 12 Toronto Public Library locations across the city.HO/The Canadian Press
As Toronto’s libraries increasingly find themselves on the front lines of the city’s homelessness and mental health crisis, a program that aims to help some of the most vulnerable people is expanding to more branches.
Social and crisis support services are now available in 12 Toronto Public Library locations across the city, in an effort to meet growing demand and reach people who may otherwise go without support in a welcoming public space.
The idea was born in 2023, when staff expressed feeling limited while trying to help vulnerable people who came to the library, said Amanda French, manager of social development at Toronto Public Library.
“We would tell people where something was, but then we couldn’t really warmly hand them over to anyone,” French said.
In partnership with the Gerstein Crisis Centre in Toronto, the library launched a pilot project in a handful of locations in 2023 to offer free drop-in crisis services and programs to people experiencing mental health, substance abuse or other issues.
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Partnering with Gerstein to address the gaps in crisis supports “only made sense,” said French, especially as the library took on the challenge of delivering services outside of its expertise.
The partnership was also a no-brainer for the Gerstein Crisis Centre, which saw it as an opportunity to connect with people who may not have access to its location, said the centre’s executive director Susan Davis.
“I think the beauty of it is the inclusivity and the fact that a community cares enough to try and bring the resources to the people,” Davis said.
According to a 2024 report by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, 2.5 million people with mental health needs said they weren’t getting adequate care, even as Canadians reported having “poor” or “fair” mental health three times more often than before the pandemic.
The library program locations were decided according to where organizers thought they would have the most impact, French said.
“We saw that there was a really great correlation between better connecting folks not just when they were having what we’ll call an emergency crisis or a loud crisis, but a lot of preventive behaviour before someone is already experiencing crisis,” she said.
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A year and a half after the pilot project’s launch, more than 8,000 people accessed services across more than 1,000 different wellness programs and sessions. The library says there were also a total of 12,900 engagements between people and crisis workers.
Programming includes peer-led group activities involving physical activity and music therapy, an education program focused on mental health recovery and a three-hour workshop focused on suicide prevention.
Seven of the library branches, including the Toronto Reference Library, also have Gerstein crisis intervention workers available to offer short-term crisis counselling and other mental health supports.
The group activities are important as they offer participants a chance to feel connected to a community, which is not always provided in more traditional mental health services, Davis said.
“So many people are living with loneliness and that really impacts mental health,” Davis said. “Inclusion is really a core component everybody needs to feel well.”
A 2023 survey conducted by the Toronto Foundation found that 37 per cent of Torontonians – or approximately 925,000 people – reported feeling lonely at least three or four days a week, making the city among the loneliest in Canada.
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This statistic especially stands out to French, who says that libraries are some of the last free public institutions where people can connect with others.
“These folks are already in our spaces and so having them connect with things they perhaps didn’t even know how to find to begin with, bringing it right into the spaces where they are, that absolutely helps us build a community,” French said.
Since the project’s expansion in June, French said the number of people accessing services continues to ramp up. So far this year, the program has had more than 4,000 participants with 8,300 total crisis worker engagements.
For anyone looking to access the services, it’s as simple as walking into a library branch that offers them, French said.
“When crisis workers are not occupied with somebody, they’re often out in the library. So they’re visible and people see them,” Davis said, adding that those workers often have a white lanyard with a purple card that denotes they are part of social and crisis support services.
French said the program may be expanded to even more library branches around the city if demand continues.
“We’ll look at our data and make sure that we are serving customers where they are with the kinds of services they need,” French said.
