Monday, May 19, 2008

Poor Locked Out of Carnegie Learning Center on Saturday

On Saturday, Carnegie Center staff locked the Downtown Eastside poor out of the Learning Center. The Learning Center is supposed to be open Monday-Saturday all year long, including holiday weekends.

It was open today, Monday of the holiday weekend.

The poor were locked out of the Learning Center last Thursday as well. The reason was apparently that some of the volunteers had gone on a scheduled trip. But three Carnegie members have reported that Lucy Alderson, the Capilano College staff person who runs the Carnegie Learning Center, was present and could have kept the drop-in facility open.

The Learning Center was closed once last month as well.

These closures are an improvement though. The Learning Center used to lock the poor out more often, until the Downtown Eastside Enquirer started squealing to taxpayers.

The Learning Center is jointly run by Capilano College and Carnegie Center from Monday to Friday. Capilano College staff don't work on Saturdays so Carnegie staff are responsible for keeping it open on that day.

The door to the usually busy computer room just up the hall from the Learning Center was frequently locked in April, according to reports we got from members. (We recorded some of the times and dates of the closures.) But May has been a good month, with the computer room being steadily open.

1 comment:

Dag said...

There's one sure way to find out if Carnegie members care about this issue: find a half dozen Learning Center users and go to Capilano College and hand out leaflets to students explaining what's going on.

At some level or another it is Capilano students who are paying for this, so they might like to get their money's worth.

If no one from the Carnegie library cares enough to go to inform the students, then you'll know it's just another load of crap dumped on people too dysfunctional to care about their own lives or anything else that doesn't include a free sandwich.