A letter from the house on Dunblaine Avenue
Cds Family Foundation is a small family support foundation working from 149 Dunblaine Avenue, Toronto - M5M 2S4, Canada (CA). We sit with parents caring for a child with a disability, a long illness or a sudden change at home, and we turn the paperwork, the waiting rooms and the quiet evenings into something a family can hold. Everything we do begins with a conversation at the kitchen table, continues through steady weekly follow up, and ends only when the household tells us it can stand on its own again.
Our work is practical rather than ceremonial. A respite grant pays for the afternoon a parent spends asleep. A referral puts a counsellor on the telephone before the week closes. A circle of caregivers shares the recipes and the small routines that keep a house running when energy is thin. If any of that sounds like your week, write to us and we will answer the kettle →
We publish our privacy promise and our terms in plain language because a foundation that asks for your trust should be readable in one sitting. The pages below describe the six services we run, the people who staff them, and the way a family moves from a first phone call to a settled routine. Read the letter. Walk the line. Answer the kettle.
Explore the six servicesThe line we walk beside families
Most households arrive at our door somewhere along this line, and most leave it further down than they expected. The markers are not steps in a strict order. They are the places we return to, week after week, for as long as a family needs the company.
Twice each season we open a short grant round for families who need an afternoon, a weekend or a night away from the constant watch. The grant is deliberately unglamorous: it pays a trusted sitter, a bus fare, a hot meal eaten while sitting down. Applications are one page long and we read every one of them aloud to the review table.
A parent who calls our referral line reaches a person, not a menu. We keep a working list of counsellors who understand disability, grief, immigration and the particular exhaustion of caregiving, and we stay on the telephone until an appointment is booked. If cost is the barrier, the foundation covers the first block of sessions.
On the second Thursday of each month the front room fills with tea, folded chairs and people who do not need the situation explained. A circle evening has no lecture and no guest speaker. It has a facilitator, a timer and the freedom to say the sentence you cannot say at work.
Brothers and sisters of a child with high needs often become small adults without anyone deciding it. Our sibling days give them an afternoon that belongs only to them, with games, a craft table and a counsellor who answers the hard questions honestly. Parents receive a short note afterwards so the conversation can continue at home.
When a boiler fails, a wheelchair ramp is refused or a hospital stay empties the grocery budget, the emergency fund moves within days rather than weeks. We do not ask a family to relive the crisis in triplicate forms. A short call, a written note and a decision from two reviewers is enough to release help.
Funding applications, school meetings, accessible housing lists and medical forms share one quality: they assume the reader has spare hours. A navigation walkthrough pairs a family with a volunteer who has done this before, sits beside them through the forms and leaves a written summary with the next three actions highlighted.
The Emergency Family Fund keeps a standing reserve so that a broken furnace never has to wait for a committee to meet.
The first visit lasts an hour and has no intake form. A family sits in the front room, drinks something warm and tells us what the last month has actually looked like. From that conversation we write a short household note, choose one service to begin with and agree on a date for the next call. Nothing is sent to a database before the family has read the note and corrected it. We have found that a foundation which listens first and files later tends to keep families for years rather than weeks.
Between visits a small team checks in by telephone at the agreed interval. If the household needs a grant, a referral or a walkthrough, the request travels with the household note so nobody has to tell the story from the beginning again. If a family disappears for a season, we send one card and then wait. Reaching out is not a summons, and returning is never treated as a fresh start.
Our volunteers come from the neighbourhoods around Dunblaine Avenue, and many of them were once on the other side of the table. They are trained in confidentiality, in the limits of their role and in the exact moment to hand a family on to a clinician. The foundation pays for that training, for the tea and for the sitter who makes it possible for a parent to attend. You can read how we handle information on the privacy page, or check the terms that govern every service →
In spring the respite rounds open and the garden behind the house is dug over by whoever wants a row of beans. In summer the sibling days move outdoors, with water balloons and a picnic blanket, while the referral line stays open for the families for whom summer means no school supports at all. Autumn brings the circle evenings back indoors and the navigation walkthroughs cluster around school meetings and benefit renewals. Winter is the season of the emergency fund, when a burst pipe or a heating failure can undo a year of careful budgeting in a single night. The pattern is not a marketing calendar. It is simply the shape of the year as our families live it, and we plan staff time around that shape rather than around our own convenience.
Every service is free at the point of use. The foundation is funded by modest grants, by neighbours who leave a line in a will and by the annual letter appeal that goes out with the first cold week. We publish a short account of where the money went each year, and we answer questions about it in person at the house. If you would like to volunteer, to refer a family or simply to sit in the front room and ask what we do, the kettle is on during business hours and the telephone number below reaches a person who can help.
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