Roulant Keeps on Rolling (Page 2)

Clients, who are referred by social work agencies, are charged three dollars a meal. The fee helps cover the cost of food, but also recognizes that people often aren't comfortable accepting charity.

Since 1995, when a pair of Café Santropol employees -- Chris Godsall, BA'95, and Concordia grad Keith Fitzpatrick -- founded the operation, hundreds of volunteers have helped prepare and deliver more than 150,000 freshly cooked meals. The service covers seven Montreal areas and operates six days a week, all year round. The Café Santropol, a popular restaurant which was opened 25 years ago to prevent the building it occupies from being demolished, sits across the street from Santropol Roulant. The owners of the café believe in community service and helped the two young men get the meal delivery program up and running. The charity keeps the Santropol name, both as thanks for the support and for its name recognition value.

Santropol Roulant is also an ongoing experiment with youth volunteerism -- an experiment with strong McGill connections. The 2,000 hours of unpaid time required each month to deliver the meals and run other Roulant projects are mostly provided by young people, many of them McGill students. As well, both the Faculty of Management and the School of Social Work send students to the Roulant to do course work and case studies of the organization.

"It's a great way of us learning from them and them learning from us," says Reid.

The Ottawa native comes from a family with a long tradition of public service -- a grandfather who worked for Canada's foreign service in India and Germany, a mother who is a senior civil servant and a lifelong volunteer, and a father who served in the Ontario legislature. Upon her graduation in 1993, Reid contacted Paddy Torsney, BCom'85, then a newly elected Liberal Member of Parliament.

"She came to me because she did her research. She was looking for someone she could identify with, and I was a young McGill grad as well -- it was a chance to work for a woman who cared about the same issues she did," explains Torsney.

Torsney was -- and still is -- impressed with Reid's abilities. As her assistant, Reid was responsible for dealing with irate constituents ("putty in her hands," according to Torsney) and drafting committee reports.

"I hired her because she exuded all this great energy and dedication. Nothing will stop her; she gets an idea, gets everyone on side, and gets things accomplished, all with a big smile," says the MP.

How does one go from the halls of power in Ottawa to meal delivery in Montreal? Well, after returning to McGill to get her Master's in Architecture, Reid went to Gujarat, India. In collaboration with international aid agencies, she spent a year working with "untouchables," the lowest class in the Hindu caste system, to build community organizations which would improve their living conditions. Reid saw her work in India as a chance to share her knowledge -- and to gain some.

"I learned far more than I think I gave. There's tons to learn from the kind of grassroots community development that's happening in India that we should be cognizant of in Canada," says Reid. "Just by building an organization they're imagining a whole other way of living."

On her return to Montreal, Reid wasn't certain what her next move would be, but a chance meeting with an old friend proved fateful. Stephanie Garrow, BA'93, was an acquaintance of Reid's in their undergraduate days, and their paths had crossed again when Reid volunteered at Santropol Roulant before heading to India.