MESSAGE FROM CHAIR

Welcome to the Community Social Services Health and Safety Association’s web site. Most people never think about the Community Social Services sector. And yet, every person in British Columbia, or a member of their family, will use the services of our diverse sector at some time in their life.

Our workers are frequently invisible to the general public. They often serve people or families in their most desperate hours. Sometimes it is important for their work to be discrete and confidential. The result is that our sector is perhaps the most ignored of all public sectors. But the Community Social Services Sector is critical to the social, physical, and financial health of this province.

At the beginning of the COVID 19 pandemic the BC Premiere established, and Chaired, the Economic Recovery Task Force to help steer the province through the emergency. One of the first priorities of this task force was to keep the Community Social Service workers on the job. The media’s attention was on frontline health care workers, and rightly so, but the task force recognized that without child care for the children of emergency services staff, or street workers continuing to look after the most vulnerable in our communities, or community living workers taking care of our citizens with diverse abilities, or support workers for individuals and families already in crisis who might have limited resources to respond to public health orders, our social and economic systems would collapse.

Our workers support other workers to get through the hard times of being temporarily unemployed. They support the families of workers who are recovering from illness or injury. They care for their children, and for their aging parents, or their disabled siblings. They help people displaced by wild fires and floods. They fill the gaps in the social support network so that no one falls through.

And it is the mission of this association to help employers to create a safer workplace for these Community Social Service workers who make our communities stronger.

Thank you for all that you do, and for your support of this Association.

Warm regards,

Richard FitzZaland
CSSHSA, Board Chair

 

Helping employers to create a safer workplace for community social service workers.