Theresa Schrader.
Theresa Schrader triumphed over a 10-year history on the Lakeshore as a prostitute and crack addict to receive the Jean Augustine Scholarship tomorrow night. The 35-year-old single mother is now the founding director of Ve’ahavta Street Academy, an eight-week program for homeless youth.
Courtesy photo
Theresa Schrader roamed the streets of the Lakeshore for 10 years as a crack-addicted prostitute.
Heart wrenching life losses conspired to find her there.
At just 13, she lost her father. She was hospitalized for mental illness. She left her Nova Scotia home at 18, her strained relationship with her mother broken down.
She found people who wanted to take care of her. They were all using drugs. She joined them.
"I was just a slave," Schrader, 35, said of her crack addiction.
A desperate bid to escape crack drove her to Toronto. She lived at Covenant House, then found her own place to live. She had a child. Toronto Children's Aid Society took her son at nine months old. After a year-long battle to regain custody, CAS took him permanently.
"I hit the Lakeshore like none other. Once I had to say goodbye to my son, I hit the crack pipe like no tomorrow," Schrader said.
Schrader had a second child. She lost that child to CAS, too.
Today, she has a four-year-old son named Markus.
"It was the pregnancy with Markus that ended it all on the Lakeshore," she said. "I had CAS facing me. I had support systems facing me. Everyone said, 'You're going to lose this child again.' I started to process that, and when I did, I saw myself dead. I thought, 'If I have to go through this one more time, I'm going to kill myself, rip off some dealer or do somebody wrong' and I saw myself dead.
"It scared the sh** out of me. I went and got clean. I haven't looked back."
That was five years ago.
Tonight, Schrader is being honoured with the Jean Augustine Scholarship. The $1,000 scholarship is awarded annually to a single mother in need who is currently attending or registered to attend George Brown College.
Community Unity Alliance, George Brown and Jean Augustine's friends and family sponsor the award.
Augustine became the first black woman elected to Canadian Parliament in 1993. The native Grenadian was a four-term Etobicoke-Lakeshore MP. In 2009, Augustine was made a member of the Order of Canada. She is Ontario's first Fairness Commissioner.
"I'm honoured," Schrader said of the award. "I cannot believe that 10 years of drug addiction, prostitution, roaming the streets of Lakeshore would turn into something like this. I feel like I'm really, really being recognized for what I've done. Not too many of us make it. People I used to use with are still out there."
Soon, Schrader and her son will transition from their current home in supportive housing in downtown Toronto to a market-rent apartment in a new building in Parkdale. Her scholarship award will pay her first month's rent.
In a few weeks, Schrader will graduate from the social work program at George Brown College.
Already, she has landed her first job.
In 2005, Schrader won a creative writing contest held by Ve'ahavta, a Canadian humanitarian and relief organization motivated by the Jewish value of Tzedakah (Justice) that assists the needy at home and abroad through volunteerism, education and acts of kindness.
The candid, straight-talking Schrader's $1,000 winning entry was a revealing, raw memoir she wrote about her struggle on the streets.
Ve'ahavta is a Hebrew word found in the Torah; it means "and you should love."
"Nothing but inspiring" is how Ve'ahavta president Avrum Rosensweig describes Schrader's strength, resilience, recovery and its ultimate reward - a healed, clean life.
"Theresa is very human. She has her scratches and bruises, and she also has her crowns, if you will, and her great successes. I think she has worked really hard over the years to bring all those pieces together," Rosensweig said. "She really struggled to see herself as a good, decent human being who cares deeply about humankind and obviously love herself. That's a hard piece... Theresa is really quite a magnificent human being."
Last summer, Schrader called Rosensweig in search of a job. Her conscience, she said, couldn't accept welfare.
She leveraged her learnings as a survivor of loss, addiction and a scrappy life on the streets and married it to Rosensweig's dream to create a university for the homeless.
Now, she is the founding director of Ve'ahavta Street Academy, an eight-week program at George Brown College for people who live on or near the streets of Toronto. Participants learn communication, life and leadership skills, conflict resolution, self-awareness, career exploration and volunteerism.
Ten students participated in the academy pilot last year. Nine graduated. Two are in school full-time, another two part-time and two more landed jobs.
"The end result was really superlative," Rosensweig said of his organization's street academy.
Schrader will run the academy for 20 students twice a year and also operate Ve'ahavta's annual creating writing contest.
"Some of these people living on the streets are the most intelligent, articulate people you could ever meet. For some reason, whether a trauma or something else that happened to them, they managed to get onto the street. Now they're stuck there. They don't believe, just like I didn't believe, it's possible. I never thought in a million years after being out there, that I could put my life together. I thought I was going to die out there. All I thought about was crack."
Schrader is remarkably open about the most intimate details of her life, its traumas, and her ultimate triumph over overwhelming adversity. The reason is simple. She hopes to inspire others.
"Maybe somebody will see that there's hope."