COVID Changemaker: Gwen Madiba started a headphone campaign to help homeless students

Bruce Deachman

Apr 14, 2021  

Gwen Madiba is president of Equal Chance, and started a campaign to provide new headphones to homeless Black youngsters living in emergency housing, to help with their schoolwork.
Gwen Madiba is president of Equal Chance, and started a campaign to provide new headphones to homeless Black youngsters living in emergency housing, to help with their schoolwork. PHOTO BY TONY CALDWELL /Postmedia

Gwen Madiba was in the Ottawa apartment — a city-run emergency dwelling for the homeless on St. Denis Street — that an eight-year-old boy shares with his four siblings and mother, when the boy’s teacher vented his frustration with the youngster’s distractedness during an online class.

“Can you move to another room?” the teacher asked. “This is too much.”

“I can’t,” the youngster explained. “There is no other room.” He held up his device to show the teacher his cramped surroundings. “This is where we live.”

“It was heartbreaking,” Madiba recalls. “You could see the child was embarrassed, and then he logged off and started crying.”

Madiba is president of Equal Chance, an Ottawa-based not-for-profit organization that supports low-income and homeless Black families in the community through food, housing, employment, health and childcare and other programs and resources, all of them overwhelmed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Following the incident with the schoolteacher, she asked the youngster whether a pair of headphones might help. He said they would.

Madiba asked other families in similar straits, and they all said headphones would make a big difference.

And so began a public campaign to seek donations of new headphones, or cash to buy them. In just a couple of weeks, the drive has netted more than 50 of what Madiba hopes will be at least 80 pairs of headphones, although more, she adds, would not go unused.

“There are six, seven, sometimes nine people in a one- or two-bedroom apartment, and because of the pandemic, they’re having to study at home. And these children can’t focus. They can’t study.”

The children, meanwhile, have been surprised and excited to learn of their audio windfall.

“They’re excited and relieved. The headphones will help them with school, first and foremost, but also just as escape to listen to music or a show on their device, to get that one moment just to be with themselves.”

Visit https://www.equalchance.ca/ for more information or to donate.

Source: Ottawa Citizen