Someone is hurt, a life is in danger, there is a fire, or a crime is happening. Police, fire and ambulance.
Call or text any hour if you are thinking of ending your life or cannot keep yourself safe. Free. A trained person answers.
Your city's help line. In Toronto it is open any hour and can find you an emergency shelter bed tonight and connect you to city services like Ontario Works (welfare). Peel, Halton and Durham have 311 too. York Region and Hamilton don't, so call 211 there.
Food, housing, welfare, legal help, mental health and more, anywhere in Ontario. Free, any hour, in many languages.
Plain language, no games. Here is what we collect, why, and what we will never do with it.
The Ember House Project ("we", "us") is a Greater Toronto Area community initiative currently operated as a sole proprietorship while our not-for-profit incorporation and charitable registration are in progress. This policy covers emberhouseproject.org and our support companion Clara, on SMS and on Telegram (@ClaraEmberBot).
Clara is an automated AI companion. Messages you send to Clara are processed by automated language-model systems to generate her replies. Conversations are stored securely and reviewed only for safety, quality, and abuse prevention. Clara is not a medical professional and her messages are not medical advice; in an emergency call 911, and for crisis support call or text 988 any time.
If Clara thinks you may be in danger. When something you write suggests you might be at risk of harming yourself, Clara alerts the Ember House team straight away. That alert names your number and includes what you wrote, and the person who takes it can read your conversation with Clara so they know what is going on before they reach out. If nobody responds, she alerts again and tries the next person on our list. We are a small team and cannot guarantee that someone is available at every hour. She will tell you a person is coming only once one of them has actually taken it on. We do this because a support line that spots someone in danger and tells nobody is not a support line. If you would rather this did not happen, please do not use Clara for anything urgent, and call or text 988 instead, which is staffed around the clock by people trained for exactly this.
You opt in by messaging Clara first; we never send the first message. Message frequency varies with your conversation. On SMS, message and data rates may apply; text STOP at any time to opt out, HELP for help. On Telegram, send /stop to opt out (Clara confirms once, then goes quiet) and /start to come back. Your phone number, Telegram account, and consent are never shared with or sold to third parties for their marketing.
We use reputable infrastructure providers to host our website, deliver SMS, and process messages with automated language models. They handle data on our behalf and are not permitted to use it for their own purposes.
We keep information only as long as it serves the purposes above, then it is deleted automatically. In practice that means: a location you shared is deleted after 30 days, the calendar file for a reminder is deleted 30 days after the appointment, and the conversation itself is deleted after 12 months. If you opt out and do not come back within 6 months, everything we hold about you is erased.
Two different things, and the difference matters:
You can also ask us what we hold about you or ask us to correct it, through the contact form, subject to records the law requires us to keep.
Questions about this policy: use the contact form at emberhouseproject.org/contact.