Changing the story from homeless to hopeful

For all there is to be negative about, serving the city's most fragile — and often difficult — population, Kath Hoffman, executive director of the Central Alberta Safe Harbour Society manages to stay pretty positive.

She credits her staff, people who work at the butt end of our city's effort to end homelessness.

“I can never say enough about our staff,” Hoffman said in an interview, praising “the remarkable skills they have to defuse situations.”

And for the winter, she gets one more staffer. After the $110,000 funding that had been covering the Winter Inn program was cut this year, the city found $13,000 for one more staffer to work November through March at an expanded operation at People's Place.

There's been a change in both provincial and municipal priorities regarding homelessness. Neither level of government sees much future in funding emergency shelters, winter after winter.

For her part, Hoffman agrees. Significant money is being poured into research and program planning to fight homelessness at its root — in addiction and mental health, family strife, trauma and brain function.

“There's a lot of good talk going on,” Hoffman said. And she's been part of it for years. She mentions that it would be a good idea for everyone to take a look at the Alberta Family Wellness Initiative web site, to see how resources are being put into keeping people at risk from ending up on the streets.

But in the meantime, it still gets pretty cold here at night in the winter.

Safe Harbour, Hoffman says, “is the agency between the dumpster and the referral. That's where we live.”

Against losing a program like Winter Inn, you'd think adding 12 beds at People's Place, and another six spots in the Mats program would be an inadequate response. Especially given that Red Deer has grown a lot since the last time either program had begun.

How could 18 emergency spots be enough to absorb all that growth?

Besides having great staff at Safe Harbour, Hoffman credits some of the very policy directions that led to the eventual loss of Winter Inn.

One solution has been the Housing First program.

Let's take it as given that people with addiction problems and mental health problems — and often both at the same time — are very difficult to get into housing. And even more difficult to maintain in housing.

That's a tough struggle, but there have been successes. Once safely housed in a place that a poor person can afford, and with supports provided to help them cope with some pretty serious problems, people do get off the streets.

Another way off the streets is People's Place. About 70 per cent of the people who come there are either employed or between jobs; they just need a safe, warm shelter for a month or so.

Hoffman says there's a whole lot of flow-through of people who need shelter, but who then find permanent housing, either on their own, or with the help of local agencies.

The room at People's Place has a fire regulation capacity of 46. With the bunk beds, the population is raised to 35.

Increased crowding at both People's Place and at Mats (where people must go if they are intoxicated) leads to fewer conflicts than you might think, Hoffman says.

Both places empty in the morning. Their clientele is walking the streets all day.

“They're bagged,” she said. “They just want to lay down and sleep.”

Plus, she says, she has good staff.

If someone walks out, they can't come back in. If they walk out drunk or on drugs, staff knows to advise police. Sometimes, a person drunk in public spends a night in a prison cell. Sometimes there are medical emergencies, and people end up in the emergency ward.

Those are two extremely costly consequences of not dealing with the fact that both mental illness and addiction are rooted in physical causes.

A person with cancer goes to a new cancer treatment centre. A person with a physical addiction or bipolar disorder gets a mat on the floor.

But access to medical treatment delayed by social stigma is being recognized, Hoffman will tell you. Even though Red Deer now has more people with these problems than ever before, her agency and others cope — for now.

“It's about changing the story,” Hoffman said. Medical science is catching up to the root causes of why people become homeless.

In the meantime, no one in Red Deer has recently frozen to death. Nor should it require that, to move the story forward.

For all that, Hoffman is optimistic.