Here are some excerpts from presentations to the city’s Emergency and Community Services Committee meeting.
You can watch the video at https://pub-hamilton.escribemeetings.com/Meeting.aspx?Id=2fccdddd-d21e-4e25-a7e0-c14b9e5f89af&Agenda=Merged&lang=English&Item=36&Tab=attachments
Joanna Santucci, Executive Director, Hamilton Food Share. I’m coming to you because I’m sounding the alarm. Never have I done that in 33 years. We have done everything in our power possible. We’ve gone to our donors, we’ve done double fundraising, we’ve gone on and on, and if the numbers continue to grow, I’m not sure how this network’s going to hold. … There’s only so much resources left. … We’re at a crossroads. I don’t know what to do. … I hope we can pull it back. I’m just not sure after 33 years of looking at this situation. … We’re slamming into a wall of need.
Shawn MacKeigan, Associate Executive Director, Programs, Mission Services. Recently the shelter system has been described as a system on the verge of collapse and that is accurate.
[Shelters face] chronic underfunding, that is to say, the funding that the province commits to addressing homelessness and delivering these essential services has remained stagnant for years. Hamilton’s emergency shelter system has not had a funding increase since 2014, this despite continually increasing costs incurred by service providers, the increasing demand for and evolving community needs such as the demand for affordable housing and supportive housing options … the opioid crisis, the pandemic and all of its associated pressures, the rapidly accelerating cost of housing, food prices and the overall cost of living. All of these are contributing to increases in downward pressure on the emergency system but shelters specifically.
Inflow to homelessness is increasing. The Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, in their effort to push for a national housing benefit, has described this as a wave of new homelessness.
The lack of capacity in the women’s shelter system has been a focus of advocacy for years and despite the creation of women’s overflow beds during COVID, women’s emergency shelters operate over capacity virtually all of the time.
We are seeing an explosion in demand for family shelter beds, with Hamilton’s only family shelter averaging a 118 per cent occupancy rate over the past year and turning families away an average of 78 times a month.
Notre Dame youth shelter had an average capacity of 84 per cent over the past six months and a near 30 per cent increase over the six months prior to those. …
However, in the face of these extraordinary pressures, we’re still seeing successes. At least enough that we can be hopeful. Early intervention, outcome focused harm reduction and housing-focused sheltering are all examples of work being done in our emergency shelters to help end homelessness. … Emergency shelters can be engines to help drive an end to homelessness but not on their own, not without resources, and not without support. There is strong evidence that homelessness prevention and early intervention work well by reducing the number of people entering shelters or staying for extended periods of time. …
We need the province to come through. We need the federal government to come through. And we want to partner with the city in making that happen. Housing is a human right.
Brad Clark: I have heard that your services are experienced unprecedented challenges when it comes to retention of your employees.
Katherine Kalinowski, Chief Operating Office, Good Shepherd Services: The recruitment and retention landscape in emergency shelters … in 30 years, I have to say I’ve never seen anything like what we’re dealing with at this point. And there are a number of factors involved. Certainly we’ve seen some exit from the employment landscape generally, especially since the advent of COVID.
We are also dealing with a landscape that I think is almost dystopian in terms of homelessness in this community. My colleague spoke about the moral despair of people who are doing this work and spend more time turning people away or telling them that they can’t find the resources they need than they do actually celebrating excellent outcomes with them. That has an impact.
I think there’s a current factor that is really significant and everything isn’t about money but the fact of the matter is that the shelter system, while we are asking shelter workers, front-facing shelters workers, to work shifts, three 24/7, work the holidays, and do this increasingly complex work, we are simply unable to pay a competitive wage. I will tell you for Good Shepherd, as an example, we often have our shelter staff recruited by the city of Hamilton. It’s a destination. So a starting shelter worker, at $19 or $20 an hour, as opposed to a city-employed Ontario Works worker, for example, starting at $30-plus an hour. These are the problems that we’re facing not just with the city but there are so many opportunities for people to do work that is equally challenging or actually easier and in more commodious circumstances than an emergency shelter, where people can be paid more.
Councillor Brad Clark: What we’re seeing in our community, we have never—and I repeat—never seen before. The amount of homelessness, the amount of addictions, the amount of mental health issues that employees in these shelters are dealing in 24 hours a day and if you can imagine having to turn people away, and if you’re a social worker or a PSW or just a good employee, how that feels to know that you’re having to turn people away and send them to a warming centre because they don’t have a bed …
The challenge that we are seeing is that most of our population are separated by many degrees from what’s transpiring on the streets of our city and in the shelters.