By Brittany Maguire, News Contributor
As winter approaches and nights get colder, community members at the Out of the Cold Emergency Winter Shelter are preparing to provide shelter for for the homeless on the Halifax streets. Despite a lack of secure funding, they hope to open in early November.
The shelter started in 2008 after Halifax’s only emergency winter shelter, Pendleton Place, was shut down. The Nova Scotia Department of Community Services reallocated their funding to provide more beds and extended hours at Barry House and Metro Turning Point, two other shelters in the city.
Community members lobbied the government to reinstate funding and after trying to source funding elsewhere, they decided to open a new one themselves. The shelter was housed in Fort Massey Church when it first opened in March 2009. Due to renovations it was relocated to St. Mathews Church last winter where they remained open from November 2009 until April 2010.
Jordan Roberts, the volunteer coordinator for Out of the Cold, says there need to be long term solutions to homelessness.
“While I think that spaces like Out of the Cold are important, I don’t think that they are anywhere close to being a solution,” says Roberts. “A solution is more affordable housing. A solution is more supportive housing. A solution is allowing people to have incomes that work for them and make them able to sustain housing whether that’s through income assistance, increasing minimum wage or decreasing student debt.”
She maintains that government needs to focus on long term solutions to homelessness rather than temporary solutions, while the Halifax community does its best to help people immediately.
Out of the Cold is intended as a small alternative shelter to others in Halifax. The shelter is open to males, females and trans people over the age of 16. As an alternative shelter, Out of the Cold provides shelter for couples who want to stay together, people with dogs, who have had conflict issues with people in the other local shelters or who do not feel comfortable in the larger shelters. A large number of people using the shelter are youth under 25, currently the largest demographic of the homeless population.
The shelter is largely volunteer run. with less than five core staff members. Core staff is important to creating shelter stability and allows for relationships to develop. Unfortunately, this year the shelter is having trouble finding funding for core staff.
They rely heavily on donations from people and groups in the Halifax community. Donations have included money, food, clothing, hygiene products, laundry services and volunteer time. A large portion of the shelter volunteers are Dalhousie students studying Social Work and Nursing.
Roberts thinks that volunteering at shelters is great for students, challenging their preconceptions of homelessness and allowing them to find confidence in dealing with difficult situations.
She also notes that most don’t realize how easy it is to end up on the streets.
“Imagine if you didn`t get your next two pay cheques. Imagine if you didn`t get your student loan. Imagine there was one piece of what is holding your life up right now that gets pulled out from underneath you and you didn`t have a supportive family.”
She says that it usually takes a combination of factors for people to end up on the streets and that these may include physical and mental health issues or drug and alcohol addictions, although this is not always the case.
On Oct. 16, Out of the Cold will be partnering with the Common Front for Housing in Nova Scotia to set up a “Tent City” community event on the North Commons to raise awareness about homelessness in Nova Scotia, starting at 3 p.m.. Halifax Out of the Cold Emergency Shelter can be reached at halifaxwintershelter@gmail.com.
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