Harbour Inn |
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A men’s mission emergency shelter was opened in the beginning of November 2006. We saw a need, had the space and decided to act. So far, it has been an interesting journey. When we started, we ran into some opposition from some neighbours. Their main objections seem to be that they didn’t appreciate having a homeless shelter in their neighbourhood and that they thought we were running without the proper zoning. Some also believed that running without professional paid staff was not in everyone’s best interest.
Recent news has it that “The Inn of the Good Shepherd” is planning on building a 20 bed shelter with a 20 bed transitional housing part. We welcome this idea. We believe that Sarnia needs around 100 shelter beds. London has 450 beds and is 320,000 in population and is roughly 4 times the size of Sarnia. Toronto has approximately 5,000 beds and has a population of around 3 million. So, doing the math with some rounding, 100 beds would be a good number at this time. The key to keeping it to 100, is to minimize attracting homeless from other cities. We know from talking to the homeless in Sarnia that a lot of them found themselves in shelters in London. We do not believe this is “right”. We need to look after our own homeless, instead of making them go to other cities. We also don’t want to attract others that are part of another city. People who live in Sarnia have a network of friends, family, doctors, contacts etc. There is enough stress with finding yourself homeless, let alone having to move to a strange city. Some people do need a geographic change to get them away from peers who influence them in a negative way, and so we should be able to receive some of them in exchange for some of ours. Our goal is to raise awareness and work on the County of Lambton” for a larger and long term solution. We want our shelter to be primarily available to help those who fall through the cracks and who don’t “qualify” for county assistance. Currently the county has a program that will put people up in local hotels for up to 30 days, To date this year that program has supported 203 clients for 2338 nights, which works out at an average of 2 weeks per client. An average year will see around290 - 300 clients supported in a motel. Of the 203 clients supported in shelter, 41 were not covered by the County, so coverage was provided by the Inn for 1 - 8 nights, depending on circumstances of the client and financial restraints at the Inn; yearly average sees around 55 - 70 not qualified for County coverage. Recurrent stays, those who access shelter services 2 or more times a year, runs at around 20% of the total client group; this is the "hard to serve" group that are targeted for transitional housing as they do not (yet) possess the necessary skills to retain housing.
. Hotel programs are very expensive and we believe dormitory style shelters are able to house 90% of the homeless and are more cost effective.
Currently we have helped many different individuals with shelter and over 50 of those to find a place of their own. We have no government assistance and run solely on the generosity of the local people. We have asked the large petro-chemical plants to help us and have received $500 from one plant. Most say their policies prevent them from helping us because we are a church. We are thankful to everyone who has contributed to this and help make it a success. |
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homelessness in the city, as many people were shocked that we had homeless people in Sarnia. We have support for the shelter from city hall, agencies and most neighbours and citizens of our city. We recently met with two of the neighbourhood group leaders and we believe we will have a win-win situation within a month. Most of the opposition from the neighbours is ‘fear of the unknown’. Some of the questions posed were, “How big will it get? What happens when the men leave the facility? Will this shelter make our neighbourhood unsafe?” We don’t believe the concerns are petty and we are communicating with them to help ease their fears. They realize that once the zoning is approved, it is approved forever and we may make it bigger or have more problems than we anticipate. To help create a win-win situation, we were open to the idea of doing a temporary zoning, which would give us time to prove ourselves and give the neighbour’s time to evaluate the long term effect of a shelter in the area.
engineering drawings. The engineers and architects are very busy and are trying to accommodate us. We had approval once but city hall wanted to see the HVAC drawings included and that caused about a 2 month delay. We need a building permit because the building is changing its use from occupancy to residency which requires fireproofing. Fire proofing means we need to change the ceiling tiles to fire rated tiles and we have to double dry wall certain parts of the facility. It also involves re-routing a hall and upgrading our fire system. We need about $40,000 more to reach our goals.
We currently run with a volunteer staff of around 40 people. We have 2 shifts; 8pm-midnight and midnight - 9am. We have a minimum of 2 people on per shift with one person required to be awake at all times.