March 11, 2005
Homeless shelter on the rocks
“We can’t afford to go on like this”
GREG YOUNGER-LEWIS
William Lawrey, manager of the Oqota Emergency Shelter in Iqaluit, is working for free in order to keep the door open for the 14 men who call the facility home. (PHOTO BY GREG YOUNGER-LEWIS)
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Community volunteers are considering closing the doors to Nunavut’s only homeless shelter and home for troubled youth because of what they call “sluggish” bureaucracy tying up their funds.
Bill Riddell, chair of the Illitiit Society overseeing the two projects in Iqaluit, said the group has lurched from one funding crisis to the next since opening the youth cottage two years ago.
But the budget crunch has never been this bad, where volunteers are starting to pay out of their own pocket for expenses.
“We can’t afford to go on like this,” Riddell said. “We’re barely able to make it through.”
The society is waiting on $224,000 in federal funding handled by the City of Iqaluit’s Niksiit Committee under the government’s Continuum of Care program. Although the committee received the applications for funding in October, city council didn’t approve the request until earlier this week.
The funding application still needs final approval from federal officials, who haven’t indicated if or when the money might be delivered.
Riddell said the delay is forcing shelter volunteers to guess whether they can afford to keep running the two projects, the Oqota Emergency Shelter and the Youth Cottage.
He said the Illitiit board considered closing them last week when they found there was no money to pay staff at the two sites.
But then the shelter manager bought them some time by offering to work for free until finances were sorted out. Late last week, an Iqaluit resident donated $2,000, and the territorial department of health and social services chipped in another $1,000.
Riddell said he’s hopeful that more funding will come through, but warned that Nunavut has to start taking homelessness more seriously.
“No matter what anyone says, homelessness is the major crisis of Nunavut,” Riddell said. “People don’t understand that.”
Increased housing problems and lack of support for shelters are creating a “culture of homelessness” in Nunavut, according to Riddell.
He explained that a generation of Nunavummiut are growing up in a desperate situation, where people value life less than they did in the past. Previously, Inuit had stable homes where traditions could be passed on.
Riddell said now, the poor of Nunavut can’t afford a permanent family home to provide stability.
“I see it as the absolute destruction of a culture,” Riddell said.
Ed Picco, minister of homelessness for the government of Nunavut, said help could be on the way.
Picco said that this year’s territorial budget will be the first to put funding aside for Nunavut’s homeless.
If MLAs approve the proposed budget, Picco hopes he will have $100,000 to help community groups fight homelessness.
However, he said that the new funding is specifically meant to help local agencies leverage money from other homelessness programs, like the federal government’s Supporting Community Partnerships Initiative.
“We’re not opening a shelter or anything,” Picco said.
Annie Gordon, a councillor on Iqaluit’s Niksiit committee, said she is sorry about leaving the shelter and youth cottage in limbo since last fall.
Gordon said the committee was slow to approve the money because the committee needed time to find ways of trimming the budgets of the 10 community projects that they were evaluating.
“It’s been a long process,” Gordon said. “They’ve waited for a long time.”
Gordon promised that the committee would be quicker in the future, although she didn’t know if the federal government planned to give the city more funding for community projects, like the shelter and youth cottage, next fiscal year.
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