Affordable housing key to ending poverty: advocate

Traumatized and troubled at a young age, Cora Sellers says her “solution” was to get pregnant and move out on her own.

Surprisingly, she was able to do that quite easily at age 16. She found a decent apartment in a good neighbourhood for $375 a month.

She was able to finish high school and go to university, have more children. She left her exhusband twice during this time, relying on Regina Transition House for a place to stay with her children while she found a new place to live.

Affordable housing programs dropped her rent to between $50 and $65, family allowance (now the Child Tax Benefit) and employment supplements helped her provide for her children and graduate university with honours.

“A lot of people will ask me, ‘How did you do it? Man, you must have worked so hard, you must be so smart,’ ” said Sellers.

“No,” she tells them. “I could afford my rent. I had a place to stay.”

Now a mother of seven and a grandmother of six, Sellers is the executive director of Carmichael Outreach, which advocates for and provide services to people who are experiencing homelessness or are at risk of experiencing homelessness.

Before then, she worked for the provincial government as a policy analyst in the areas of justice and Aboriginal employment development. She has a bachelor of arts degree with honours and a master’s degree from the University of Regina.

“These social programs that were there back then, they helped you to transition,” she said. “Had I gone through the situation right now, I would be who I see when I go to work everyday.”

Sellers spoke to a room of about 90 people from across the province on Wednesday morning as part of a free conference put on by Poverty Free Saskatchewan and the Saskatchewan Council for International Co-operation.

The conference brought in nine presenters, from professors to advocates, to share insight and experience in regard to the current state of poverty in the province and explore possible solutions.

The reality now is not what it was when Sellers was young, and it’s having consequences, she said.

“Rents are very high,” said Sellers. “Income (assistance) programs are not high enough to cover them and that’s literally, I would say, the foundation of most of the problems that we’re seeing at Carmichael Outreach.”

Last year, Carmichael Outreach served approximately 50,000 meals. Sellers says the people they help often only have $459 a month to spend on rent, and that the average rent on the organization’s “affordable housing ” list is $750 per month for a single bedroom.

“They come to us for the food and clothing that they can’t afford. That’s who we see at Carmichael,” she said, adding they are often people with disabilities and people struggling with trauma and addiction.

While affordable housing prices keep going up, social programs and social assistance continue to face government cuts, said Sellers.

“I know that they’re very resilient,” Sellers said of Carmichael’s clients. “Given the healing opportunities and the income supports that are necessary, they would be able to reach their potential.”

She emphasized a critical need for adequate affordable housing in Regina in order to bridge the transition from being on social assistance to entering the workforce.

It’s not just a lack of social and financial supports that put vulnerable groups at risk of homelessness and poverty, said Sellers, but also a divided community and the perpetuation of stigma.

“It seems to me like we’ve gone from being kind of irritated and disgusted to virtually hating them,” she said of Regina’s poor. “The stigma is that they’re lazy, they’re a drain and it’s completely wrong ... You cannot be lazy and be as resilient as our people are and still have a smile on your face while you’re trying to survive.”

She said a political divide, the left versus right mentality, is what is stopping the government from making meaningful attempts to address poverty and homelessness.

“That’s very evident in our politics and our policies that are coming out,” said Sellers. “We need to look at community differently, accept everybody as a part of community and instead of approaching the problems as an us-and-them thing, we need to start looking at our community as a we thing.”

These social programs that were there back then, they helped you to transition.

TROY FLEECE Cora Sellers, executive director of Carmichael Outreach, says high rent costs are making it harder for people to escape poverty. She spoke to about 90 people attending the conference Be Part of the Solution: Let’s End Poverty, held on Wednesday in Regina.