Willow’s Place offers ‘other home’ for women: A safe drop-in space
For Maureen Longboat, Willow’s Place is her “other home.”
The 43-year-old started coming to the safe, drop-in space for women two years ago while upgrading courses to get her high school diploma.
Now, she drops by almost daily — sometimes two to three times — just to get out of the house, connect with other women and enjoy the “awesome” food.
“It’s just somewhere where I can just free my mind,” the Hamilton woman recently told The Spectator.
“I don’t know where I’d be without this place because it’s somewhere to go.”
Willow’s Place, now in its fourth year, is visited by around 25 women a day.
The drop-in program offers a place for women to go and use laundry facilities, take a shower, participate in crafts and games, and socialize with one another.
There’s a quiet room where women can take a nap and a kitchen in which a light breakfast is served and where staff and visitors eat a hot lunch together.
Staff can connect women with addictions workers, nurse practitioners and legal services.
“We tried to create a community of women who come together and support one another,” said Pat Vaughn, program facilitator at Willow’s Place.
With the help of seed funding from the Ontario Trillium Foundation, Mission Services launched Willow’s Place out of its location at 196 Wentworth St. N.
The idea for the year-round space came about following the “How’s the Weather?” report — a question posed by the Women’s Housing Planning Collaborative to draw attention to the growing yet often invisible local crisis of single women at risk of or experiencing homelessness, Carol Cowan-Morneau, executive director at Mission Services of Hamilton told a recent Spectator editorial board meeting.
When it first started, most of the women visiting the space were not homeless but “very precariously housed,” she said.
“Many of them were living in bad situations. Many of them were living with violence. Many of them were moving from partner to partner to stay in a space,” Cowan-Morneau said.
“What Willow’s has done for them up until now has been to support them and to keep them housed and sometimes to help transition them into other spaces,” she added, noting how establishing relationships with one another is vital to their healing.
While the program started operating from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday to Friday, its hours expanded from to 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. — plus both weekend days — last December after it received money from the Local Health Integration Network.
But stable funding has been an issue, especially since the Trillium money ran out after the third year, and the hours are expected to be clawed back to what they were before at the end of March when the LHIN funding runs out, said Wendy Kennelly, associate executive director at Mission Services.
Recently, Willow’s Place has seen a bit of a shift in demographics, with women who used to visit no longer coming around, and many of the new women attending experiencing chronic homelessness, said Cowan-Morneau.
“We are now seeing an entirely new level of homeless women,” she said.
Some of the women are coming straight to the program in the morning from Carol Anne’s Place, a shelter overflow program providing overnight spots for homeless women when single women's shelters are full.
But staff at Willow’s Place have no idea where the women are going after their doors close at 4 p.m. until the shelters open at 10 p.m., said Sheryl Bolton, director of addictions and community services at Mission Services.
While Willow’s Place is meant to help fill-in gaps in service, staff know there are still more women in need. But the funding is not there.
“The women’s system is in crisis,” she said. “We can’t just have a Band-Aid solution.”