YWCA Niagara marks 90 years in Garden City
Its emergency shelters took in more than 750 women last year
Most days, the emergency shelter at the YWCA is filled beyond capacity.
Its boardroom is used as an overflow space to add extra cots for women who have no where else to go, says Elisabeth Zimmermann, executive director of the YWCA Niagara Region.
“We’ve reached a crisis in the access to affordable housing,” says Zimmermann.
“The individual living on the margins, their income can’t support the cost of rent.
“When more than 30 per cent of your income is going to rent, all it takes is one life event to put you at risk.”
Think job loss, relationship breakdown, illness and rent increases.
It’s also more difficult for the shelter residents to find housing so they are staying longer, she says. Two years ago, a single woman would spend 15 days in the shelter. These days it’s a month to six weeks.
Last year, the shelters in St. Catharines and Niagara Falls took in more than 750 women and more than 120 children. The Niagara Falls shelter also services men. It also had to turn away more than 1,000 requests for shelter, redirecting the women to other programs.
“Where are they staying? That’s the worry,” says Zimmermann. She was speaking before a celebration to mark the 90th birthday of the YWCA in St. Catharines. The organization in Niagara Falls marks its 105th anniversary this year.
Politicians, volunteers, past and present clients gathered at the St. Catharines museum Saturday afternoon to celebrate the occasion with stories and a display of historic memorabilia.
The YWCA was started to empower women in the community.
Women like 88-year-old Helen Antonio, who spoke during the service. It was 1958, and every Wednesday morning she boarded a city bus with her young daughter. Together, they headed to the YWCA on Culp Street in Niagara Falls.
Her daughter went into a nursery school program.
And Antonio met other moms in the organization’s Homemaker’s Holiday program.
These days, she giggles at the name. “Homemaker’s Holiday, it seems so archaic,” she says, smiling.
“It was a morning out,” she says. Yoga, a craft and coffee.
But it would eventually change her life.
The next year, the YWCA started a swimming program at the nearby Boys and Girls Club. Antonio was put at the junior level, and learned the side stroke, and elementary back stroke. The instructor would not teach the women the front crawl.
“It was for the boys,” she said. Antonio would have none of that. She eventually worked her way up through the swimming levels — even learned the front crawl — and became an instructor herself.
That led to being on the YWCA’s board of directors, then president of the board. She also co-ordinated the summer swim program for the city’s recreation department.
But it was the YWCA that empowered her to pursue that opportunity.
“It’s done so good for so many women,” she says.
On June 8 and 9, the YWCA’s No Fixed Address fundraiser, for which people gather sponsorships to live in a car for 24 hours, takes place in the parking lot of the General Motors plant on Glendale Avenue.
It helps people to understand through an experience that will hopefully inspire them to be a voice of change for the “hidden homeless.”
Volunteer John Bedell is in charge of attracting teams to the event.
“It’s going to take all of us. If not us, then who?
“As long as that need is out there we stand ready to help the YWCA.”
Zimmermann is hoping construction on a 24-unit building for families and transitional housing on Oakdale Avenue will begin by early next year. Roughly $1.2 million of a $1.5-million fundraising target has been raised, she says.
Until then, she worries.
“When you’re already vulnerable,” she says, “it takes that much less to be homeless again.”