Helping the homeless, the hungry and the hurting
Coldest Night in Yarmouth event a chance to support important cause
It’s often a choice. Heat or eat?
That, says Adam Dolliver, executive director of SHYFT Youth Services, sums up what a difficult time of the year this can be for people.
“Seniors are especially susceptible to this. They have to make that choice: do I pay for oil to heat my home or do I pay for groceries, because I don’t have money for both,” Dolliver says. “Or medications. Unfortunately, in some cases, people forego medication to pay rent, to pay mortgages, to pay for heat, groceries, or they’re buying food that’s affordable rather than nutritious.”
Dolliver speaks from experience. He has a mental illness, and a decade or so ago, while living in Halifax, he went through a period when he was struggling financially and went without his medication for a while.
“It was very unhealthy and could have caused life-threatening problems,” he says. “I was lucky enough that it was only a six-month period, so I was able to kind of get back into a better place fairly quickly, but I know that other people are suffering much more long term than that.”
A fundraising event in Yarmouth is aimed at helping the area’s homeless, hungry and hurting. Called the Coldest Night of the Year, it is a walk happening Saturday, Feb. 22 and SHYFT – an organization that helps at-risk and homeless youth – is involved. Many others are also taking part.
Yarmouth resident Kevin Vallillee hates the cold, which is one of the reasons he decided to sign up for the event. He saw on Facebook that a good friend of his – Candy Fitzgerald – had started a team and was looking for participants.
The idea that there are people sleeping outside made him shiver, which is why Vallillee – a popular face at the Yarmouth Mariners Centre, where he works – has gone all out raising money for the cause. Friends, family, sports teams and even strangers, have been donating to the cause by sponsoring his walk.
Vallillee knows there are people struggling and having to make tough choices. He knows that for many of them, even if they have a roof over their head, life is hard.
“You’ve got to decide which bill to pay and which bill to fall behind on,” Vallillee says. “There are lots of people struggling just generally. I don’t know how many signs we have to see that something needs to change ... It’s just one thing after another, (bills) going up, going up.”
A cold winter night in Yarmouth.
THE CHALLENGES
Trish McCourt, executive director of the Tri-County Women’s Centre, another organization involved in organizing the fundraising walk, says mental health issues, in combination with poverty, uncertainty over one’s housing and other factors, can make things very difficult for people.
One thing feeds off another, compounding the problem.
“When you’re living in a precariously housed situation, it affects your mental health,” McCourt says. “It’s a cycle that just gets worse and worse.”
Another big issue, she says, is the high child poverty rate at this end of the province, which has a “huge impact” on the women they see at the TriCounty Women’s Centre. Low income assistance rates aren’t helping either.
“When their basic needs aren’t met, again, all of these other things become worse,” she says. “Not just mental health but other health needs are increased because they’re not able to eat nutritiously, they are spending significant periods of time in environments that aren’t good for them and so on. That’s why it’s such an important issue for us.”
THE FACTORS
There can be different factors at play with people who are struggling, says Dolliver, noting housing is a big one. While homelessness isn’t as visible in rural southwestern Nova Scotia as it is in the city, he says a good number of people are living in an uncertain housing situation.
Or – as McCourt puts it – they are “precariously housed.”
To further complicate things in Yarmouth, where SHYFT Youth Services is located, there is a shortage of housing, so Dolliver says even people who can afford to rent a place may have a hard time finding one.
And many people, even if they’re getting by now, are perhaps just a bad break away from being in serious trouble, he says.
“Of course, there are people who are doing well in the community and great for them,” says Dolliver. “But there are a lot of people who aren’t, who are living paycheque to paycheque."
What would happen if they lost their job or a paycheck?
Dolliver says you can’t examine any of this in a vacuum.
“It’s not just about poverty. It’s not just about housing ... It’s all of these things.”
MOVING FORWARD
The Tri-County Women’s Centre has a lot of requests for financial assistance that are challenging for it to meet since the centre has very little money to help with that.
One thing McCourt has found is much of the centre’s work lately is centred around crises and traumas. She would like to be able to offer programming that would help prevent women from being in those crisis situations. She cites things like helping clients learn more about healthy eating, budgeting, how to have a nutritious diet with limited funds etc.
“So we’re looking for creative ways to be able to bring some of those things back into what we’re doing,” she says, “and that’s part of the reason why we end up doing this kind of fundraising (i.e. the Coldest Night of the Year event).”
Both the Tri-County Women’s Centre and SHYFT provide supports and services that are not adequately funded, she says, so they must fundraise just to meet their budgets.
“People don’t realize we do receive our core funding from the government, but we receive one lump sum, which doesn’t cover the cost of running the organization,” Dolliver says. “Every year our budget is larger and larger.”
And while budgets grow, so too does the need for help.