The Bridges hopes to be ‘crown jewel’ again

Shelter in heart of Galt has been ‘navigating a PR crisis,’ executive director says

CAMBRIDGE — The Bridges shelter in downtown Galt hopes to become the “crown jewel” of Cambridge again, a community centre offering “robust” programming for the people who stay there.

Bridges’ executive director Lynn Perry told a packed crowd at city hall Wednesday night that she wants the public to feel welcome at Bridges and to engage with the agency again.

“It’s important the community views us as ... their organization,” she said in an interview after the meeting organized by the grassroots group For a Better Cambridge.

“We forgot to touch back and communicate well. I believe the community interpreted that as a lack of transparency,” she said.

“We were just really swamped.”

The shelter, which was welcomed into the core area in 2005, has been “navigating a PR (public relations) crisis” with its neighbourhood of late, she acknowledged.

The growing opioid crisis has galvanized residents, some of whom organized discarded needle pickups, and led city council to pass a bylaw banning a safe injection site in the city’s core areas. Many of the community’s concerns were directed at The Bridges and the people who stay there, who often can be seen hanging out outside at the Simcoe Street building.

Currently, The Bridges has 78 beds for men, women and children, which are filled, and it offers a daily meal to about 120 people. It has 20 supportive housing units.

In July, the agency announced it wants to move to a different location because it has outgrown its current home.

At the meeting, Perry said the current Bridges location is “so forward facing” that people are constantly under the “observation of the community when navigating a mental health crisis.” On the small lot, there’s no green space where people can retreat to for privacy.

“It doesn’t bring out their best self,” she said. “It exasperates and escalates those challenging situations.”

Perry said the shelter plans to launch a fundraising campaign for a new location. The site selection committee is still talking about possible sites.

“We want this to be a community-motivated change. We need the community to back us and support us with it,” she said.

Perry said the community centre programs, set to begin within the next few weeks, will offer life skills training, job skills, food preparation training, and music and art therapy.

In September, the Bridges announced it is ending its addiction services.

Those services will end by next May, Perry said.

“It was a very hard decision,” she said. “If we continue to operate the way we are, we will not be the Cambridge shelter for very long.”

Perry said it doesn’t mean the shelter thinks there are enough addiction services available. Rather, it believes other agencies, such as the House of Friendship which is funded for those programs, can better offer the counselling.

Also speaking at the meeting were representatives from other social agencies that serve marginalized groups.

Joe Mancini of The Working Centre in Kitchener said drugs often fill the void for those feeling dislocated.

That’s why the model of The Working Centre is to engage people so they feel empowered.

“In the 1990s, Kitchener downtown was the dumping ground for a lot of the homeless,” he said.

Street outreach workers began connecting with people and The Working Centre slowly created a “village” with supportive housing units around the downtown area.

“We knit together a community,” Mancini said.

Cameron Dearlove of the Cambridge Self-Help Food Bank said his agency recently finished a feasibility study looking at starting a daily meal program from Monday to Friday.

The Cambridge Kitchen initiative has been presented to Cambridge city staff and is expected to go to council in the new year.

Dearlove said the idea is a similar to the Ray of Hope model in Kitchener, in which meals are served daily and people can gather and receive food, medical care and take a shower. “It’s more than a meal,” said Dearlove.

It’s creating a space where people, many of them homeless, can get out of the cold and heat and socialize, as well as get addiction support and medical treatment.

Dearlove said many residents in the community were afraid when they saw used needles and people on the streets with no place to live.

“It caught the broader community off guard,” he said in an interview.

“I think the mood is starting to change. Now people are moving from a place of fear to what action can I take as an individual.”