HELPING THE HOMELESS
Funds will help 38 communities in effort to get people off the streets: Boissonnault
Edmonton Centre MP Randy Boissonnault scans a wall of photographs at the Bissell Centre during a tour on Friday. Boissonnault visited the facility to announce a funding commitment of $885,000 for the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness.
Edmonton has been leading the fight in eliminating homelessness across Canada and the federal government is hoping new funding will allow other cities to follow suit.
The Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness (CAEH) will receive $885,000 from the government’s homeless partnering strategy that will support 38 communities across the country in the 20,000 Homes Campaign, Edmonton Centre MP Randy Boissonnault announced on a snowy Friday morning at the Bissell Centre.
“How are the people living rough coping with the snow this morning ? We need to build and we need the data to know where to build and who to build for,” said Boissonnault on the data collection, research initiatives and training the money will go toward.
CAEH president Tim Richter said these additional funds will provide training and support to 30 additional communities and the eight pilot communities — including Edmonton — involved in the campaign. The goal is to end chronic homelessness in 20 of the communities and house 20,000 of the country’s most vulnerable homeless by July 1, 2020.
Edmonton has been on the front lines of combating the crisis, Richter said, and leads all major Canadian cities through a reduction of homelessness by 45 per cent in the last nine years.
“There’s still a lot of work left to do obviously, but I think Edmonton is well on its way to being the first city in Canada to end chronic homelessness and the first city in Canada to end all homelessness,” he said. “They’ve pioneered a lot of the key strategies that we need ... and they ’re achieving some success.”
Mayor Don Iveson said he doesn’t see it as a race, but to be recognized by the CAEH and the federal government as a leader means the city’s work and affordable housing plan is heading in the right direction.
The funding announcement came just a few days after the city pitched an affordable housing project of $132 million for 2,500 units over the next four years that will be part of capital budget discussions. The city report suggested an additional $377 million would be needed from other sources and this would only be a small portion of the 50,000 affordable units required to meet the need.
“We have been the most successful at this because of the work of partner agencies,” Iveson said. “We have the partners. All we were missing was the dollars and the dollars are now starting to flow.”
Since the launch of the campaign, 18,000 people have been housed across the country.