City expands homeless outreach program
Four métro stations added to rotation in bid to offer long-term help to itinerants
Twice a week during the morning rush hour, Caitlin Murphy goes into Montreal’s Place des Arts métro station with her big bag of provisions and looks for homeless people. As transit users hurry to catch the next train, Murphy lingers by someone sleeping on a bench.
“I know that they probably didn’t sleep the night before,” says Murphy, a crisis intervention worker with St. Michael’s Mission day centre that locals know as the “Red Roof.” She digs into her bag for her business card and leaves it behind on the bench along with a pair of warm socks, a granola bar and a juice.
“Sometimes I’d have people call me afterward and make an appointment to come and see me,” Murphy says.
The juice is an icebreaker, a way to extend care to people who may not know how to find health and social services.
After helping 430 homeless people at Place des Arts station this year, Montreal is expanding its “first service point” program, a pilot project started last December with the Société de développement social de Ville-Marie and other partners to deal with the public health issue of homeless people living in the métro and ensuing problems with drug use, bad behaviour and sanitation.
The program will grow over the next three years, targeting where many homeless live and spend their time. Three workers will make contact with itinerants at Place des Arts and four other stations: BerriUQÀM, Bonaventure, McGill and Atwater.
Although the program has been hailed as a huge success, critics say it is not as effective as Chez Soi, the five-year, federally funded, housing-first research program.
“Chez Soi is a great program, unfortunately it was cut,” Murphy said. Chez Soi lodged and cared for 280 homeless people with mental health problems until it was dismantled by Quebec when its five-year mandate ended last year.
There’s no hard data on the number of homeless people in Montreal, but estimates peg the number at 30,000.
Many do not want help, may not know what services are available or have overlapping mental and physical health issues including drug addiction that can exclude them from aid programs.
“Outreach is the only way to make a difference,” says Murphy, who introduces herself to another man and offers to take him back to the mission for a hot shower and a bowl of soup.
“We offer them things that they need on the spot — socks and winter coats, things that we take for granted, and we help them out for that day and hopefully with that connection, they come to us and get long-term help. That’s the goal.”
A Université Laval study of 147 itinerants who use the red-roof centre shows that 15 per cent of them have a university degree, 20 per cent are under age 30, 28 per cent are immigrants, 31 per cent are aboriginal and 30 per cent have not worked for at least five years.
Cities dealing with the homelessness crisis are facing changing demographics, Damien Silès, executive director of the Société de développement social de Ville-Marie, said during a news conference Monday to announce the expansion of the pilot project.
Its cost is projected at $65,000 and funding will rise to $140,000 next year, Silès said.
The métro is an extension of the city, but it’s not a day centre for the homeless who have nowhere else to go, Silès said. “Social cohesion is the goal. And together we can make a difference.”
Psychiatrist Nicolas Bergeron, head of Médecins du Monde Canada, said his group, which has been working with Montreal’s homeless for several years, now has a $30,000 startup fund to set up a mobile clinic for spring.
Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre promised to create a social agency next year to act as an “entry point” or coordination centre for various services available for itinerants, from social housing to medical care.
“There are ways to end homelessness and we’ve got to get moving because we’re not doing a good enough job now,” said Matthew Pearce, director of the Old Brewery Mission, the biggest homeless shelter in Quebec that provides more than 260,000 meals every year to its clients.
The needs of the homeless are so great that an outreach program in the métro stations represents a “drop in the bucket, although it was very important for those 400 people,” Pearce said Monday.
Montreal needs one concerted strategy, not three or four strategies, he said. “But unfortunately, as well meaning as they are, I don’t think these things can be gamechangers.”
Chez Soi was a game changer, said George Greene, executive director of the Mission’s red-roof centre.
“I see the fallout from Chez Soi at the centre every day,” Greene said of people who went back to the street once the program ended. “It’s sad.”
The centre serves 200 people with breakfast plus another 200 lunches, five days a week. Participants have access to medical, psychological, social and legal services, as well as art therapy workshops.