Chez Doris adds new building with help of $1M donation
Former addict credits women’s shelter with helping her get off streets and drugs
After a life spent battling addictions and homelessness, Nora Mehringer was living in a Tupper St. apartment in the early 2000s when bedbugs infiltrated the entire building.
The bugs had gotten into everything — even her purse, she says — and she had no choice but to leave her place behind.
She packed what she could into two bags and knew where to go: Chez Doris, a day shelter for women in western downtown.
The shelter’s staff let her shower, replaced her clothes, and made sure she knew where she was spending the night.
Fifteen years later, most of them spent homeless, Mehringer, 62, has never forgotten the gesture. And so she rejoiced Friday as she heard the news that Chez Doris has purchased a nearby building and plans on expanding its services by 2020.
The expansion was made possible by a recent $1-million donation from Montreal businessman Andrew Harper, 95. The plans were announced during a special Thanksgiving lunch at the shelter on Friday.
According to executive director Marina Boulos-Winton, the building is in the western end of downtown, but the official location is being kept under wraps for now.
The shelter will move some of its counselling services and administrative offices to the new building, allowing the addition of 20 overnight emergency-shelter beds at its current location, a first in Chez Doris’s history.
“There’s a need in the area for overnight shelter,” Boulos-Winton said. “As a day shelter, we see it every day when we close: There are a lot of women who don’t have anywhere to go.”
Harper, in attendance for the announcement, said he was pleased to see the money being used in such a concrete way. The shelter’s building on Chomedey St. is now named for him and his late wife, Carole.
“She would agree with it,” Harper said of how the money is being put to use.
According to Boulos-Winton, nearly a quarter of people experiencing homelessness in Montreal are women.
Although it gets funding from Centraide and the government, Chez Doris still needs to fundraise for roughly 70 per cent of its $1.7-million budget.
Open seven days a week, it offers an array of services, including access to showers, hygienic products and clothing, emergency food bags and a financial-management program. It helps 84 women a day on average, though it’s not rare to see the number balloon to 110 or more, depending on the time of the month.
Mehringer has used the services for more than 20 years. She called the addition of a new location “a blessing.”
After struggling with drug and alcohol addictions through her teens and 20s, it got worse as she got older. She became addicted to heroin and would find herself staying up all night in the city ’s streets, fearing what could happen to her if she fell asleep.
But about a year and a half ago, she started getting clean.
Around the same time, she secured an apartment in the east end of the city through a housing program. The time she used to spend milling around the streets, she now spends at the Bibliothèque et archives nationales de Montréal, reading science and astronomy journals.
These days, Mehringer said, she comes to Chez Doris mostly for the food and to pick up her socialassistance cheques each month.
As staff served warm soup, potatoes and turkey on Friday, she said she had a lot to be grateful for.
“I’m thankful to be clean,” she said. “And for the roof over my head.
“Very much so. Very much so.”