Main stay Housing is most successful model

DEAR EDITOR:

Re: “Kelowna's homeless agency tries again for charitable status,” pentictonherald.ca)

The question Ron Seymour needs to ask is "Why are the directors of Journey Home trying to reinvent the wheel ?"

Not-for-profit housing authorities with charitable tax status already exist in Canada. The best model for Kelowna would be Mainstay Housing, founded in 1982 as the Supportive Housing Coalition. The closing of provincial psychiatric hospitals created a need to transition people from institutions into the community. SHC was much more than a simple coalition of agencies.

Among its founders were consumers, advocates, housing agency staff and mental health professionals. With goals of changing community attitudes and building a large membership base, SHC became a social movement, an early example of resource mobilization theory.

The evidence and understanding of mental illness and addictions has evolved. We know housing plays a critical role in health and wellbeing. It is the foundation and with housing and proper supports in place, people can achieve lasting tenancy and thrive as part of a community. Housing is a basic human right, enshrined by the U.N.

Mainstay today is well established as a leader in community housing and last year joined forces with Houselink Community Homes. The integration makes the new organization the largest supportive housing and private non-profit housing provider in Canada, with nearly 60 buildings and management of another 300 units through private landlord partnerships that include a mix of market-rent and affordable units, where some tenants receive support services. By doing so they received financial support from the municipal, provincial and federal governments.

In Kelowna today, we have a number of well-intentioned but scattered NGO, faithbased and private charitable groups filling the supportive, social and community housing voids. All with their own infrastructure, boards of directors, goals, ambitions, grantwriting challenges, public/private partnerships, maintenance staff, supportive housing workers, community gardens.

As Seymour points out, Kelowna currently has 660 beds in shelters and supportive housing units, but another 500 supportive housing beds are needed by 2026. This does not include working families who cannot afford to eat and pay rent.

If we were to consolidate under one roof with shared resources and political power in a municipal election year we could achieve the goal of reducing homelessness to “functional zero” in Kelowna. Richard Rafton Kelowna