Southwest YES continues efforts to address youth homelessness

Ongoing collaboration and partnerships were highlights of the activities of Southwest Youth Emergency Shelter (YES) during the past year.

The annual general meeting of Southwest YES, a nonprofit organization that works to address youth homelessness in southwest Saskatchewan, took place in Swift Current, Oct. 14.

It took place in Dorie’s House, the emergency shelter for homeless youth that was built through community support. The meeting took place later than usual, and due to the COVID-19 pandemic there was an option for virtual attendance.

Shaun Hanna, the Southwest YES board president, told the Prairie Post the annual general meeting will usually take place in June, but due to the pandemic they decided to postpone it for some time. He was re-elected unopposed during the meeting to continue as board president for another term.

“We made some great strides forward, which is what our goal is every year,” he said. “With the time constraints and with the COVID concerns, we were fairly successful in accomplishing what we set out to do in terms of building partnerships and so on. Obviously, we would have loved to expand on those. We had a lot of projects in the works that just had to be put on hold out of an abundance of caution and care.”

Collaboration and partnerships have always been an integral part of the approach followed by Southwest YES, and this was also the case in the past year.

“We're particularly pleased with our new partnership with Southwest Crisis Services, in part because it allows the house to be utilized and renting out the office spaces was always actually part of our business plan,” he said.

The Southwest Crisis Services outreach team moved into office space inside Dorie’s House in November 2019, which made it possible to expand their outreach services to include support for those who have experienced sexual assault.

“Southwest Crisis Services is an obvious match,” he said about the partnership. “They're basically the left shoe to our right shoe, and so we're really happy that we were able to give them space, but also so that they could expand their own programs as well. … It was really exciting that we were able to collaborate in that way. It sounds like it's working out wonderfully for them and it's certainly working out for us. We're definitely looking forward to continuing that relationship.”

Another highlight for Southwest YES during the past year was the success of the annual Dorie’s House golf tournament in September 2019.

“The golf tournament last year was a huge hit,” he said. “We raised something like $11,000 at the charity golf tournament last year, which is unfortunately something that we weren't able to do this year again because of COVID. So it was great to see that people were really supportive to that.”

The community support for Dorie’s House was also evident at the 2019 home opener of the Swift Current 57’s, when baseball fans paid admission through a donation to Southwest YES. He recalled how people made a $20 donation and then added another $20 on behalf of a friend coming to the game.

“There were kids that were going to the concession stand and they bought a burger or whatever and came over to give us their change,” he said. “So that was really heartwarming. Those things I really miss this year, that we weren't able to be out in the community as much as we would have been.”

For Hanna a key highlight of the past year was a stakeholder meeting that took place at Dorie’s House in early February 2020.

“That one was fantastic,” he said. “We were able to bring together about 45 different people from more than 20 agencies and all levels of government to talk about what's going on in southwest Saskatchewan in terms of youth homelessness, precarious housing, and how helping organizations can better align. By the end of that meeting we had commitments from everybody to regroup and reassess where to go next in the spring. We actually set up a meeting in April, and of course middle of March is when things started to heat up in terms of the COVID response. So we had to delay that.”

The connections created at that meeting will continue in the future, but for now there is a pause on hosting similar meetings due to the pandemic.

Southwest YES had a small deficit of $1,325 at the end of the 2019-20 financial year. This was an improvement compared to the previous year, when the deficit was $13,260. Several factors played a role in the improved financial results. A depreciation of assets was reflected on the financial statements for 2018-19. The organization benefitted from rental income received from Southwest Crisis Services in 2019-20. Southwest YES was also able to re-access some outstanding grant funding during the past year. Another factor is the ongoing support in the community for Dorie’s House.

“There's still a huge outpouring of support from the community, even during COVID,” he said. “We had most recently a $1,000 donation from the Boston Pizza Foundation Future Prospects to the shelter. That sort of community piece has been really helpful, even when we're not able to go out in the community and really solicit donations.”

Although they are receiving fewer donations, the amounts of donations now tend to be larger than in the past, whether it is coming from individuals or organizations.

“So before we were getting a lot of smaller donations here and there,” he said. “The ones that we 're getting now tend to be in the $750 to $1,000 range when they do come. A lot of it still comes from in memoriam donations. … Any amount that comes in is a godsend and we're grateful for it.”

Dorie’s House was open for eight months during 2017 as a pilot project to highlight the need for such a service in southwest Saskatchewan, but the doors of the eight-bed facility had to close due to lack of funding. Hanna acknowledged that it becomes a challenge with each passing year to keep people aware of the fact that their goal is still to re-open the facility, but the community has already done so much to support that goal.

“It was the community that donated this house, and it was the community that put up the funds to run the pilot project,” he said. “So while we would never turn away donations from the community, we also believe that the community has really done their part, and now it’s really trying to look at other means for long-term sustainability, which is why we look to our partners at government, both federally and provincially, and that’s why we look at other stakeholders that are interested in looking at youth homelessness and those sort of issues related to youth homelessness.”

At the moment this effort is carried out by the volunteer board, which can be a real challenge. One of their goals is therefore to consider the appointment of a program director, who can identify potential grant opportunities and look at what programs can be offered at Dorie’s House in the meantime.

“Let’s look at what programs we can offer,” he said. “Build programs out that way and sort of grow that program rather than saying let’s just get 100 per cent funding and open our doors and away we go. I think the approach we’re taking now is an acceleration approach rather than let’s hit the highway at highway speed approach. It will be a lot more sustainable and as we do that, I think we will be back into the minds of people, because we will be able to be more visible in what we are doing helping youth.”

Their intention is to access grant funding to finance this position. Southwest YES was able to do that to fund the position of their first executive director.

“So if we were to get into a position where we are hiring somebody, it would be a position where we have the funding in place through a grant to hire them before we actually go ahead and spend the money, simply because we need it to be sustainable.,” he emphasized.

The data collected in the past clearly indicated the need for an emergency shelter for homeless youth in southwest Saskatchewan.

“The problem that we're trying to tackle is a problem that has gone back 40 years, and just because we're not currently open doesn't mean that kids still aren't couch surfing or there isn't a breakdown in families,” he said. “What we found with our pilot project is it wasn't that the southwest area had any worse or better problem with homelessness or precarious housing. It was that we were hitting the national average.”

Another goal for their current year is to carry out a point in time count in the region to collect data about the need for an emergency shelter.

“It is kind of the industry standard for having a statistical idea of how many people are actually in a position of homelessness or precarious housing,” he explained. “It's something that Regina and Saskatoon engaged in quite frequently, but it's not something that's done in rural areas almost ever, partially because it's such a large are to cover and then the communities that are there are very small. It's a project that we were actually going to embark on this year to actually get those solid data.”

Their intention is to carry out this project in cooperation with two partner organizations, the Alberta Rural Development Network and A Way Home Canada, as well as volunteers from non-profit organizations in Regina and Saskatoon.

“Then apart from that we're looking at grant funding to work on specifically that project,” he said. “So it would be the first of it's kind in the province's history to actually go out into rural Saskatchewan and do this data research and it would be supplementary research to our four decades of research that we have on the topic, but it's a specifically accurate way of doing it.”

They will have to evaluate how realistic it will be to carry out this initiative during this time, due to the pandemic. In the meantime, the overall goal of Southwest YES will remain the same, and that is to move closer to the provision of support for homeless youth at Dorie’s House.

“I can understand the tentativeness or the pessimism of will they ever be able to get off the ground, but every single year that we've been in operation has been one step forward and one step closer and one step closer,” he said. “There's never been a time that we've actually taken a step backwards. It's always been slow and methodical, and some steps are larger than others certainly, but we're always moving in the right direction. And I talk to people who have been working on this project for 40 years, and this has been the closest we've been.”