Woman takes homelessness into her own hands
Lois Mitchell has opened up her home to the most unlikely of roommates. Most of them were once homeless, addicted, on the streets of Saskatoon. Almost all of them battled mental illness.
For three years now, the 64- year- old grandmother has conducted her own social housing experiment, inviting people off the street to live with her.
“I guess it’s kind of a refuge,” said Mitchell, describing her rented three-storey house a block off 20th Street in Riversdale.
Early Thursday morning, she sat at her kitchen table on the main floor, sipping coffee. The home is cluttered, but comfortable. Six men sleep in bedrooms on the two upper floors. Some of them came from shelters or transitional housing, others directly from the street.
It wasn’t long before one tenant — Darcy Yuke, a middle-aged man with long hair and facial piercings — came downstairs.
“It’s good here,” said Yuke, who has been living with Mitchell for two years. “It keeps me sober. I have a roof over my head.”
A next door neighbour has been giving Yuke weekly cooking lessons and helping him better understand nutrition. His favourite dish is casserole.
Mitchell, who spent years running a restaurant in Rabbit Lake, Sask., was a social worker in her younger days. She moved back to Saskatoon and rented the house three years ago so she could care for a close friend who was living in a long-term care home.
Around the time her friend died, Mitchell became heavily involved in the Occupy movement and became a fixture at the Occupy camp in Friendship Park. There, she got to know many of the homeless people living in Saskatoon.
“In that Occupy camp, it became an awakening for a lot of people that the people who call themselves homeless are real people,” Mitchell said. “I got into this accidentally, but I realize that this is one of the most important jobs I could be taking on.”
Her home is not a shelter, she said. The rent is covered by the welfare and social assistance cheques of the men who live with her. Aside from occasionally buying coffee and laundry soap and being a source of support for the men, she leaves them to their own devices.
There’s a ‘three-strikes rule’ for staying with her — no getting too drunk, and no fighting or causing trouble. She encourages people living under her roof to be selfreliant.
Mitchell said the project is her own manifestation of the ‘housing first’ philosophy, which draws a connection between a lack of stable, clean housing and mental illness and addiction.
The success of the house has encouraged Mitchell to try another step. She’s looking for partners to start a non-profit that would provide shelter and nutritional training to the city’s homeless.
“It’s like having a family around,” said Yuke, sitting upstairs watching a game show on a small television.
“Lois is a really good support for me.”