New Adsum project is ‘about healing’
With a grant from the provincial government, Adsum for Women & Children is launching a new project to help women and families move away from domestic violence and toward stability.
On Wednesday, Adsum was announced as one of 18 community organizations and groups throughout Nova Scotia to receive grants from the provincial government to help prevent domestic violence and support victims and their families.
With a $75,000 grant, the Halifax organization is launching a new project called Unlocking Hope: A Housing First Approach to Supporting Survivors of Family Violence.
“This grant is just amazing to us because it's a next step in not just housing women, but really giving them the support services to rebuild their lives and get past having dealt with crisis and trauma in their lives,” said Kathy Mcnab, fund development and communications officer for Adsum.
The Unlocking Hope project will see the development of a trauma-informed housing-first model — making two emergency apartments and formal trauma-informed programs available to women and families who have faced domestic violence.
The two emergency apartments bring the total of emergency apartments that Adsum has available to its clients to eight. The apartments serve as immediate temporary housing for clients until they're able to find more permanent, longterm housing.
According to Mcnab, the new project is an “add-on” to a program the organization started in September 2017 called Diverting Families from Shelter to Home to get women with children “into direct housing quicker,” often starting them out with emergency apartments and then helping them move into apartments with long-term leases.
“We're just expanding on this program because the need has grown so much," she said. "We see increased calls all the time from people who are trying to leave domestic violence.
“They're living with friends, they're couch-surfing, they're living in cars or they're staying in very unsafe situations, so we need programs like this to be able to support people who want to get out of those unsafe situations of domestic violence.”
In the last fiscal year, Adsum had 110 calls for support from women and families for the Diverting Families program, Mcnab said, but was only able to help 51 of them find housing due to a low vacancy rate and lack of affordable housing options in Halifax.
With this new grant making way for two more emergency apartments, she said Adsum is going to be able to quickly house more people in apartments that “will be on hand and will be already furnished and ready to move people into.”
The trauma-informed counselling and programs, which are led both by social workers and client support staff, but also peer-led, will also help women and children who have dealt with domestic violence “get beyond the trauma and move from that crisis to stability,” Mcnab said.
She noted the Unlocking Hope project will also aim to help women and families reconnect with families, peers and their community.
“When you think about domestic violence, one of the big things that happens is the abuser disconnects them from their family and their friends, and we're trying to break that cycle of isolation and silence by helping people reconnect with their family, friends and their community and then integrating them in the new community they're in,” she said.
“It's about healing.”
A full list of the projects that are receiving grants from the provincial government as part of Standing Together, a provincial plan to prevent domestic violence and support victims and their families, is available at novascotia.ca/standingtogether.