Women’s shelter to be named for late teen girl
A new supportive housing facility for homeless women will be named after a 19-year-old who died alone in a rain-soaked tent in Surrey just months after she aged out of the foster care system.
Atira Women’s Resource Society is renovating a formerly notorious motel on King George Blvd. and hopes to reopen it this spring as a 23-room facility for homeless women and those at risk of homelessness.
It will be called Little’s Place after Santanna Scott-Huntinghawk, who was known as “Little” because she stood just over five feet tall and weighed 110 pounds.
She fatally overdosed on fentanyl on Nov. 30, 2016 in a tent hidden in some trees just off a busy Surrey street. Her story sparked intense debate about how a young person could die alone under such dire circumstances in the middle of B.C.’s
second largest city.
“We work with and house and support a lot of young women just like Santanna,” said Atira CEO Janice Abbott. “We thought (the name) would be a great way to both honour her and remind us constantly what our obligations are for youth and, in particular, for young Aboriginal women.”
Many of the young women Atira helps have aged out of B.C.’s child welfare system at age 19, leaving them without access to most of the emotional and financial supports they had been receiving.
“Clearly having an abrupt cutoff of support at age 19 puts women at risk, particularly women who often haven’t had strong life skills,” Abbott said. “And not having enough housing puts women at risk.”
Savannah Scott said she was emotional and thrilled when Atira asked for permission to name the facility after her strong-willed, spunky little sister. “That’s so amazing,” she said Wednesday.
Santanna grew up in a stable foster care home with three of her siblings, although she remained close to her biological mother. The oft-criticized child welfare system worked relatively well for the young Indigenous girl until she hit the age of 15, when her drug use and suspected attention deficit hyperactivity disorder started to cause problems academically and at home.
As Santanna then bounced from foster homes to group homes, she spiralled downward, unable to connect with the specific services she desperately needed to lift her again. For the last year of her life, she was homeless on the streets of Surrey.
“Santanna was going through a really long battle of drug addiction, a battle no one should ever face,” Savannah said last year. “No one really prepared her for the outer world. She was hard to handle, but I feel like people gave up too soon.”
Santanna’s grim experience should inspire the provincial government to do more to help troubled youth, Bernard Richard, B.C.’s representative for children and youth, told Postmedia last year.
On Wednesday, an all-party committee of the legislature recommended Richard’s role be expanded to include advocacy for youth who had previously been in care. Before this change, the representative could not investigate cases like Santanna’s because she was no longer a child or a ward of the state.
The NDP also recently announced more support for rent, child care and health care for youth who have aged out of care, up to the age of 27, while they go back to school or attend a rehabilitation, vocational or approved life skills program.