Women’s shelter shuts for renos,
Sandy Merriman House — an emergency shelter for women — will close for about three months for renovations, likely beginning the first week of June.
The Burdett Street shelter accommodates 25 women a night and offers meals and services to as many as 50 women a day.
The renovations will be paid for by B.C. Housing, which owns the 1887 house, once the home of Sir Richard McBride, who served as B.C. premier from 1903-15.
“We will find a way to continue to provide services,” said Don McTavish, shelter manager for Victoria Cool Aid Society, which operates the building.
“We get the best bang for our taxpayer dollars by actually vacating the house and letting them go to town on it while we’re set up somewhere else.”
The renovations will not increase capacity, but are aimed at reconfiguring some of the interior space — enlarging the dining area and staff space and making the second floor accessible to the disabled, McTavish said. “The building is in good shape but needs a tune-up.”
The shelter is down the street from the tent-city encampment behind the Victoria courthouse lawn, but there is not a lot of overlap, McTavish said. “They’re generally pretty separate groups, although we do have a lot of people, men and women, coming from tent city, asking for services, asking for food, for toilet paper, for a whole variety of things.”
The tent city has its own serv- ice providers, he added.
Where the homeless women who use the shelter will be accommodated is still up in the air, with a couple of options, including Rock Bay Landing, available if all else fails, he said. “We’re trying to keep to the downtown area and we’re trying to keep it as local as we can,” he said, adding that doing the work in the warm weather is an attempt to make it easier for all concerned.
The Cool Aid activity centre at 755 Pandora St. will provide barbecues and bagged lunches at noon and some services.
When the shelter opened in December 1995, 15 women over age 19 were limited to stays of seven days. Now it’s usually 30 days, although women who work with staff consistently to improve their lives can stay longer, McTavish said.
The house was renovated to become a shelter by 20 women who were on social assistance and took four months of classroom training in life skills and construction. Of those, 11 completed seven months of on-site renovation work, working with professionals.
The shelter was named for Sandy Merriman, a 27-year-old construction trainee who died from an accidental heroin overdose during the construction process.
The daytime drop-in program typically serves more than 800 hot meals a month, along with providing unlimited coffee, tea and juice, laundry and shower facilities, hygiene supplies, clothing, and help and referrals from support workers.