The Brighton Homelessness Task Force

My last few posts stimulated a lot of comments along the lines of “why don’t you advocate for a shelter/warming room/safe consumption site/etc in Brighton, instead of Cobourg?” There are two answers to that.

Why Are Services in Cobourg?

Northumberland County Social Services, like all Northumberland County services, are headquartered in Cobourg. It’s what is often called the “county seat”, the place where county (and often provincial) resources are headquartered, including the County offices, paramedic services, the provincial courts, and a hospital. This provides Cobourg with the benefit of hundreds of jobs being located there, and close access to a lot of services that the rest of us need to drive to; but it also comes with the cost of needing some higher levels of services to support all of the people who gather there to access those services – things like more policing, greater traffic infrastructure, etc.

Some services are only truly effective if they’re located near the people who use them, particularly if those people lack transportation of their own. The emergency shelter, Transition House, is a good example of this, and here’s where it gets complicated. While there are people who are precariously housed and homeless in every community across Northumberland, there is only one shelter for all of us. With ~85 people on the By Name List (residents identified as unhoused), and 35 rooms at Transition House, we need to make the most of the shelter’s capacity by ensuring that it’s where most of the people are. Most of the people on the By Name List live in Cobourg, have lived in Cobourg for a long time, and many of them were even born there; there is a common misconception that people travel from far and wide to settle where shelter services are available, but it’s largely untrue. But to the small extent that it is true, it’s because the people who use the shelter also tend to need the other services that are located in Cobourg (Northumberland Hills Hospital, the Help & Legal Centre, the courts, addiction treatment services, etc). Most of them do not own cars, so it’s far from convenient for them to drive 35 minutes to get to any of the services they need day to day.

So why don’t all of the unhoused residents of Northumberland live in Cobourg? Brighton has a few unhoused residents that we know of; why are they still here? For the same reason any resident is here: it’s where we’re from, or where we’ve chosen to live, and where our community is. It’s sometimes frustrating that Brighton residents don’t have easy access to the same services that Cobourg residents do, but while county staff are based in Cobourg, they do serve all of the county through things like weekly office hours (in our case, at the Health Services building/YMCA location), and on-demand street-level outreach services. If our residents are out in the cold, county staff can and do come pick them up to access the warming room or shelter as needed; but understandably, our residents often resist having to move for as long as possible, until the cold forces them to make a choice. The same would be true for unhoused residents of every other municipality that doesn’t have its own shelter.

So why don’t we build shelters in every municipality? Well, because it’s costly. The shelter costs millions of dollars per year to operate, particularly if we want it to be safe and effective. A shelter in Brighton wouldn’t need 35 beds for the 2-3 people who would use it here, but that doesn’t mean it would be 10x cheaper to run; it would still require staff and around-the-clock supports. The services we have are already stretched, and I have no doubt that Social Services could easily find ways to improve their effectiveness with 10x the funding they currently get. But while much of their current funding comes from the province, the province doesn’t cover nearly enough: a report from the Association of Municipalities of Ontario this year noted that the province’s new commitment of an additional $20M for shelters amounts to about 2% of the total spending on shelters, and the new HART Hub funding covers about 6% of the need (Northumberland applied for, but did not get, HART Hub funding). So if we want to have seven shelters instead of one (one for each Northumberland municipality), we’d need to raise the county tax levy astronomically to fund that, and those additional shelters would be incredibly inefficient. It would be far more efficient to funnel more money into existing services located in Cobourg to improve and expand them, than it would be to duplicate them around the county.

So as always, it comes down to how much money we want to spend on it.

So What Is Brighton Doing?

The other answer to the question above is that, well, we are doing that. Brighton started its own Homelessness Task Force to ask these very questions. Our Task Force is made up of volunteers from several local nonprofits and churches, the library, one member representing residents, two councillors, the Mayor, and the Manager of Homelessness Services from Northumberland County. It was the Mayor’s idea, probably because he gets the same question all the time when County Council discusses homelessness. It’s not a bad question, and we set out to answer it.

We’ve been meeting all year to explore what resources exist within our community. Who’s out there looking after their neighbours? We’ve made lists of those resources, looked for where gaps might be, and mostly learned about how the official homelessness services from the county serve our residents here. Our mandate was to present a report on all of this to Brighton Council, which will happen in about an hour (I’d better get this post finished quick!). Follow the link and look under item 14.2 for more details.

The gist of the report is:

• We rely more on County Social Services than most of us realize, and it’s important that our residents understand how that system works so that they know how best to help when they see a neighbour in need;
• We rely more on the voluntary sector than anyone has even calculated, and volunteerism and donations are both in sharp decline nationwide, so we need to find ways to better support the volunteers that still exist;
• There’s a gap between county-level government services and local folks, partially because Social Services staff have strict confidentiality policies they must follow and partially because it’s difficult for an upper-tier government centralized in another town to really know what’s happening on the ground here;
• The Municipality of Brighton, and perhaps all lower-tier municipal governments, can help bridge these gaps and support these services, both official county services and unofficial nonprofit supports, without duplicating either of them.

The mechanism that I recommend in the report for bridging those gaps and empowering the grassroots to better support one another is the Community Safety and Well-Being Plan. It’s a provincially-mandated plan that lives at the County level in Northumberland, and it’s all about recognizing that safety and well-being are the outcomes or emergent properties of a connected, caring, and thriving community. It’s a powerful concept, but one that’s difficult to implement from a centralized, upper-tier government. For that reason, I’ve recommended that we take another shot at the plan, and come up with local implementation plans for individual communities like Brighton, so that it can be truly operationalized in ways that support and empower the people who are already volunteering to and looking out for their neighbours.

The plan has been approved and supported by the Task Force members, so now we just need council’s support. At the same time though, this week County Council will discuss a motion from Councillor Cleveland of Cobourg, to completely redesign our entire Social Services department, changing its approach to one that includes “mandated treatment”, which some people call “compassionate care” and other people call “coerced treatment”. I gave a delegation to the County Social Services Committee a few weeks ago to suggest that, rather than having a program focused on arresting people and forcing them into drug treatment, we instead invest in a whole-community approach such as the one outlined in the Community Safety and Well-Being Plan (my delegation starts 5 minutes in). Through the work of the Brighton Homelessness Task Force, my conviction that the CSWBP is the way to go has been significantly strengthened as I learned just how much our residents are already doing to create that safety and well-being, and how much more they could do if we were better coordinated with County services and other local resources. I worry that if we don’t invest in these volunteer services, they’ll wither away, and we don’t even know just how much we’ll miss them when they’re gone.

So that’s what we’re up to in Brighton, and why we don’t have a shelter or warming room of our own.