Prince Albert Mayor Greg Dionne, Craig Guidinger, and Dr. Chad Nilson talk to those in attendance during the media conference for the new Homlessness Action Initiative. (Ian Gustafson/paNOW Staff)

By Ian Gustafson

Taking Action

Homelessness Action Initiative announced by City of P.A.

Dec 16, 2021 | 6:00 PM

A new Homelessness Action Initiative has been announced today to combat the city of Prince Albert’s homeless problem.

On Thursday afternoon the City of Prince Albert, in partnership with the Prince Albert Community Advisory Board and supported by the Living Skies Centre for Social Inquiry, announced the plan to those in attendance.

Prince Albert Mayor Greg Dionne said this initiative has been launched to develop a format for action against homelessness noting it won’t just be a report but rather moving forward with multiple action items.

“It’s going to be a community project and we’re going to work with our partners to see if we can make things better,” Mayor Greg Dionne said. “Homelessness is a complex issue and certainly nothing we can solve in council chambers or within city hall as a single organization. To have an impact we need to bring multiple partners together where we can have sensible balanced dialogue around causes, consequences and solutions for our community.”

Through the initiative, Dionne said they will be working with social, health, business, academic advocacy and government sectors to inform better practices, policies and opportunities.

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Dionne believes it will help those involved in the initiative to understand the problems, causes and solutions they have yet to realize until they look at the data and collaborate.

“This is an issue that affects our whole community and not one group or organization by itself is going to solve the problem,” Dionne said.

Brian Howell, who spoke on behalf of the Community Advisory Board, said they were very interested in joining the initiative, adding they feel homelessness in the community in the past year has been increasing in severity.

“We feel that it’s going to take a collective action working together as a community to come up with some solutions that are workable. We need to engage the province, we need to engage the federal governments more than they are already and we need to engage Indigenous governments across Saskatchewan and work together collectively, because this bigger than any one community,” Howell said.

Dr. Chad Nilson, the lead researcher for the Homelessness Action Initiative, said this is an opportunity to facilitate collaborative dialogue between the different service providers, government, and business community to identify some of the causes, impacts and solutions to homelessness.

His role is to bring in the research side of it and to bring in the data to help better inform about homelessness, such as statistics, surveys with people affected by homelessness and data from partners who have a good understanding of the issue.

In the past Nilson has led studies on homelessness where they interviewed individuals who have lived on the streets or what they consider as hidden homelessness. He said the next step is building a process where they can get into some complicated problem solving.

“As some of the speakers had mentioned homelessness is not solved by simply popping up another couple shelters. We have to look at some of the impacts of homelessness for example the needles in the street that is tied to addiction, the defecation on sidewalks that is tied to a lack of facilities,” he said adding they will also talk about community safety, the image of the community and chronic high risk.

He added an observational change has been an acute spike in the number of people camping out on the street. Noting previously, people had somewhere inside to reside for the night and now people are committing to camping in a corner.

“It wasn’t your stereotypical homelessness situation in Prince Albert,” Nilson said. “We always had people, but they were able to find a couch or a living room of a friend or family member to sleep on. That’s changed. We have an increased observation of what we call absolute homelessness where there are people actually camping out in tents, in shopping carts, in cardboard boxes on the streets.”

Some of the initiative benchmarks include identifying the problems and researching the solutions by early January. By March the initiative will have time to evaluate how it’s going and start prioritizing some of the main issues.

The Homelessness Action Initiative is also funded in part by the Government of Canada’s Reaching Home.

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Ian.Gustafson@pattisonmedia.com

On Twitter: @IanGustafson12