Participants read up on what their challenges will be over the course of the next 36 hours as they start the Prince Albert Sanctum 36 Hour Challenge. (paNOW Staff/Nick Nielsen)

By Nick Nielsen

Sanctum 36 hour homeless challenge kicks off

Sep 25, 2025 | 12:56 PM

With a brisk Thursday morning 6:00 a.m. start, 10 community leaders in Prince Albert will be homeless on the streets of Prince Albert as they take part in the first ever Prince Albert Sanctum 36 Hour Challenge. Along with living homeless in Prince Albert for 36 hours, participants are also each raising $20,000 to help with homelessness initiatives.

The challenge is put on by the Sanctum Care Group based out of Saskatoon, a charity organization that focuses on helping those experiencing HIV/AIDS, homelessness, and other complex health challenges. The goal, according to co-founder and Executive Director Katelyn Roberts is to help remove the stigma around homelessness and remind the public of what’s really at the heart of homelessness: people.

“We wanted people to have a better understanding of the challenges our homeless population are faced with, but also to dispel a lot of the myths or misconceptions around why people are homeless and what they’re experiencing while they’re on the streets. So this was an opportunity to literally give people an opportunity, in a very small way, to step into the shoes of individuals who are faced with homelessness every day.”

As part of the challenge, each person participating started in the parking lot of a business on 15th Street where they picked out their clothes for the challenge from a donation pile. It was there they also received a booklet with instructions for the weekend, with each person getting a different ‘role’ to play with certain mental and physical health challenges, along with 36 tasks they need to complete before the end of the 36 hours.

These challenges included things such as asking members of the public for money to buy their lunch, going to health clinics across town without the use of any transportation services, and other challenges specific to the role they received.

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The 10 participants are broken up into pairs, and will face the 36-hour challenge together. Some of the participants have to deal with physical challenges such as being confined to a wheelchair or having to pull around an oxygen tank throughout the challenge.

“The challenges have been designed by people with lived experience as well as frontline workers to try and create a 36 hours that is meaningful in terms of engaging with obviously the many amazing organizations that service this population, but also to really give participants an understanding of the day-to-day challenges and how difficult it can be to actually just meet your basic needs or access medical care. So the challenges have been designed to help our participants gain a more in-depth understanding of what it means to be homeless in our community.”

One of the participants in the challenge is Danielle Carter, who owns 4 Horsemen Fitness in Prince Albert. The role she received was that of a 24-year-old woman who has HIV, ADHD, and a history of substance abuse including crystal meth. As a result, Carter will have challenges that involve her getting tests and treatments for her different conditions without any form of ID.

“It makes me very emotional,” said Carter after reading the background of the role she would be playing. “We do have to try and visit a doctor without any ID, so that’s going to be a very big challenge. We also have to try and figure out how to get legal advice for my complex needs.”

Local nurse Carolyn Brost Strom is also taking part in the challenge, and in her role, she is a 22-year-old mother of six living out of her car, just finished having a baby in an ambulance, and also has both HIV and syphilis that has spread to her newborn. With her career as a nurse, Brost Strom knows that this is all too real for some of the patients she’s treated, but this makes that even more of a reality.

“It’s a very scary situation, I have to visit my kids supervised. Right off the start, it actually made me tear up because just being thrown into that is quite something, and that’s someone’s reality. That was the first thing I read. So you have health conditions, and then I’m homeless, living in a car, and yeah, have to try and get through the day finding food and shelter, and go to my appointments. No transportation, no phone, no money. It’s going to be a heck of a day.”

Along with Carter and Brost Strom, here’s the full list of participants.

• Cody Barnett – CEO, Boreal Healthcare Foundation
• Carolyn Brost Strom – Registered Nurse
• Danielle Carter – Business Owner, 4 Horsemen Fitness
• Code Demerais – CEO, Limitless Gear Clothing & Motivational Speaker
• Jessee Honch – Real Estate Professional
• Dr. Morris Markentin – Co-Founder of Sanctum Care Group & Physician
• Alex Paul – Deputy Fire Chief, City of Prince Albert Fire Department
• Britany Shymanski – Registered Nurse
• Dr. Viji Udayasankar – OBGYN
• Allan Webb – General Manager, RNF Ventures Ltd.

All 10 participants are also required to raise $20,000 to support Prince Albert’s Prenatal Outreach Resource Team (PORT), helping provide at-risk mothers services to improve health outcomes and prevent infant death. It’s also going to help lay the ground work for Sanctum 1.5 in Prince Albert, which will become a care home to support pregnant women at risk here in Prince Albert.

For Brost Strom, she says she’s already about halfway towards her fundraising goal.

“$20,000 is a lot of money. I’ve done Relay for Life and that before and sure, it’s a couple thousand, but 20, yeah. So I’ve just been telling everyone I know, sharing lots on social media and texting, emailing. That’s been my approach so far, I’ve had some friends offer to make some things that I could offer as prizes.”

For Carter, the first few hours just reading about what she was about to take on was enough to have an effect on her, and now she hopes that it can have a similar effect on the public.

“I talked to a lot of friends and family about what my goals out of the next 36 hours were, and just mentally kind of prepared myself just to be the best I can be and to make my family and my friends proud, and just to hopefully really get some insight into what our unhoused population has to deal with every day and hopefully I can make a difference and my voice is strong enough to have their stories told.”

The 10 participants don’t know where they are going to be sleeping tonight, and only have use of their phones to update to the public how they are doing. They will reconvene at 101 15th Street East to finish up the challenge.

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nick.nielsen@pattsonmedia.com