Crushing financial woes and a lack of staff are forcing Arrowhead to close its clubhouse doors, leaving 50 mentally-ill members adrift until the organization gets its new Dolphin Street location open in 2010.
"We have less than $5,000 left. We've had to lay off our entire staff. They're all gone," said Bob Smith, chair of the board of directors for the Arrowhead Centre Society.
Arrowhead, which provides a support centre and hosts daytime activities for people suffering from serious chronic mental illnesses, requires $10,000 a month to run, he said. The society has seen its financial troubles deepen since last fall, when it discovered it wouldn't get any funding from Vancouver Coastal Health. Cash flow problems increased when the society received only $30,000 of the $55,000 it had requested from B.C. Gaming's Direct Access grants - and an ensuing appeal has been in limbo since the Gaming grants were frozen earlier this summer.
Added to this, Arrowhead has been scrambling since late June, when it discovered its current Cowrie Street rental location was being sold, to find a new temporary clubhouse location, as it waits for its permanent Dolphin Street location to be available.
The Dolphin Street Project, which involves the renovation of the former RCMP building, plus the installment of eight units of social housing from VANOC following the 2010 Olympics, has been pushed back due to a series of bureaucratic and funding hurdles. Smith said he hopes to see it open in February.
In the short term, Arrowhead had been pushing forward with a plan to move a limited program to the Kirkland Centre in Davis Bay, he said.
But now, he said, with the society's coffers empty, and with the final paid staff member laid off, the society can no longer see a way to keep operating viably without the permanent location - which will come with a significant amount of core operating funds.
"We had some very capable members of Arrowhead, who together with some of the directors, were going to try to run programs for three days a week [at the Kirkland Centre]," he said. "And when we sat down [last week] and looked at it, we said, 'We don't think we can do this.' We were so anxious to try to save it that we overstretched."
The result, he said, is that Arrowhead's 50 members - who take transit or hitchhike in, sometimes daily, from as far away as Madeira Park and Langdale - will lose a key support in their lives for a minimum of four to six months.
"What they find [at Arrowhead] - what they have found there, past tense - is a safe place, a place where they were welcomed and valued," Smith said, his voice heavy with sadness.
Members, he said, would develop their skills, learn to shop for groceries, plan and make meals, keep the place up and operate a garden.
"They're an exceedingly vulnerable population," he said. "Many of them are living rough. Most of them are without families, and in many instances, they're solitary."
But while Smith expressed deep regret about the clubhouse's closure, he said Arrowhead needs to regroup and focus its limited resources on fundraising for the society's future.
"We are absolutely at the end of this particular piece of rope, but we are absolutely committed that we're not at the end of Arrowhead," he said. "So we have to use our resources to make sure we can get into the building and the Dolphin Street Project doesn't fall by the wayside."
