A severe lack of funding and the need for a coordinator has delayed the opening of the Sunshine Coast’s only shelter and cut the number of days it will be available to the homeless this season.
“We have had a lot of people asking us when it’s going to be open,” said Rev. Clarence Li of St. Hilda’s Anglican Church, which is the lead agency for the shelter, aided by the Sunshine Coast Community Services Society.
“At this stage, all we can really say is that we are anticipating there will be an extreme weather shelter this season. But at the same time, we are not able to say when it will get open. We have to have the coordinator in place and then the coordinator would need to start hiring staff and building a program and training the staff as well.”
Former shelter coordinator Brenda Wilkinson stepped down from the position this year to focus on her massage therapy practice and Li said several of the shelter’s longtime volunteers also left, due to “volunteer fatigue.”
The shelter is now seeking a new coordinator. As of this week, one application had been submitted for the position.
Under Wilkinson’s watch last year, the shelter secured two streams of funding to provide both an extreme weather and cold weather shelter out of the same building beside St. Hilda’s Anglican Church. The extreme weather shelter operated when temperatures dipped below zero degrees, while the cold weather shelter was open every other night during the fall and winter months.
In the 2014-15 season, the shelter was available for the homeless nightly from Nov. 1 to the end of March and it cost about $80,000 to operate. That money was obtained through government grants and donations, Li said.
Only $33,000 in grant funding for the extreme weather shelter has been secured for the 2015-16 season.
Li was told the shelter wouldn’t have its main source of funding (a $40,000 federal grant through the Homelessness Partnering Strategy) renewed this season because it didn’t properly fit the grant’s criteria of “helping communities to transition from shelters to supportive housing.”
The lack of funding means the shelter will only be open on days when the temperature dips below zero, once a coordinator and staff are in place.
“For people who want to support the program in terms of funding, they could send money to Sunshine Coast Community Services and all the donations can get tax receipts,” Li said.
“We still want to offer the cold weather piece but that piece is totally dependent on donations.”
Donations can be made by sending a cheque (payable to Sunshine Coast Community Services Society with a note in the memo line for the cold weather shelter) to Box 1069, 5638 Inlet Ave., Sechelt, B.C., V0N 3A0.
