We learned this week that a homeless man was found dead on a bench in Gibsons early Saturday morning. The 56-year-old Lakota man had been a regular client at the Sunshine Coast’s only homeless shelter, located beside St. Hilda’s Anglican Church in Sechelt. So why was he sleeping outdoors in Gibsons on a cold November night? Sadly, because the shelter in Sechelt wasn’t open Friday night. Nor is it expected to be open tonight, or tomorrow night.
Last year it was a different story. The shelter opened on Nov. 1 and remained open every night until the end of March, as a cold weather shelter.
The main reason for the change was the loss of a $40,000 federal grant – representing about half of the facility’s operating costs and forcing it to revert to an extreme weather shelter. The resignations of the shelter coordinator and several long-time volunteers were an added complication, but the lack of funding was the key factor. As a result, even if the shelter is ready to open by Dec. 1 as hoped, it will only be open when “extreme weather” conditions are present.
We reported this critical funding need back in the middle of October.
“We still want to offer the cold weather piece, but that piece is totally dependent on donations,” Rev. Clarence Li of St. Hilda’s said at the time.
More than a month after that plea, less than $800 has been donated to the Sunshine Coast Community Services Society in support of the shelter.
The Lakota man who died last weekend was a familiar character on the Coast; we did not name him in this week’s story because we could not be certain that his next of kin had all been notified of his death. Plainly there were substance issues behind his homelessness and, as Chief Calvin Craigan told reporter Christine Wood this week, “he had too many demons” to overcome that addiction.
He was one of our community’s vulnerable. This time last year he had a warm bed every night; this year he died outdoors in the cold, stretched out on a bench.
There is something so wrong with this picture. In retrospect, opening the shelter every night last winter to our homeless and then removing the service this year – regardless of the reasons – was inadvertently setting the stage for exactly this kind of tragedy.
Sunshine Coast people are caring, giving people and it’s admirable that some of them are now organizing to bring Syrian refuges here. But charity, as the saying goes, should begin at home – and it should start with the most vulnerable.
