Frontline workers supporting the city’s unhoused population sound the alarm about cuts to service

Frontline workers in London’s supportive services sector are sounding alarms about proposed changes by City Council to the city’s warming centres and funding for outreach services provided by London Cares.

In advance of federal funding expiration — which had provided $4.2 million in support for the city’s homelessness response — city staff recommended London’s Community and Protective Services Committee extend a multi-year contract with London Cares and further evolve the homelessness response system. 

However on January 23, Ward 4 Coun. Susan Stevenson, Ward 2 Coun. Shawn Lewis, Ward 5 Coun. Jerry Pribil, and Ward 8 Coun. Steve Lehman, proposed amendments to reallocate the nearly $3 million of London Cares’ outreach and housing stability funding to expand service at single warming shelter, depleting the other services funding. The proposed amendments additionally call for temporary one-year contracts, with renewal explicitly pending council approval, and for service providers to provide quarterly reports to council.

An open letter signed by 78 workers in the “homelessness” sector shared with Antler River Media, emphasizes their collective 708 years of experience supporting those experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity, and demands that council reconsider these amendments, warning of the harms they will likely cause to the sector. 

“Most of us are only one or two paycheques away from being homeless ourselves. We do this work because we know that every member of our community is a person deserving of love and care,” the letter reads. “If these changes take place, people we know and love will die premature and preventable deaths.”

Mechele te Brake, a frontline worker with 23 years of experience in the sector reiterates the life or death struggle that’s at risk if the amendment were to pass. “It’s only organizations that are being funded by the city that are doing outreach services to our most vulnerable population,” she affirms.

“Earlier in the winter, outreach workers found a person stuck in their tent because their feet were frozen to the ground. They were able to save that person’s life. But if there’s no outreach workers going out to do that, that person’s dying in their tent,” said frontliner and housing support advocate Daniel Oudshoorn, in an interview with Antler River Media. 

Te Brake sees the amendment’s request for the city to have more control over the organizations operations as an overreach that could put London Cares services completely defunded at the whims of developer-beholden councillors. “It’s control where there doesn’t need to be control,” te Brake says. “They’re using language of care to control and potentially harm our vulnerable population and the organizations that serve them.”

Frontline workers te Brake and Oudshoorn have been consulted in the past by City Council, but don’t feel as though the consultations earnestly appreciate the years of experience they bring. 

“[We’re] consulted in such a way that it’s like ‘this is what’s going to happen. And if you don’t agree, then you don’t get your funding,’” says te Brake. “We’re only looking at the now. We need to look at the big picture. If we take these programs away, what are the costs going to be? What will they become when people have nowhere to go?”

For Oudshorn, the unfortunate answer to this is the unfavourable conditions on the street. “We’re talking about Indigenous women, we’re talking about homeless veterans — we’re talking about highly vulnerable people being thrown out. And we know that not everybody is going to survive that.”

The proposed amendments also call to change the contract focus of Project Home, a supportive housing program, from supporting “high acuity individuals” to primarily supporting graduates of substance use recovery programs like London’s Hart Hub and the Quintin Warner House. Oudshorn posits that the assumptions behind this amendment — that homelessness is the direct result of substance use issues and that individuals must first undergo residential treatment before they can access housing — are insidious.

“We know categorically and comprehensively from years and years of research that both of these assumptions are fundamentally false,” said Oudshoorn. “This would be a massive barrier raised to the majority of the people who need housing and support would no longer be able to access it because of this.”

The support workers ask Londoners to stay engaged and email their respective councillors, as well as to attend the city’s upcoming council meeting on Tuesday, February 10,  where these amendments could be accepted.

Oudshoorn warns that the amendments “seem clearly just designed to essentially drive services away from the city and force people who are impoverished to go and die somewhere where we can’t see them anymore.”