Community, Belonging and Homelessness: social inclusion in mid-sized cities

Centre for Research on Security Practices

 

INTERVIEWER: Avery Moore Kloss

PARTICIPANT[S]: Dr. Jessica Braimoh, Dr. Marcus Sibley, Dr. Carrie Anne Marshall and Brian Hart

LENGTH OF INTERVIEW: approximately 51:36

 

Avery Moore Kloss 00:

Welcome to CRSP talk podcast from the Centre for Research on Security Practices or CRSP. I'm Avery Moore Kloss. Security practices can be defined in many different ways and at CRSP the definition is different for each of our researchers. We've made episodes on CRSP Talk about policing, surveillance, extreme domicide, perceptions of rural safety, security art, human trafficking and more. And now, we're about to venture off into a mini-series on homelessness and belonging.

 

This episode is the first in that series of stories about research being done in this area. In this episode, we're tackling how social inclusion is created in mid-sized cities for people with lived experience of homelessness and to lead this episode, I am pleased to be joined by two researchers setting social inclusion belonging. Dr. Jessica Braimoh is an assistant professor in the social science department, Criminology at York University in Toronto and Doctor Marcus Sibley, Is an assistant professor in the criminology department at Saint Mary's University in Halifax. Welcome to you both thanks for having us.

 

Jessica Braimoh 01:08

Thanks for having us.

 

Marcus Sibley 01:09

Thank you.

 

Avery Moore Kloss 01:10

Thanks for being here. I just want to start with having both of you introduce yourselves as co-host. We just want to know a little bit more about you so maybe we'll start with Jessica. Jessica, just give a sense of what you're doing in your role and the kind of research that you’re doing that relates to this topic that we're on today.

 

Jessica Braimoh 01:24

Yeah, for sure. I am a critical sociologist. My research and teaching interests are generally focused on the ways that social institutions and systems respond to experiences of marginality. And so, some of my research has examined the link between criminalization, racialization, and class, among other systems of domination. I'm also very much interested in the ways that social institutions are coordinated in their response to marginality. So how, for example, the criminal justice system interacts with the welfare system or the education system to respond or intervene on the lives of people experiencing marginality or who are vulnerable. And so, in relation to this project, I've become very interested in the ways that mid-sized level cities respond to homelessness, how they understand homelessness. And this is kind of how I've come into this project.

 

Marcus Sibley 02:25

Hi, I'm Marcus Sibley. I do research generally on policing and surveillance and in particular around the kinds of relationships between communities, police and vulnerable groups including people experiencing homelessness, sex workers and those criminalized under rubrics of human trafficking and gender-based violence. So, I joined this project interested in this idea of how mid-size cities orient themselves toward issues related to homelessness, how police respond to those issues, how community members activate those kinds of policing response mechanisms, and the sort of myriad institutions that work in this kind of broader framework around the governance and social control elements of marginality and vulnerability.

 

Avery Moore Kloss 03:13

Okay, so we're here to talk about belonging in mid-sized cities. And I think to setup that context, I wonder if you might set the context for us, and just give us a sense of what the current state of homelessness in mid-size cities is and what does the research that you're doing say about that?

 

Jessica Braimoh 03:32

Yeah, for sure. So, I think it's important to start with a really clear understanding of what we mean by mid-sized cities. So here we're talking about populations between 50,000 people and 500,000 people. And one of the things that we've noticed is that there is this kind of consensus or the sentiment that there's an increased visibility of homelessness in these midsize cities and the thing that we are really seeing in terms of the data is that there has always been homelessness in these communities. There's always been on house people, people who are precariously housed in mid-size cities, but this perception around an increased visibility is sort of mirrored by the data which actually shows that since 2018 there's been about a 21% increase in homelessness in mid-size cities. And so, this definitely is suggesting that in these spaces’ homelessness is a very central social issue that people are experiencing.

 

Avery Moore Kloss 04:35

Yeah, absolutely. Marcus, I wonder from your stance if you could give us a sense of when you're studying these communities, how are these communities responding and is there an alternative way to respond over thinking about belonging and a sense of community?

 

Marcus Sibley 04:50

I think just as Jessica pointed out, the visibility of homelessness is sort of the driving thrust of the issue or at least how the issues is represented in the media and how it gets talked about in the kind of mainstream discourse and so the response to the kind of visibility issue, is that people generally don't know how to respond or how to deal with people experiencing homelessness in their communities. And what they end up often resorting to is calling the police or calling some sort of authority, whether it's the municipality or some kind of bylaw enforcement. With the ultimate goal of having that issue related to visibility dealt with and so what that in turn results in is a kind of invisibilization of people experiencing homelessness. These organizations don't really have the tools at their disposal to deal with the kind of systemic and deep-rooted issues related to poverty, lack of housing, mental health. And so, what they end up doing is kind of surface-level response, which is to displace people experiencing homelessness to sort of satisfy the publics need or want for having less visible homelessness in their neighbourhood and in their backyards.

 

Avery Moore Kloss 06:16

So, Jessica, I wonder if you can give me a sense of when we're talking about, studying homelessness and community belonging. What's the importance here? What's the importance here of community-based research?

 

Jessica Braimoh 06:30

Yeah, it's a great question. So, one of the things that we have historically seen in research is this sort of top-down approach whereby researchers, folks’ kind of in that ivory tower of academia go out and do research onto communities and what a community-based participatory research approach seeks to do is to kind of blur the lines there between researcher and participant. So, in other words, trying to kind of redress some of the power imbalances that we see in that historical relationship of researcher and kind of participant and so community has a more active role in the process by which a project unfolds and so again, this is a little bit of a different approach to doing research.

 

Avery Moore Kloss 07:18

And to build on that, I had the chance to interview Carrie Anne Marshall. She's an assistant professor at Western University in the School of Occupational Therapy and her research focuses on the intersection between poverty and mental well-being and she says the majority of her research actually focuses on homelessness and in particular, the transition from unhoused housed. And that's a big piece of what we talked about with Carrie Anne is this idea of social belonging, both when you are unhoused and once you found housing and so I think this is a really interesting interview and she really sets up for us, social belonging and why that's so important and really the effect of loneliness. And so, I began by asking her just to give us a sense of why belonging is such an important issue for those experiencing homelessness and for those who have recently found housing.

 

Carrie Anne Marshall 08:07

I mean, I think belonging is critical for all of us and it's critical for our well-being and it's actually, you know, when I, when I talk with, with community groups, with students, with other researchers about, you know, social integration, and belonging, I always say, you know, it's the number one predictor of psychosocial well-being. If you just do a quick literature search, you'll find study after study that correlates, you know, community integration, social inclusion with psychosocial well-being. So belonging is really important for all of us. For… you know, when a person is unhoused, you know, individuals who are, you know, need to survive every day, they depend on belonging for their own survival. So, for you know, for accessing food, for accessing clothing, to stay safe, they rely on other people on the street in order to keep them safe, you know, following homelessness, you know, often individuals just talk about, you know, how they have this unbearable quiet, and nobody comes by, nobody comes to visit them. And there's one story that I often tell, you know, of a person that I knew who was unhoused for chronically for end for many years of his life. And he was a very social person, and I remember seeing him after he had been housed for a few months for the first time in a very long time. And I asked him how things were going, and he said, well, I'm, you know, staying at the shelter again, and I said, well, what happened to your housing? And he said, ‘Carrie, I can count on my on one hand, how many people came to visit me in the three months that I was housed,’ and when he said that it was just, you know, it really struck me how that was the one thing that prevented him from sustaining his housing. It lacked meaning for him because he knew so many people on the street.

 

Avery Moore Kloss 10:08

Can you set up for us like, I guess what are the stakes here, right? Like when you're in that situation where you're in an apartment, you finally found housing and then you know, none of your friends have come to visit you and you're feeling lonely, what happens? What's the, what are the stakes when someone really doesn't have that sense of belonging? What happens?

 

Carrie Anne Marshall 10:29

Well, we don't know other people, or we don't have current relationships. We don't have a group of people that we belong with or that we feel like we belong with. Often, you know, our time isn't occupied with anything that's meaningful to us. You know, people tend to, you know, when, when they are not interacting with others, I think there are many, you know, many instances where or even like, research that has been conducted for a long time that indicates that human beings are very unhealthy when we're not with other people when we don't feel like we belong our mental health tends to deteriorate people tend to experience depression, anxiety when you know in some of my research around meaningful activity, engagement and boredom, you know individuals talk about, how are participants in that research talk about how they have these large swaths of time that are unoccupied and when they're not with other people and when they're not engaged in meaningful activity, often, they begin to think about things that are distressing and that ends up kind of occupying most of  their mental energy. And so that can feel very distressing for most people and lead to, you know, not wanting to, to stay in one's apartment and maybe even feeling like, you know, I think, you know, we need people like we need food and water and I think that, you know, that drive to be, to belong with other people, to be with other people is so strong that many people will forgo their own housing in order to seek that sense of belonging. You know, individuals who experience homelessness are much more likely to experience loneliness and social exclusion because they occupy in a range of social locations that tend to lead to that exclusion, but if we look at the literature broadly on loneliness. Loneliness often leads to, you know what loneliness is associated with, I won't kind of you know, it's not, you know, correlation doesn't mean causation, but loneliness is frequently associated with poor health outcomes in general for, you know, for all people. And so, when we think about individuals who experience homelessness, we know that they already enter into homelessness with very compromised health histories.

 

Avery Moore Kloss 13:19

You were talking a little bit about when, when someone does find housing and they don't, they, you know, they don't have the connection to their community from before and they're not feeling integrated into the, the current community they're living in. Is there a specific way that you find that people who are experiencing homelessness build community between each other? Or is that unique in any kind of way?

 

Carrie Anne Marshall 13:39

So, I think it's much easier when a person is unhoused to find belonging with other people because they often share the same unmet needs. And so, then they're often making connections just to survive. One, you know, sometimes people you know go and, you know, seek out resources for other people that they know on the street, and they share those resources with one another, and that's one of the ways that they that they are able to feel like they belong. And when a person is housed, following homelessness those… that immediate access to those social environments is not it's no longer there. They're not they're not co-located necessarily with other people. They might be in an apartment building with other people that they don't know and have never met before and it can take a long time to build those relationships, but when a person is in an encampment or there in the in a shelter, you know you can't really look anywhere without seeing other people and eventually people do build those relationships with one another, especially when they depend on one another for their survival. Following homelessness individuals, you know, often are told that they can't go back to the shelters that they came from there they are they are sometimes no longer eligible for some of the meal programs that they used to access as well. So often , you know, their networks are really quite limited following homelessness, and I think that's a bit of a mistake and in some of the ways that we designed services in particularly and mid-sized communities because there are fewer services overall. So, if the… you know so if the few services that you can access, you’re not allowed to access following homelessness, then it really cuts a person off even more as opposed to a larger city like Toronto for example where there are so many services across the city that you could potentially access.

 

Avery Moore Kloss 15:48

Yeah. I wonder if we can just get a sense of, or you can give me a sense of what community groups or organisations or local people are like, how they're attempting to foster and build community among people experiencing homelessness. And then on the on the flip side of that, you know, what are, what are those services not getting right that we can help to mobilize more community involvement to create those support structures that are needed.

 

Carrie Anne Marshall 16:14

You know during homelessness there are a number of different I would say you know advocates and community groups who try to help individuals to feel like they belong in the community, just by being, I guess, decent citizens. They, you know, many advocates and community organizers are bringing resources frequently to encampments and to shelters really to send a message to persons who experience homelessness that they that they belong and are welcome in the community. I think a lot of policies that are currently implemented, however, send the message to persons who experience homelessness that they are not welcome in the community and that they don't belong. And sometimes those are really they seem to be rather deliberate and there are other times when those policies are not really deliberate, but the way… in practice they, they send the message that the person doesn't belong.

 

So, I'll give you an example in a shelter when, shelters often implement policies that are meant to kind of, keep shelters uncomfortable for the people that use them. So, the idea behind this, and this is, you know, has been demonstrated, you know, in multiple research studies, but most people who work in the housing and homelessness sector will tell you this, that we don't want to make shelters too comfortable. For people to stay in because if they feel comfortable there, they'll never want to leave, is the is the idea. And I disagree with that, that way of thinking, but it's certainly quite prevalent in in many kind of traditional shelters. And so, this is kind of manifested in a number of different ways. So, you know that a television can't be on, you can't nap during the day at the shelter, you can only have food at a certain time and so on. So, there are a number of rules often that are implemented to keep shelter spaces uncomfortable for the people that use them. As a way of deterring people from wanting to stay there for long periods of time.

 

The… in the community when people and one of the ways, you know, shelters are often closed during the day. So, individuals who access them usually have to leave at 8:00 o’clock in the morning and they can't come back until 8:00 PM that night and they're, they basically are walking around the streets all day and as they're walking around the streets there are police officers who prevent them from moving on, and bylaw, officers that prevent them, sorry, that ask them not to loiter in public spaces. So, they're asked repeatedly to move on. If a person is staying in an encampment, for example, you know. You know where there are multiple, you know examples of this across Canada where encampment policies vary by municipality and you know people are asked when they set up a tent or something and encampment, they usually asked to move on. In some municipalities that time tends to vary, but in some municipalities it's two hours and other municipalities it's 48 hours. Often these rules tend to change, and so if a person is detected by the police or a bylaw officer to have set up camp somewhere, they usually send an outreach worker and/ or the police or a bylaw officer to ask them to move on. Sometimes this happens forcibly. So, if you think about and then you know individuals who experience homelessness, they may not be able to afford to buy a coffee at a local cafe, for example. So, and so sometimes people will sit in local cafes with empty cups and for as long as they can. But once somebody notices that they're not buying something, they're asked to move on.

 

So, you know, people who are unhoused are sent the message repeatedly that they don't belong. They are never allowed to sit anywhere. They are never allowed to kind of like settle anywhere. And they're asked to move on repeatedly over and over again. And the longer a person is spends in this in, unhoused, the more that message will be sent to them both explicitly and then also kind of unconsciously. You know? Where you know, even things like you know, if you're panhandling on the street, for example, people don't tend to make eye contact with you. So, they pretend. It's almost like you know, you're being sent the message that you don't belong or you're not there. And if a person is unhoused for a long period of time in their lives, like maybe you know, 5 or 10 years or more or even I mean even a year's enough for a person to begin to feel like they really don't belong at all.

 

So that kind of belief can often set in for people and when they’re housed following homelessness they really have the sense that they don't belong and now they're in this in an apartment and they that maybe they haven't been in, for quite a long time and now they don't even have the comfort of knowing other people who are unhoused. Now they're in this apartment and they feel alone and maybe that they're embedded within a culture that has kind of excluded them for quite a long time. So, that sense of belonging can, can even be can even decrease following homelessness and when I say this, I'm not saying that we shouldn't house people following homelessness. The whole point of studying this is really to identify how we can better support people to belong following homelessness so that they're not feeling, so that when those feelings set in that they have a place to, you know, they have some, some contacts to reach out to or some way of attaining belonging over time because I think it's the kind of thing that does take time.

 

Avery Moore Kloss 22:38

Yeah and when you're doing that work, I mean, I know that researchers hate this question is like, what's the solution? But what, what kind of solutions have you come across or ideas for how, you know that sense of belonging, how we can help create better supports, when someone finds housing to make them… to help them feel like they do belong.

 

Carrie Anne Marshall 22:59

So at the risk of sounding self-serving, This has been sort of a line of research in my, in my research program for a while and I worked on a study called The Transition From Homelessness study over the past two years and in that study, the study was a participatory study. So, all the way along right from the beginning, the study involved persons with lived experience, service providers, researchers and policymakers. Right from the very beginning, right from the designing the research question and so forth it was a community-based participatory research project, and that project was first we decided to conduct a stakeholder consultation where we ask people about, you know, like what do you need to thrive following homelessness? What is it that individuals who have left homelessness, what is it that they need to thrive?

 

And this idea of community integration and belonging came up consistently, both in interviews with persons with lived experience. So, we interview individuals who are unhoused and individuals who are housed following homelessness and we interviewed service providers, and all of those interviews, the participants told us that community integration was a major gap. And so, we took that information as a Community Advisory Board with all of those stakeholders that I mentioned earlier. So, persons with lived experience, service providers, organizational leaders and policymakers and we work together to co-design an intervention called the Peer to Community Model and the purpose of that model was aimed at helping people to integrate in their communities following homelessness. So, we're about to conduct a pilot of that project we will begin in February of next year and will be piloting in Kingston. We don't know yet whether it's going to be effective. So that's kind of one approach that I think is promising, but you know, we don't have the data to support that approach quite yet. I think, you know from the Kate’s Rest and the big Islands Model that was sort of… that I referred to earlier in this in this podcast, was, is a really nice approach I think for promoting belonging and that is a model that even just in our case study, we have really promising data to suggest that it could promote belonging following homelessness if we were able to replicate it. So that, you know, but, you know, if you look at the literature on, you know, various interventions that promote belonging following homelessness, there aren't very many that that have demonstrated effectiveness and of those they tend to incorporate meaningful activity engagement and peer support in those models, so, yeah

 

Avery Moore Kloss 26:03

Do you have a sense when you're looking at these possible solutions like what role if any, government should be playing in fostering community both and people experiencing homelessness and those people who have found housing and does government kind of pose a challenge to community building initiative at the same time?

 

Carrie Anne Marshall 26:20

Yeah, I think we have a conundrum in many Canadian communities, where, you know, especially in the municipal government’s often give organizations funding to operate services to support individuals during and following homelessness and I think sometimes you know that that funding can only be allocated to one organization or another and sometimes these organizations can feel like they're in competition with one another for funding. So, I think that's one thing that can come that can erode community so I think if, you know, governments can find a way to allocate funding in a way that limits that competition. I think that that's one way of, you know, helping to build community and help organizations to work together. I think that's particularly in issue in mid-sized communities because again, there are fewer services and less funding to go around. I think that you know, I think that one of the ways that government can play a role in fostering community is by funding initiatives that help to promote, that build community with individuals who are unhoused or housed following homelessness and sometimes, you know, those initiatives can be things like, you know, mitigating stigma in mid-sized communities for individuals who experience homelessness. I think, you know, one of the reasons a lot of people feel like they don't belong following homelessness and during homelessness is because they face a significant amount of stigma in their communities. So, implementing policies and funding initiatives that help to mitigate stigma, I think are really quite important.

 

Avery Moore Kloss 28:13

All that information from Carrie Anne was really important and she had a lot of good advice about what needs to happen now, specifically around stigma and around, you know, getting everyone on the same page towards the goal of creating a better sense of community for those who are unhoused or who have been unhoused in our recently housed and so I wonder from you, Marcus, can you give me a sense of like, why should we care about this as a community? Why as a community should we really be standing up and demanding a solution and trying to cut the stigma? What's the important piece of that that we should take away from what Carrie Anne said?

 

Marcus Sibley 28:53

Well, I think the important piece is that while individuals are affected by issues related to homelessness, there's more to it than the individual piece. The individual is sort of, navigates their community, navigates government, navigates different social servicing. And so, the individual is only one piece of a larger, more complex puzzle that needs to be looked at an addressed and I think Carrie Anne sort of brilliantly touches on the idea that stigma plays an important role in how people navigate those very complex systems.

 

What we found was that community plays an important role in shaping individual experiences. There are a number of studies that show how bringing community members, both unhoused people and housed people together to do communal activities creates a sense of bonding, creates sort of counters that stigma that Carrie Anne mentions. You know, some of these things can be community gardens, sport leagues, where people who are or have experienced homelessness are actively involved with other members of the community in a way that breaks down those barriers. So, there's not this kind of like us versus them or kind of divide between people who are experiencing homelessness and those who have stable housing but instead sort of brings people together to say look, people experiencing homelessness, people who are experiencing poverty are active members of this community, live here, work here, play here, together. The research even shows that at a base level, not allowing people to exist and not actively displacing them has beneficial material impact at the policy level, at a minimum, not displacing people, not allowing people experiencing homelessness to exist has significant and beneficial impacts on at the policy level, people who interact with vulnerable, marginalized members of our community are more likely to, then vote for policy frameworks that actively better the lives of those community members. And so, I think breaking down the barriers that sort of divide, actively resisting, displacing people experiencing homelessness is part of the community building project.

 

Avery Moore Kloss 31:20

Actually, I think actually, Marcus, that's a perfect segue into our last interview, which is with Brian Hart. He's the founder of Kate’s Rest or sometimes it's called the Big Island model in Prince Edward County, Ontario. He's a retired parish priest and he's lived on this property that is now called Kate’s Rest for about 17 years and so just before we get into that interview with Brian, I just wanted to ask Jessica, why was it so important that we interviewed Brian for this episode? Without giving away too much about Kate’s Rest. Why did we choose to involve Brian in this discussion about community belonging?

 

Jessica Braimoh 31:57

I think for us it was really important to include Brian and as folks were here because he is just a community member. He's just one of the people who’s part of this particular community. He's not connected to any particular institution. He's not connected to law enforcement or security. You know, he's just an everyday person, who wanted to do something to help support unhoused community members. And so, I really think that his approach to offering support and to creating a sense of inclusion and belonging is really different than we might see from other kinds of responses to homelessness, and I think is really particularly important in mid-sized communities, whereas we've been talking about we see the stigma, we see the sense of unhoused people not belonging in these communities or being from somewhere else and the response that Brian offers us is a way to think about how we can tear that down and maybe like allow folks to feel a part of their community and to feel a sense of home. And so that's why I think we chose Brian.

 

Avery Moore Kloss 33:14

Great, and Brian is so, it's just such an interesting story and I think, I think people will really enjoy. Just for some background, Brian bought the property that is now Kate’s Rest in a 2006. It started off as an old tourist camp on the Bay of Quinte. He told me that friends really encouraged him to tear down these seven cabins that were on the property, because they thought it would improve the value of his property. But Brian had other plans, so I'll let him I'll let him start off into what his plans were.

 

Brian Hart 33:46

So, I looked at it and I thought, you know, there's just too much goodness in these buildings to be just tearing them down and especially when there are people in need of a place to live. So, I busied myself with the help of some young men that were homeless at the time to upgrade all of the cabins into all seasons homes and as soon as we got one finished, another one that was filled up with people and we just kept moving along and to the point now where we have about 20 of us living here, men, women and children and we're a small community.

 

Avery Moore Kloss 34:25

Can you give me a sense of when you launched Kate’s Rest, that first cabin, what was the gap in existing programs or services that that you were responding to at the time or the gap that you saw?

 

Brian Hart 34:39

Well, it started in in 2006, I moved here with a homeless person. I knew that there were homeless people in the community that were in need of a place to live. I had a vision of really encouraging people to live here with me who had been on the street and engage them in a social enterprise. At the time it was an insulation business which we ran, which became very handy when we started upgrading the cottages and the insulation business ran for about 6 years, and it really helped young people in particular. Young men, to find a way into a trade, find their way into the construction industry and by the end of it and they also finished their high school diplomas through the social enterprise and kept them off the streets and get them out of out of trouble. Before that they were involved in, and I had squad cars, here quite often. So, once we got into this insulation business in a really meaningful way, people found careers and many of the folks who were involved in that have gone on to their own businesses and their own companies. They own their own homes in the county and then they come back here quite often because this is their home, this is where they started out and some even came to call me dad. I was very honoured when that happened.

 

Avery Moore Kloss 36:08

So, I wonder if you can tell me just a little bit about how Kate’s Rest works. Who comes to you, where are they coming from, and how do they end up at your door?

 

Brian Hart 36:19

Well, at the moment, I am simply a resident here with all the other residents. I no longer own the property. I transitioned the property to a foundation in 2020 when COVID was raging all around us. I'm a senior citizen and I have breathing issues, which I was fearful at the time that if I should contract COVID, I'd be dead, and then what would happen to my friends? So, I wanted to make sure that there was a future for them here. And so, I created the foundation in 2020 and it’s now operated by a board of directors and we have a young man who came here when he was 14, who is now the Vice President of Operations, and he is attending local college to get all of his certifications that he requires to be a social services worker and to be fully operative in managing this foundation and Kate’s Rest. So, my role is kind of just become more like a mentor and senior citizen living in the community and I'm very honoured to be allowed to stay here with my friends. So, what happens and what has happened in the past is people come, will call or they will have someone in social services called for them inquiring if there's a space here and that's kind of rare nowadays, unfortunately were always filled to capacity, but if there is a space for them to come, what I did in the past as I would go and meet the individual in town and I would sit down with them explain all about Kate’s Rest and sort of do a little appraisal of my own to see if the person would fit in and is a good candidate for here because not everybody…It wouldn't be a good fit for everybody at a certain times, there's certain conditions that sort of set out who would be best to fit into the house. Like for example, right now we have quite a group of young people in the main house and they're quite loud and boisterous and I wouldn't want to bring a senior citizen in here because it wouldn't work. There’d be conflict.

 

So anyway, after that assessment and after they've agreed that they want to come out and live here, which is kind of usually the case because they have no other place to go, they’re brought out and we right away assess what their needs are. Often, they come with health needs. We've had two people come and we help them identify a cancers that they were that were undiagnosed and untreated, and we help them transition to palliative care for those conditions. But we've also identified other medical issues, and most do not have doctors. And so, we try to reach that reached the clinics or specialists to get the help they need for those medical conditions or mental health conditions. Some of them even present with legal issues. We've had numerous people that come here who are wanted by the police and we help them work through those circumstances. And after they get those needs being met in there on social services they contribute to the operations of Kate’s Rest through a rent.

 

Avery Moore Kloss 39:47

So, you talk about Kate’s Rest a lot as a community and how you kind of, you know, bring people in and how you know, where you place people on the property. And so, I wonder if you could just give a sense of, you know, and obviously this episode is about belonging and inclusion, and so how do you foster inclusion? Or how do you see inclusion almost foster itself through the program when you have so many people living in one place?

 

Brian Hart 40:16

Well, the most important aspect of that is to is to allow people to come to understand that this is their home. That there's no program here, there's no treatment here, there’s no activities that they must be engaged with. This is their home, and they can be as relaxed as they wish to be or as energetic as they wish to be in whatever course of action they choose to take, and we will support them in that, and they have to know that there is secure in that home. That this isn't just a transitional home or a temporary shelter or something of that nature, that they've actually come home and they're accepted for who they are, whatever their conditions in life might be. There's no judgment if they have addictions, there's no judgment if they have legal issues. We just support them in trying to have any whatever issues they have, that they present to be addressed. And if they recognize that they can make mistakes and fail but still be home like anyone else and not be evicted because they’re not acting appropriately. They do have some, many do have behavioural problems, which we try to help them address. But if they're not going to be evicted, there develops a sense that this is truly something then they can depend upon as their own and this is their home that they've landed and that sense of belonging is very critical that they're not going to… is not just going to be a temporary fix for their condition and they're going to soon find another place to live.

 

Another feature is that they often come with their pets, which when you're on the street, if you have a dog, quite often it’s a dog. Then they’re looked upon as family members an if the place that they're going doesn't allow pets, that means they got to leave their family member on the street and they won't do that. So, we encourage them to bring their pets and make them a part of our community and they're a very important part. I find that the pets that come with, my friends are very therapeutic and very supportive and it really brings a sense of, of humanity to the place. And we are… the other thing that we do is we all have each other’s back. You know, it's not just, you know, clients and service providers, that's not the roles. It's neighbours and friends, helping each other, that's the role that we encourage, and we try to have kind of like an old rural community feel to the place, you know, rather than, you know, some form of facility that's got residents here that are being cared for by paid staff. That's not the model that we choose.

 

Avery Moore Kloss 43:05

Yeah, it's a really beautiful come-as-you-are, kind of feel, right?

 

Brian Hart 43:12

Come as you are and stay as you are. That's the other, that's the big thing and the other point is, I mean, not that we didn’t, we haven't had failures. We have, had failures, but where we've had to say, you know, look at you're going to continue, you're going to try and we've given you plenty of warnings, you cannot sell your drugs here. So, you're going to have to leave. That's there's been times like that, but those are small in number. Most by and large leave because they found a job, or they found a relationship, significant other and you're going to… and those are the kinds of things that we celebrate.

 

Avery Moore Kloss 43:56

So as Brian mentions, Carrie Anne Marshall and her team at Western are hoping to collaborate on working towards a pilot of, piloting that model elsewhere. They don't have funding yet, but they're working on it. And so, as kind of a wrap-up. I just, I wonder, you know, we've heard from Carrie Anne Marshall about how important community is and how important it is to feel like you belong in a social situation or in a, in a community or in the city that you live in. And I wonder from you both, just as we go out, if you could just give us a sense of like, why are case studies like this so important? And it doesn't necessarily have to be, you know, I'm sure there's other solution, alternative solutions to the way we're currently trying to, perhaps bring community or help with social belonging. But just to each of you, and maybe we'll start with Jessica. What's kind of your takeaways from this episode from both Carrie Anne and Brian about what we need to do to move forward?

 

Jessica Braimoh 44:52

Yeah. So, I think one of the things that really stood out from Carrie Anne's insights was that there's something unique about the ways that midsize-level cities are resourced, whether that's through organizations and service providers and funding to actually respond to issues and then the ways that, Brian signals for us that there can be alternative ways to create a sense of belonging, kind of support people on their pathways to exiting homelessness that are… deeply engaging for unhoused people and community members, other housed residents alike, and that kind of move from thinking about altering these misperceptions that we often hear in midsized level cities about who unhoused people are to creating opportunities for them to actively participate and be seen as actively participating in the community. And I mean I think the language that Brian uses there of thinking about the folks on this property as friends, is really signalling to us how important this kind of work really is. This is not just people who are not part of our community, these are our neighbours; these are our friends and what better way to support our friends than through community led initiatives like this one.

 

Avery Moore Kloss 46:29

What about for you Marcus?

 

Marcus Sibley 46:21

I think that's brilliant. I think you don't necessarily call the police on your friends, right? And so this is sort of one of the ways in which you can actively kind of dismantle those systems of oppression and power in ways that ensure that people who are experiencing homelessness or who have experienced homelessness in the past feel this sense of belonging, right, and involving the community writ large in these projects at, you know, putting people who have these kinds of experiences at the forefront. Whether it's community members like Brian who are actively taking on these projects or lived experts themselves who have experienced homelessness, putting these people front and centre and really driving the discussion, driving the policy, relying on their expertise, really can have this kind of transformative impact, I think. In ways in which challenge the status quo, in ways in which go against what we, we sort of, we sort of think of, as, you know, the normal way of addressing these kinds of historical issues.

 

Avery Moore Kloss 47:31

Thank you, both for joining us today and really like helping us contextualize both the research that Carrie Anne's doing and the research that you both are doing and the story that is unfolding at Kate’s Rest as well.

 

Jessica Braimoh 47:43

Thank you.

 

Marcus Sibley 47:44

Thanks so much.

 

Avery Moore Kloss 47:53

We thought today, as a special ending, we would give Brian Hart the very last word. At the end of our interview, I asked Brian if there's anything I didn't ask him that he wanted to mention. He had a really beautiful answer and so I just want to end this episode by letting you all hear Brian's last thoughts.

 

Brian Hart 48:12

Much of the dialogue in society, in the communities these days trying to address homelessness is simply about housing and making sure that people are housed and that they have clothing and that they have food, which is all well and good. Those are all necessary first needs that have to be addressed. But what is really needed are helpful, loving, enduring relationships, unpaid relationships. Not some staff person alone. Although I mean you may have to have staff for different things but, they … need to know that you really do care about them and it's not just a matter of it, you're being paid to care for them. And I remember that was one thing that came out loud and clear when I was dealing with a particularly difficult individual here. And there was time and time again that we were having problems and I…and she really messed up. And I would say to her, ‘I'm here, I'm with you, I'm not going to leave you if you work with me’. I often tell them if you, if you, ‘I will walk with you to the ends of the earth. But I won't carry you.’ You got to do your own work and after a while, she turned to me she said, ‘Brian, you must really care about me, cause you're not getting paid to be here with me and you won't leave me alone. You won't, you won't walk away from me.’ And I said, ‘yes, I do care about you’ and that that's the kind of thing that we need to be able to communicate to people who are on the street that, we do care about them and we're not just going to transition them from the park bench into a house and then abandon them.

 

We need to be a part of their lives to help them meet the challenges of their particular situation in life, whether being economical or health situation that they're dealing with, but we're not going to abandon the and we're not there just because we're paid to be there, 9 to 5, kind of thing that, but we really do care. That's the important thing that I would like to people to understand.

 

Avery Moore Kloss 50:30

Thank you for listening to CRSP Talk, a podcast from the Centre for Research on Security Practices. A big thank you to our guests today, Doctor Carrie Anne Marshall from University of Western Ontario, Ann Brian Heart of Kate’s Rest. A special thank you to our co-host for today's episode, Doctor Jessica Braimoh, is an assistant professor in the social science department, Criminology at York University in Toronto and Doctor Marcus Sibley is an assistant professor in the criminology department at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax. And a thank you to Carrie Sanders and Samantha Henderson from CRSP for their help with this episode. You can find links to any of the research work we mentioned today or more information about Kate’s Rest, the Big Island model in the show notes. CRSP talk is a production from the Centre for Research on Security Practices at Wilfrid Laurier University. For more research stories, listen to past episodes of this podcast. For more information about the work we do at the Centre for Research on Security Practices, please visit our website at CRSP.online.