Mustard Seed CEO James Gardiner says services are taking hit after the organization was forced to shut down within the Allowance Avenue Community Impact Centre.--News Photo Anna Smith
asmith@medicinehatnews.com
With the Mustard Seed’s Community Impact Centre on Allowance Avenue set to shut down later this month, the organization says it is committed to finding other ways to continue to offer vital services.
Following the decision made in mid-January to not permit a change-of-use application for adding temporary shelter beds, the location no longer had a valid permit, and as such, must cease all operations by Feb 28. CEO James Gardiner said that while the overnight shelter is not affected by this decision, there will be changes to the services they can provide.
“Because the Allowance Avenue location operates as the daytime shelter Monday to Friday, folks who are staying at the Eighth Street shelter won’t have access to come here during the day any longer,” said Gardiner.
To help with this, and to offer residents experiencing homelessness a warm and secure place to be, the Eighth Street location will become a 24-hour shelter, accessible seven days a week.
Many of the Mustard Seed’s other services that operated out of the Community Impact Centre however, will be cancelled while the Mustard Seed seeks alternative delivery methods and locations to provide them from.
“The one that is maybe most thought of is the meals for the community and the shelter folks. And so we feed up to 130 people a day here,” said Gardiner. “That is being shut down, and so because we have no other location, there isn’t any intention for those services to be offered anywhere else in the foreseeable future.”
Mail services that 275 people rely on for government assistance, legal documents and employment correspondence will be impacted, says the Mustard Seed, as will health and wellness programs which have provided care to approximately 150 individuals each month.
Additionally, the distribution of essential clothing and hygiene items to nearly 90 people per month will no longer take place at this location.
“We are currently trying to find ways that we can continue to serve that … those clothing items and hygiene items, are all donated items. So it’s a way for the community to come together, and we’re looking for a location for that,” said Gardiner.
The Mustard Seed has applied for a “ghost kitchen” permit, says Gardiner, to allow for staff and volunteers to prepare meals at another location and deliver them to spaces where they would be needed, such as the Eighth Street shelter. And the search for a suitable location to be able to provide services in a centralized manner is ongoing, says Gardiner.
“Our mandate is to help the most vulnerable members of our community who are experiencing homelessness and poverty. And so our mandate is unchanged, and there are still people that need the crucial services that we provide,” said Gardiner. “We need to come up with an innovative way to continue to serve them.”
The issue of what needs to be done for people who are homeless, drug addicts, or suffering for mental illness on our streets rather than in a secure facility, keeping them and the public safe, is not up for debate. This we can agree on. The elephant in the parlour not addressed in your reporting or that offered by other news outlets in the city is that of the consequences of a facility of this nature being located in a quiet residential neighbourhood in which there are schools, children at play, and hard-working people who abide by laws and who, needless to say, pay the taxes, funding government here, and thus who have every right to expect our concerns to be heard with as much attention as those of an organization that appears not to give much of a damn about the effect their services and those who use them are having on said neighbourhood. I won’t go into the multitude of questions many of us have here in the Flats regarding what violations The Mustard Seed seems to have incurred to bring on this decision by the city. It would certainly be interesting to see what kinds of permits they have for the services they’ve been offering. The most important thing to me, and to many of us who live here is that the services not be interrupted since it is obvious there are some successes, but that the location for the services not be plonked down in the middle of a residential neighbourhood. Not sure why this is so difficult to understand.
The issue of what needs to be done for people who are homeless, drug addicts, or suffering for mental illness on our streets rather than in a secure facility, keeping them and the public safe, is not up for debate. This we can agree on. The elephant in the parlour not addressed in your reporting or that offered by other news outlets in the city is that of the consequences of a facility of this nature being located in a quiet residential neighbourhood in which there are schools, children at play, and hard-working people who abide by laws and who, needless to say, pay the taxes, funding government here, and thus who have every right to expect our concerns to be heard with as much attention as those of an organization that appears not to give much of a damn about the effect their services and those who use them are having on said neighbourhood. I won’t go into the multitude of questions many of us have here in the Flats regarding what violations The Mustard Seed seems to have incurred to bring on this decision by the city. It would certainly be interesting to see what kinds of permits they have for the services they’ve been offering. The most important thing to me, and to many of us who live here is that the services not be interrupted since it is obvious there are some successes, but that the location for the services not be plonked down in the middle of a residential neighbourhood. Not sure why this is so difficult to understand.