Elected members of the city's Resilient and Inclusive Task Force recently met with members of a local group advocating for the city's homeless population and plan to share feedback at an upcoming meeting.--NEWS FILE PHOTO
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Elected officials on the Resilient and Inclusive Task Force – established to reduce the impacts of homelessness, mental health, addiction and poverty – met last week with members of the homeless community to talk about issues they face.
Coun. Chris Hellman announced at Monday’s council meeting that he, alongside Mayor Linnsie Clark and Coun. Stuart Young, met with a local group advocating for the homeless community called Kookums, and spoke about how future collaborations could help solve some of the problems facing the city’s vulnerable population.
“We had a really good meeting for about an hour and 45 minutes and we plan to meet again in the coming weeks,” Hellman said. “We got some wonderful feedback from them that we will take with us to the Resilient and Inclusive Task Force as well.”
Young, who served on the task force as a citizen and now as an elected official, told reporters he feels focus should be on strategic ways to solve issues one at a time rather than trying to solve all problems all at once.
“We can’t solve everything, so we have to figure out what are the really important pieces for us to get right,” said Young, who explained there are many moving parts at work when addressing homelessness in Medicine Hat, citing recent provincial funding cuts that will force SafeLink to close its drop-in centre.
Young says he wants to see the group focus on solving the problem of finding a location to build the Mustard Seed’s permanent shelter and support centre.
“I really think it’s incumbent on the task force now to just get very specific and say, ‘What are those two or three things that we’re going to accomplish?'”
The task force includes 25 members and stakeholder representatives, including elected officials, police and officials from the Mustard Seed, Miywasin Friendship Centre, AHS, SafeLink Alberta, Medicine Hat Community Housing Society and more.
It met for the first time last March with a goal to improve quality of life for Medicine Hat residents, and members have since been holding meetings every three weeks.
Task force meetings are expected to conclude in March, but Young told reporters he believes they will need more time than that to solve current issues.
Elements of the meeting between the task force and members of the Kookums advocacy group will be brought forward for further discussion at the next task force meeting.
