KENORA — Homelessness hasn’t disappeared in the district, but it hasn’t gotten worse either. That, in a nutshell, is the assessment of the Kenora District Services Board’s executive director.
“The challenge isn’t getting worse. It’s intensifying in some ways, but it’s not getting worse in terms of numbers,” Henry Wall said Friday.
Partner agencies have played a big role in the city of Kenora as well as in Red Lake, Sioux Lookout and other communities in the KDSB’s region, he said.
“In our communities we’ve been quite aggressive in terms of the partnerships and investing in initiatives that are intended to address homelessness,“ he said.
Nearly 100 new supportive and transitional housing units have been added across the district in the last eight years, he said.
“We’ve been very intentional about making sure that the housing infrastructure is there as well, to support people along their journey of healing,” said Wall, who has been helming the KDSB since 2014.
“And so I think the numbers would be a lot higher than what we’re seeing now if it hadn’t been for the initiatives that were started eight or nine years ago.”
The district’s homelessness statistics “are not increasing like they have in other communities across the North,” he said.
“But as we know, things can change all the time, and something that we are seeing that is really concerning to us is that individuals are literally being dropped off outside the shelters in Kenora and Sioux Lookout who are being released from the justice system out of Thunder Bay and they are being shipped over to the shelter system in Kenora and Sioux.”
Social services boards keep “by-names lists” of individuals who are experiencing homelessness. The lists for Kenora, Red Lake and Sioux Lookout have a combined total of just under 200 individuals, Wall said.
But the lists undercount the homeless because they don’t include people who, for whatever reason, don’t trust the system enough to provide their names.
Dryden is the one major centre in the district that doesn’t have a full-time emergency shelter for the unhoused, but Wall said that “doesn’t mean that there aren’t supports in Dryden.”
The KDSB has been fortunate to get outstanding support from the Dryden Friendship Centre, provincial police and other parts of the community, he said.
And the board aims to establish an overnight support shelter in Dryden “in the coming months,” he said, before adding that “I’m not able to really speak to that just yet because there are still some details we need to finalize.”
