KENORA – The cold and snowy weather that has landed in Ontario’s Northwest may be good news for those who love outdoor winter recreation, but it presents challenges to the unhoused.
In the Lake of the Woods area, they can get assistance from the Kenora Fellowship Centre and the Canadian Mental Health Association-operated Kenora Emergency Shelter.
The Fellowship Centre serves a warm lunch to 80 to 100-plus individuals seven days a week and offers a safe drop-in place during daytime until 4 p.m. The shelter is a 44-bed facility providing overnight accommodations with intake starting at 8:30 p.m., according to the Kenora CMHA website.
Grassroots coalition Kenora Moving Forward offered a drop-in during hours between the Fellowship Centre and Emergency Shelter hours, but paused operations in early October.
The coalition has applied for funding to resume operating a safe space for the unhoused, member Marlene Elder said Thursday.
“We will be continuing to look for a space,” she said. “We’re hoping to locate a partner that we might share space with and to continue to pay our only staff person."
The homeless population’s options become more limited as winter comes in, Elder said.
“When outside is not an option, people become more desperate,” she said.
“They’re going to try and find someplace warm, and maybe it’s somebody’s shed or, you know, maybe they’re going to be curled up on a heating vent downtown and not wanting to move from anywhere that’s warm.
“So I think it really affects people. Anybody that has health concerns, it’s going to be aggravated by that.”
Kenora Moving Forward’s programming was about more than filling the gap between Fellowship Centre hours and Emergency Shelter hours, Elder added.
The coalition was providing “a place for people to be themselves, a place where they feel comfortable to sit and have coffee and not be stigmatized and treated as less than OK,” she said.
An Environment Canada weather statement on Thursday advised that up to 15 cm of snow could fall on Kenora on Thursday and Friday.
