By Sherry Morley
A vital program at Cornerstone will lose its funding at the end of March, forcing the homeless shelter to eliminate it, says executive director Sue Garvey.
Since 2000, Cornerstone has received about $51,000 each year for the three-year program, enough to pay for eviction prevention worker Jemma Touansi.
Touansi helps women who move out of the shelter and back into the community maintain homes so they don’t have to return to the shelter — which is already full — or the streets, says Garvey.
The eviction prevention program began as a result of a $753-million federal grant the government called the National Homelessness Initiative. Part of it was handed out to 61 cities across the country who allocated the money to community shelters and other organizations working to end homelessness.
Although the government is expected to renew the funding, concern lies in the time gap between now and when the money is actually delivered, which may take a few months, says Maura Volante, co-ordinator of the Alliance to End Homelessness.
“If we knew that something was going to come in the near future, we would try to hold on to it as long as we could,” says Garvey.
Garvey says that if she knew more funds were coming, they would try to keep the program because it helps women stay off the streets.
“She’s prevented about 100 women from being evicted because of their minor problems by being able to follow them and stay with them and support them when they leave the shelter so they don’t go out and are completely on their own,” says Garvey.
Touansi says most of the women moving out of the shelter don’t have families to rely on.
“If they did, they wouldn’t be homeless. Somebody would be helping them,” she says.
When women move out of the shelter and into housing, Touansi says they need support to make it on their own. She says clients have trouble paying their rent because of drug and alcohol addictions and that some are unable to read their eviction notices.
Touansi accompanies them to court, refers clients to hospitals when they are ill and helps women in abusive relationships find a safe place to stay.
Faryiha, who requested only her first name be used, says she stayed at Cornerstone in 2001. Touansi arranged for her to stay in a Toronto homeless shelter last year when her abusive ex-husband was released from jail.
“Without her, my life is really a disaster because she has been helping me for two years. She knows everything about my life,” says Faryiha, who currently lives in Ottawa.
Seventy-seven year-old Marion Yakich says she lived at Cornerstone for over a month because she couldn’t afford the rising cost of rent. She now lives in an apartment building for seniors.
“If it wasn’t for her, I’d be right out in the cold. There are quite a lot of people who need her as bad as I do,” she says.
Touansi says she has 45 to 60 clients. Before the program began, she says many women returned to the shelter because they were evicted.
Now, 90 per cent of women she assists don’t return, she says.
“It wasn’t good. That’s why this program came. It didn’t make any sense because the same thing kept happening over and over.”
But at the end of March, the funding and the program will be cut.
“Those 100 women are still out there and need her support,” says Garvey. “They’re out there and they have the threat of becoming homeless.”
The city will use the remaining federal funding from the grant to provide bridge money for a few high-priority projects.
Cornerstone is not one of them.
Volante says she is studying the impact the gap period will have on all projects at Ottawa shelters that rely on the federal funding, but has no results as of yet.
Shelters were encouraged by the city to find alternative sources of funding in order to carry the programs through until new funding is given.
Diane Morrison, executive director of Union Mission, another Ottawa homeless shelter, says they are in a similar situation as Cornerstone.
“At this time we are certainly looking for other places to find funding, but we haven’t been able to find any,” she says.
The amount of money to be put back into the national project was to have been announced earlier this week in the federal budget.
But Volante says it could take up until September before any new money from the federal government is actually delivered.