This morning, Tri-City churches shut their doors on the final night of the cold/wet weather mat program to shelter the homeless for the winter.
But after months of uncertainty about the future of the program, its director says he has now secured funding to run the 30-person shelter for one more year.
Rob Thiessen is the director of the Hope for Freedom Society, which has operated the mat program in five Tri-City churches since 2007. He told The Tri-City News last October that by March 31, 2011, when the shelter mats would be put away for the season, the program would have exhausted all of its federal funding and new funding to tackle the area's homeless problem would have to be found quickly.
But Thiessen told The News this week that the federal government has offered to restore funding for the Tri-City shelter mat program for another year.
"We haven't got the final contract signed but Service Canada has extended the mat program for one more year," he said. "We were hoping for something a little more permanent but we're going to have to wait for that."
More permanent, Thiessen said, doesn't necessarily mean longer term funding for the mat program but, rather, a solution such as a semi-permanent shelter to house the homeless until the permanent shelter planned 3030 Gordon Ave. in Coquitlam is built.
The current five-month mat program rotates monthly between five Tri-City churches - St. Andrews United Church in Port Moody, Eagle Ridge Bible Fellowship, Calvary Baptist Church and the Alliance Church in Coquitlam and Northside Foursquare Church in Port Coquitlam - and is staffed by outreach workers with the Hope for Freedom Society as well as church volunteers.
The approximately $80,000-a-year church mat program, which now picks up and shelters on average fewer than 10 people per night, is "pretty close to running its course," Thiessen said.
Now is the time to craft a more stable and efficient housing solution, he said.
"There's going to be some years before [the 3030 Gordon Ave. shelter] gets built so we're looking at some other alternatives."
Among those, he said, was the idea of a shipping container village which was unable to find approval in the Tri-Cities last year.
"We're still poking around at some other alternatives of which I can't be terribly specific about right now," he said.
Regardless of what form those alternatives might take, they will target a much smaller homeless community than the current 30-person shelter mats.
And that's good news, said Thiessen.
"The first year we started, the shelter was fairly well attended," Thiessen said. "There was more homeless then. We were counting 215 homeless in the region then and the last time we counted last September we counted 72. So that's a tremendous dip in the homeless population."
Thiessen attributed the dip to the success of the church mat program and Hope for Freedom outreach workers, saying that, by his estimates and those of the Tri-Cities Homelessness Task Group, someone who uses the mat program is three times more likely to find permanent housing than a homeless person who doesn't.
