Mayors’ Dinner Remarks by Nikki Britton
Published June 2023
Are you able to meet your basic needs like showering, clean clothes, using a restroom, accessing food and clean water? Have you been hospitalized or used a crisis service? Have you stayed in a holding cell, jail or prison? Have you been attacked or beaten up? Do you have planned activities, other than just surviving, that make you feel happy and fulfilled?
These are questions that might not cross your mind on a day-to-day basis but are front and center for many people in our community, folks our teams walk with each and every day. We are here tonight to celebrate the impactful and heartfelt work being done in our community and to acknowledge that we have a long way to go.
When we encounter someone on the street who is living differently, or acting a bit strangely, there is no reason that the natural instinct is to feel comfortable or that our understanding is deep enough to be compassionate, even if we want to be, so people walk around and look away.
As the cost of living increases, we see more tents and encampments pop up in our community and growing conversation in the media, making it more difficult to look away. It’s a forced acknowledgement of the realities in our neighbourhoods.
Many of our neighbours are in a position of constrained choice, forced to commit quality of life crimes like trespassing for a place to sleep or stealing for food to eat.
People experience homelessness for many different reasons: family breakdown, missed payments, lost jobs, cycles of abuse, adverse childhood experiences and substance use, to name a few. People without housing in our community have been professional athletes, university professors and students, scuba divers, musicians and artists – poverty, mental illness, unforeseen circumstances and addiction do not discriminate.
I would like to take some time this evening to honor people we have been lucky to know, reflect on lives lost too soon to overdose, violence and system failure and to dream and hold hope for ways we can do better.
What we do is heart centered work, it is relationship and learning.It is authentic connection and more than a job – it’s a purpose. Frontline workers take the time to get to know people and hear their stories, try to ease suffering and find solutions and most importantly hold a steady presence without looking away. Our teams offer outreach medicine, bring clinical services to the street, offer shelter, provide meals and cherish unique and special relationships. The most powerful message we can offer is mutual respect, not pity.
The work looks like:
- Knocking on the door to a garden shed to accompany someone to a psychiatry appointment.
- Treating head lice at a community centre.
- Responding to an overdose in a parking garage.
- Bandaging wounds out of the trunk of a car.
We meet people where they are at: on the streets, in encampments, motels, alleyways, hospitals, jail cells and libraries. We hope to make people feel seen, heard and valued for who they are and as they are. We offer unconditional positive regard and radical acceptance, showing up for people day-in and day-out, in moments of sorrow and beauty. We bring our hearts to work, and they often get broken. Our teams are in it for the long haul.
We look up, look people in the eye and smile when we see them, even if we aren’t sure of how the interaction will go. Every interaction is powerful and we never know when it might be the last time we see someone. People live moment to moment and minute by minute. We experience moments in time, and they matter. Moments like:
Seeing Jamie walking up the lane way towards St. John’s Kitchen in a pair of shoes we have given him and seeing him leave with nothing on his feet due to lack of insight and untreated mental illness;
Talking to Mary, a young mother, about safer alternatives to the toxic drug supply and opportunities to reconnect with her children on a Friday, and learning she has died of an overdose by Monday morning;
- Seeing Jim with black, frost bitten feet and no care due to systemic gaps, people losing lives and limbs to the elements in a developed country;
- Talking with Chris, who is larger than life and my own age, listening to him laugh, sing and play guitar only to pause and say “Nikki, will you please play this song at my funeral” and then playing it in his memory six months later.
- It’s also the small moments like:
- Knowing our nurses in the clinic keep 50 cents in their back pocket and a chocolate on hand for Mike, in case of emergency;
- Surprising Speedy with a double cheese burger and a coffee with seven sugar and two creams, because we know it’s his favourite.
And moments of celebration:
- Hearing that Jamie has been stably housed for two years, he is finishing high school, health is his favorite class and he plans to work at the waterpark again this summer.
These stories touch our hearts, we celebrate success when it comes, and believe that hope is possible.
I am continuously inspired by the courage, fierce resilience and tenacity of the people we walk with and the teams that stand beside them. The frontline workers in our community stand firmly at the intersection of the overdose crisis, housing crisis and healthcare crisis. We stand with people at the margins of society and bear witness to crushing poverty, addiction and illness – it is clear that people need care and that people need homes.
Our teams show up in blizzards and on the hottest summer days, we show up in snow suits, sunscreen and full on Covid PPE (masks, shields, gloves and gowns). We work hard to provide hot meals, offer a listening ear, bandage wounds and treat illness but without affordable and appropriate housing people are left behind and continue to fall through the growing cracks.
The experience of homelessness in and of itself, is an experience of trauma. Homelessness is a crisis across the country and in our community – people are dying in our front-yard. When we look away, we separate ourselves from our neighbors and from humanity.
It comes down to this:
Housing is health care,
Housing is dignity,
Housing is a human right.
The last few years have been particularly difficult. This work is commitment and solidarity. Responding to homelessness is a collective effort and takes a community, it takes each of us and it takes all of us – we can’t do this work alone. Frontline workers in this community hold a brave space to lean on and learn from each other, to love each other and to look out for one another while standing with people who are often forgotten.
Nikki Britton is a lead member of the Specialized Outreach Services (SOS) Team responding to the homelessness, drug overdose and mental healthcrises in our community
