I think actually if you had to describe the one thing that has never changed about this
organization, it has been the commitment, it has been the passion, it has been the ability
to understand what our clients require is phenomenal.
I'm not exactly sure how they hire here, but I could never do their job.
Kool-Aid has a mission to ant homelessness by working in partnership with others to find
solutions that will work for the whole community.
You know we've been around a long time and yet we're still growing, we're still looking
at the services that are needed.
We have the courage to change.
We operate a lot of compassion, a lot of understanding, a lot of patience and we're in for the long
haul.
It's a very exciting time to be working in the field and I think for Kool-Aid the next
ten years might show some significant change.
And yet again I have to say you know it's a sad story our growth just shows how the
ills of society have grown.
I sincerely hope that we don't need emergency shelters for homeless people in 40 years from
now.
I sincerely hope that Kool-Aid will still be in business operating supportive housing
programs that will contain people who need homes rather than temporary shelters.
That's my only hope.
You know the whole organization as I mentioned at the first it was Kool-Aid being hip-help
was simply a youth hostel and really the service consisted of somebody's living room
and the telephone.
If you were here checking around and had no place to stay you could basically crash in
this living room.
And I believe the rules were no sex, no drugs, no booze, two nights at a time and if you
can contribute 25 cents.
Well we had the naive sense that everybody on the planet was a human being and they all
deserve some kind of respect.
I don't know maybe we were completely wacky.
Then after a year or two of that they actually moved to a part of the Belfry Theater over
in Fernwood.
They had 20 beds at the time, they had minimal staffing, they provided what meals they could
this is pretty much soup for folks.
Certainly in the 70s when Kool-Aid had a hostel for youth it became very clear very early
on that in fact the youth were coming and the backpackers were coming into Victoria
and they needed some health services.
Basically the programs were the clinic, we had a dental clinic, so we had a medical clinic
and a dental clinic and then we had the hostel.
Basically just wanted to provide a youth organization run by youth for youth that would meet the
needs of the folks that were travelling and wanted to experience the world, they felt
that was very important at the time.
In those days it was a little different, there was a mixture of things going on, we would
let people in during the summer months for all the travellers and whatnot and then in
the winter it would change to people that were basically homeless, I mean we didn't
even call people homeless in those days, they were just folks that were out on the street
with problems you know and we were providing them with some shelter and food.
Everyone knew each other really well, knew what to expect from each other, that kind
of thing because when you work together for those kind of lengths of time and shifts everyone
knew when to step in and when to back off.
In those days I think it was fairly innovative to sort of form relationships with those people
and gain trust with them, we would be in the front desk area that had a kind of a box around
it but it was opened around the top so Mike and I would sit in the office and crumple
up bits of paper and try and toss it over the top of the office and into a garbage can
and a lot of the residents that were there on a regular basis would watch that going
on and sort of start cheering for us and then get involved and then they'd want to try it.
You really have to work hard at maintaining those strong relationships with the people
that you're serving I think is the key.
If we can attract quality people who will change slightly alter Kool-Aid but maintain
the heart I think we're going to be in good stead in another 40 years.
Unfortunately with the need for longer stays becoming more and more apparent, clients shifted
from traveling youth to folks that were here living in town, living in our community but
were unable to find it or keep housing.
Turned out as we went through the 70s that many of those folks had more and more challenging
medical needs, there were folks that just simply did not have doctors, did not have
an ability to get medical attention.
We started at that point talking about the cycle of evictions.
People are coming into the shelter, we're seeing the same folks over and over and over.
They'd come, they'd stay maybe a month or two, find a place to live and then a month
or two later they're back in the shelter.
The difference between an emergency shelter for the homeless and trying to create permanent
housing, your mandates are completely different actually.
In the shelter you're trying to support people, you're trying to feeding them, clothing them
and you want them to move on as quickly as possible to make room for somebody else who
needs that service.
In the housing program you're doing the exact opposite.
You're trying to receive people, yes you want to help them, you want to introduce them to
resources and you want them to believe that they've come to a place that they can call
home.
As you can see from this shelter, it's certainly not a home.
We have to have rules because we have 100 people in the building, so we have to have
people up at a certain time, we have to clean at a certain time.
By nature it's a bit institutional.
We need to be the gateway and the door to mental health services, to addiction services,
to medical services, to employment related services, to housing.
There's a woman that comes to mind named Audrey, 76 years old, showed up on our doorstep.
We weren't sure what was going on with her.
Turned out we were dealing with age, we were dealing with some dementia, we were dealing
with a variety of things.
We needed to get her to see a medical practitioner, we needed to address her mental health issues,
we needed to get her to the point where we could get a public trustee appointed to help
manage her funds.
The short story is it took a year and a half, but she is in a situation now where she can
live out the rest of her days with the adequate supports that are necessary.
If we just stayed the temporary shelter, we were just doing a revolving door and we weren't
able to make lasting change for anybody.
So it was symbolic of getting our first housing project, where we could take off from there
and we did.
We are currently managing eight building sites all over Greater Victoria.
I'll start with Swift House, which is our first housing project over the street link,
the emergency shelter.
We have 26 units there.
We had done the Swift, we then shown with Pandora Project, so it wasn't a one off.
We have the Pandora Project and we have 32 units of housing at that site.
We also have eight transitional youth units on the ground floor.
We have the Downtown Community Activity Center, also contained within that building.
Then with Micodora, that was a totally different kind of process where we were doing it without
government funding to a large degree.
We have 45 units of supportive housing in that building, so with the help of BC Housing,
we received funding to turn the Micodora building into the same model as Swift House
and Pandora.
We were now getting a model, sort of getting a process going.
So after that, we even had things like Van City, Coast Capital, we had the real estate
foundation of British Columbia now, aware of how we can do things.
So every time we build a building now, and we say we make promises and we're going to
do this and we're going to do that, they're confident that that's actually what we're
going to do.
There's a huge need out there for the type of housing that we're trying to build.
For the first time in my experience with the shelters anyways and with Kool-Aid, there's
getting to be a little bit of hope, there's getting to be a renewed sense that it actually
might be possible to reduce homelessness, it might actually be possible to make some
dent in this.
Some of the cities and the states that have been three years and four years now into ten
year plans are actually seeing reductions in their street populations.
I know that Montreal is reducing their shelter beds and converting them into housing units,
and so there's a spark of hope, there's possibilities are coming up.
Mind you, I believe Montreal built something like 10,000 housing units, so we do have some
catching up to do.
We've designed and built eight buildings, most of which are housing, but we've got our
activity center and other buildings, so Hillside Terrace and Fairway Woods are our newest buildings,
and each of those buildings we've learned a little bit more.
The model that I was introduced to was a hierarchical model, John's here in the office, he's yet
a problem, come to John, John will help you deal with the problem or he'll fix it.
It's a model that I've since learned, does not work, and that's when I noticed I got
up one morning and had a bit of an epiphany and realized, wait a minute, hold it here,
I've got 26 helpers here, it isn't just me, it's us, it's the people who are involved
in this community, whether you're a tenant, whether you're a staff, and I remember going
to work that day with a whole new idea of what this program was about.
Kool-aid couldn't be in a position it is today if you hadn't had that whole process
of success, of being an organization that people, you're solid, you're reliable, and
you know if you go to Kool-aid to get something done, it'll get done.
Well essentially next steps is to try and better serve the needs of the folks that we
see at the shelters that will only use us once or intermittently, so next steps is
to try it, putting more resources into people sooner when they reach the shelter to try
and get them out into permanent housing.
We're on the second floor here of the next steps shelter, we have a three bedroom, another
three bedroom, and there's a two bedroom and a two bedroom, so it works out to ten beds
on this floor.
There's one bathroom up here and this is the mail bathroom, the bookshelf here, this was
set up by Project Literacy.
One of the aims we had of this kind of environment too was to input lots of community programming
into the house while people are here as well as help them facilitate their own care plans
and goals, so we have Project Literacy, street nurses, supports like that coming in on a regular
basis.
I think what makes next steps unique in shelters is the fact that we are a small shelter and
with really good staff to client ratio and what that allows us to do is spend a lot more
one on one time with clients and search out a lot more of the unique supports that they
require and you're not going to get that time in a larger ratio of staff to client that
you have in larger shelters.
Also what works here is that we're very kind of open-ended on the length of the stain,
we have a lot more time to set those supports in place.
Clients have to be in a pretty stable frame of mind to come here, they can't be using
any substances while they're here.
They need to have some basic supports in place and to have started working on a plan to show
that they're ready to move on to the next step.
I think just bringing the fact that our homeless are our homeless population and we have not
only an obligation to do something about it, it's not only the right thing to do something
about it and we would not only want it to be done if it was us in those shoes but economically
it just makes more sense and that part has probably changed in the last eight years or
so is the sense that people are realizing that it's actually cheaper to do the right
thing than it is to continue to do what we've been doing.
We are really not interested in designing more shelters and building larger shelters,
ironically we are doing that because we have too many people in this existing building
and we want to do better with the people and we want to reduce the time that people stay
in shelters but that means we have to have those other resources available.
You have to have housing to move to out of the shelters so the solution to homelessness
is homes, not shelters, but every community is always going to have a shelter because
things happen.
At best shelters would be a very short term stay where you can access the resources to
get your life stabilized quickly.
Well I was on the streets for the last couple weeks and that's when I really fell down hard
and they got me back in here so I don't have to be on the street anymore so they're encouraging
me to get help that I need so I went and done all the paperwork done today and they're
helping me out, giving me a place to stay even though I'm on my two weeks out now they
let me back in here so I'm not on the street so they're helping a lot.
I've been on my own since I was about 12 years old, my parents were deceased and I came out
from Newfoundland to the east coast, the west coast here and I've been living in Vancouver
for 25 years since I was 16 and I was on the streets in Vancouver and I moved to Victoria
about seven years ago.
The past six months I've been at two hostels and I've been over here at Street Link and
it's good, it's a good experience for me, it's a humbling experience.
Hey this is sanctuary, it's good, you're fit, you clean yourself up.
One day a staff might be dealing, one hour they might be dealing with people that have
been through mental institutions and stuff, next thing they might be dealing with a guy
from the street and so I mean I'm not exactly sure how they hire here but I could never
do their job, I do actually praise them for being strong enough to try to do the job.
The stats today are still roughly true then that about a third of the folks that we see
through the shelter system will use us once and then they'll move on and we're likely
to never see them again, it was simply a blip in their lives, it was a short period of time
when they needed to stay with us.
There's another third of the folks that we see that we might see two or three times,
we might see for a while and then they'll go away for a few months and that might not
work out and we'll see again and we might see them a couple of times over the course
of a year and a half.
Then there's a smaller percentage of folks and there are folks that, well we consider
them our gold club members, there's folks that we will see for probably a huge chunk
of time.
If we do our job well and if they work with us and we're lucky we'll get them into a supported
permanent housing situation that will work well for them.
I ended up here through my own fault, I got evicted from low income housing and it came
at just the worst time possible.
I just needed to decompress and being in this atmosphere all the time, you just go circle
a little crazy and I'm bipolar too so and I don't take any medication for it.
So I've been going through kind of a manic stage the last few days, like a chicken with
his head kind of running around like crazy but I'm really looking forward to re-mingling
into this house and getting away from here.
According to our last homelessness count we counted about 1,250 people, absolutely homeless
so 1,500 units would pretty much solve homelessness in our community.
1,500 units with adequate supports.
That's not a big deal, that should be readily achievable.
That should be a percentage of the next 15 buildings that are built perhaps.
There's a variety of ways that we can do this quite quickly.
It's more the will and it's more the awareness, it's more people seeing that their tax dollars
can be better spent instead of just maintaining homelessness, they can be better spent on actually
solving homelessness.
I stayed in the shelter at Truthlink for about three months, if there wasn't programs around
like Kool-Aid and Victoria I never would have made in this city.
Also Reese I've used for support, they got all kinds of resources here, there's no end
to it and if it weren't for Kool-Aid's resources then I wouldn't have made it here.
Today I've got my own place, they've assisted with that, to no end they've helped me out.
That's my involvement with Kool-Aid.
I've even signed up to give a little bit back, I'm going to sign up for a mentoring project
here to help mentor, volunteer so that will tell you a little bit about my appreciation
towards their programs and what they're doing.
Reese stands for resources, employment, education and support and the services have been around
since 1998 for 10 years now and it's essentially a resource for people facing challenges with
their mental health and addictions.
We provide a range of services for people, outreach and case management including an
employment service.
And we're non-profit, we take none of the money, the employers pay the workers directly,
whatever the wage is negotiated with the employer that completely goes to the worker, we don't
take any fees out.
So that's a substantial difference, there's some for profit businesses in town that also
do employment referrals but you know they're charging the employer a premium and paying
the worker a real minimal wage.
We're a very unique service in BC.
Outreach, the program is done through here as well so we have a team of two outreach
workers who really provide regular outreach and case management support to people so we're
dealing with complex issues.
We essentially either provide basic crisis support when they're in a crisis and for
a number of them they sort of require assistance to coordinate all the services in their lives
and to move forward so our outreach workers are available to them to help coordinate that.
Generally the people do come into the office and they sort of ask them what they want and
oh you want an outreach worker so what happens is they call downstairs through our office
and say we've got this person here that needs some help with something if you have any time
and generally we can get to see them on the same day.
The program has helped a lot probably a lot more than actual form therapy.
This is more human just sitting talking to someone, someone you trust, someone that you
know is there to help you.
Well this is 713 Johnson Street.
It was the building that we purchased with our partners AIDS Van Kurellen back in late
2005 and the vision for this building is that it's going to become the Access Health Center
and it's going to bring Kool-Aid's Community Health Clinic and Dental Clinic over here
and they're going to occupy the first and second floors of this building.
AIDS Van Kurellen is going to bring its local programs and services into the top floor which
is this floor right here that we're standing in now.
Kool-Aid is a service provider and now we're entering into a period where we have to ask
folks out in the community for their financial assistance in making this building a reality.
Our Community Health Services are so vital because health supports for people that are
vulnerable and at risk are hugely important to making sure that they can maintain their
housing once they get it.
And I think we're going to see more and more of this in this community as non-profits have
to figure out how they're going to best use their resources.
So for me first of all it represents a partnership between two organizations.
Second it also gives us something that we've been looking for for a number of years and
that's to be able to move into a center which allows us to provide a greater range of services,
more services and more often.
So the current health center down on Stores Street is busting out the seams.
This is the solution to that.
You can see that we're absolutely bursting at the seams and we need to have more space
so we don't have to juggle for examining room space.
If you can put as many services, health services as possible under one roof then you're going
to be able to see people as a whole.
I think that our clients deserve to have the very best.
We need to have privacy and clients who feel respected and listened to.
We have folks that are on the street that we have not housed yet.
The street is extremely hard on your body.
We're trying to keep those people as healthy as possible and alive until we can get them
into actual housing and so the health services are absolutely critical.
Since the beginning of Kool-Aid you've talked about the whole 40th anniversary.
Through the years very important, pivotal, bright people have played a role every step
of the way.
And it's no one person who can claim I, I, I, I, it was us, us, us.
So thank you everyone for coming to celebrate with us.
It is our 40th anniversary and we're really happy to be sharing it with a larger community.
I never would have believed 40 years down the road having the privilege of working for
Kool-Aid.
It's been an amazing journey.
Hello everybody.
We're a little band from Victoria, BC.
We'd like to thank everybody from the Kool-Aid Society for having us here today and we are
called Zola Ba.
And the song is called Please Victoria.
This 40 year celebration will help people understand that there's, you know, a large group of people
in our community that are kind of dedicated to trying to resolve these problems.
When I'm walking down Charleston Street, got a hold on a Bible.
I know how I survive is I get up in the morning and I come to work and I just do the best
job I possibly can.
It's the only message I hope my colleagues understand and you lose your heart, you've
lost it all.
So I think we've maintained that heart and we're not going to stop until we end homelessness.
I'm laying down government, I pass a girl I can see through, I'm laying down on government
babe.
This guy's a hole I can see through, the man with the tan he's feeling low, he drives
a Porsche and he owns the show, he likes to place it all in a row, overpopulate at his
control.
Take me, cleanse me, hold me please Victoria, save me in eternity and hold me please Victoria.
Like this, here we go.
