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Helping people who have almost nothing but themselves, day after day, on shoestring budgets you have to beg for, takes a supply of spiritual, emotional and psychological strength that a mission from God surely helps sustain. The more so if, like the Salvation Army, they get talked about like villains for seeking to help poor people in the way they believe is best.
My colleague Kelly Egan points out that paying a private organization like the Salvation Army public money to provide public services means that we, the public, can’t really control what they do, where or when. He’s right and it goes way beyond the Salvation Army.
We have two other major organizations providing emergency shelter for adults with nowhere to sleep: The Shepherds of Good Hope and the Union Mission. All three are not just private, but driven by explicitly religious motives. Churches host a lot of Ottawa’s soup kitchens and drop-in centres, too.
We don’t have a single citywide perspective on emergency shelters, a standard policy on how shelter should be provided, a list of which neighbourhoods need them based on data on where people are sleeping outside or are precariously housed. The Salvation Army Booth Centre’s director Marc Provost talks about the regular meetings he has with his counterparts at the Mission and the Shepherds, making sure their three separate organizations, with their different philosophies and clienteles, cover as many people as they can.
They do the job. We don’t.
Marc Provost is executive director of the Salvation Army Booth Centre.
Practically all social services used to be the domain of the churches. The Grey Nuns and Élisabeth Bruyère ran our first general hospital, and schools, and orphanages; the Protestants opened another on Rideau Street. The original Civic Hospital on Carling Avenue was an unusual municipal project — hence its name — championed by Mayor Harold Fisher nearly 50 years later (his critics thought it was a bad idea, particularly since the site was in the sticks).
Bruyère Continuing Care, descended from the nuns’ Sisters of Charity health service, still runs the Bruyère and St. Vincent hospitals. It even handled ambulance dispatching in Eastern Ontario till the early 2000s. The Oblates of Mary Immaculate, a Catholic congregation, started Bytown College, which grew into the University of Ottawa. Its papal charter gave its leader the title “rector,” which the school changed to “president” only 13 years ago.
Painting of Mother Elisabeth Bruyère, founder of Soeurs de la Charité d’Ottawa.
The Civic and the General are public institutions now, and so is the University of Ottawa. The Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario and Carleton University were born into a more secular world.
The city government is the single biggest social-housing landlord in Ottawa, but it’s backed up by numerous non-profits that run subsidized apartment buildings, with greater and lesser supports for tenants who need it, greater and lesser amounts of public funding.
Our public hospitals are surrounded by constellations of clinics and community health centres. Those have doctors and nurses who typically focus on marginalized patients; they also run counselling programs, food banks, play groups, language classes — whatever their neighbourhoods need that they think they can do and find the money for.
Every city has different mixes of these operations, depending on its size, makeup, and quirks of history.
These groups’ independence lets them experiment and push limits, for better and for worse. The Centretown Citizens Ottawa Corp.’s Beaver Barracks housing project is a showpiece, taking chances on green building technologies the city probably couldn’t. The Sandy Hill Community Health Centre stubbornly pushed for a supervised drug-injection site when nobody in power here wanted one; numerous other centres are following its lead.
The Beaver Barracks at 464 Metcalfe Street. in Ottawa, Ont. Thursday, February 27, 2013.
Our politicians have spent years alternately birthing and smothering plans for a new bridge across the Ottawa River — you think they’re going to agree on whose ward, whose riding, should host a place that serves (gasp) vagrants? If we relied on any level of government to build homeless shelters, we’d have none.
We farm the work out. In exchange, we don’t ask the people who do it too many questions. That’s why, when the Salvation Army shows up with a plan for a new shelter campus, it’s a maddeningly narrow land-use question to be studied under the terms of Ontario’s Planning Act.
Obviously this isn’t satisfactory to many of us. Something like 150 out of 170 people who spoke to city council’s planning committee about the shelter proposal last week didn’t like it. But it’s a consequence of the bargain we’ve had for decades.
We changed the rules for hospitals and higher education. We could put in more money and take more responsibility, and in exchange get more control. But if we want different outcomes, we need a different bargain.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
My colleague Kelly Egan points out that paying a private organization like the Salvation Army public money to provide public services means that we, the public, can’t really control what they do, where or when. He’s right and it goes way beyond the Salvation Army.
We have two other major organizations providing emergency shelter for adults with nowhere to sleep: The Shepherds of Good Hope and the Union Mission. All three are not just private, but driven by explicitly religious motives. Churches host a lot of Ottawa’s soup kitchens and drop-in centres, too.
We don’t have a single citywide perspective on emergency shelters, a standard policy on how shelter should be provided, a list of which neighbourhoods need them based on data on where people are sleeping outside or are precariously housed. The Salvation Army Booth Centre’s director Marc Provost talks about the regular meetings he has with his counterparts at the Mission and the Shepherds, making sure their three separate organizations, with their different philosophies and clienteles, cover as many people as they can.
They do the job. We don’t.
Marc Provost is executive director of the Salvation Army Booth Centre.
Practically all social services used to be the domain of the churches. The Grey Nuns and Élisabeth Bruyère ran our first general hospital, and schools, and orphanages; the Protestants opened another on Rideau Street. The original Civic Hospital on Carling Avenue was an unusual municipal project — hence its name — championed by Mayor Harold Fisher nearly 50 years later (his critics thought it was a bad idea, particularly since the site was in the sticks).
Bruyère Continuing Care, descended from the nuns’ Sisters of Charity health service, still runs the Bruyère and St. Vincent hospitals. It even handled ambulance dispatching in Eastern Ontario till the early 2000s. The Oblates of Mary Immaculate, a Catholic congregation, started Bytown College, which grew into the University of Ottawa. Its papal charter gave its leader the title “rector,” which the school changed to “president” only 13 years ago.
Painting of Mother Elisabeth Bruyère, founder of Soeurs de la Charité d’Ottawa.
The Civic and the General are public institutions now, and so is the University of Ottawa. The Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario and Carleton University were born into a more secular world.
The city government is the single biggest social-housing landlord in Ottawa, but it’s backed up by numerous non-profits that run subsidized apartment buildings, with greater and lesser supports for tenants who need it, greater and lesser amounts of public funding.
Our public hospitals are surrounded by constellations of clinics and community health centres. Those have doctors and nurses who typically focus on marginalized patients; they also run counselling programs, food banks, play groups, language classes — whatever their neighbourhoods need that they think they can do and find the money for.
Every city has different mixes of these operations, depending on its size, makeup, and quirks of history.
These groups’ independence lets them experiment and push limits, for better and for worse. The Centretown Citizens Ottawa Corp.’s Beaver Barracks housing project is a showpiece, taking chances on green building technologies the city probably couldn’t. The Sandy Hill Community Health Centre stubbornly pushed for a supervised drug-injection site when nobody in power here wanted one; numerous other centres are following its lead.
The Beaver Barracks at 464 Metcalfe Street. in Ottawa, Ont. Thursday, February 27, 2013.
Our politicians have spent years alternately birthing and smothering plans for a new bridge across the Ottawa River — you think they’re going to agree on whose ward, whose riding, should host a place that serves (gasp) vagrants? If we relied on any level of government to build homeless shelters, we’d have none.
We farm the work out. In exchange, we don’t ask the people who do it too many questions. That’s why, when the Salvation Army shows up with a plan for a new shelter campus, it’s a maddeningly narrow land-use question to be studied under the terms of Ontario’s Planning Act.
Obviously this isn’t satisfactory to many of us. Something like 150 out of 170 people who spoke to city council’s planning committee about the shelter proposal last week didn’t like it. But it’s a consequence of the bargain we’ve had for decades.
We changed the rules for hospitals and higher education. We could put in more money and take more responsibility, and in exchange get more control. But if we want different outcomes, we need a different bargain.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
