300 youth call city streets ‘home’

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/10/2016 (3315 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If your commute takes you to Maryland Street, you’ve probably seen Mappy at the corner of Broadway, near the Tim Hortons.

She’s usually waving, typically wears a kid’s winter hat with long flaps, woolen mitts, woolen sweater and a windbreaker.

She has her regulars: “My friends,” she says. They hand her loonies and toonies through car windows at rush hour.

The cardboard sign she holds up says, “Anything helps.” She calls herself Mappy by way of a gentle jest: “ Mappy. It’s like happy, and I’m always smiling,” she said Tuesday.

A job would get the 29-year-old off the streets. She’s the mother of two, a girl and boy aged seven and five whom she sees once a week on supervised visits. They live with her family. She doesn’t.

This winter will be her second without a home. “Winter sucks,” she said.

Up the street under a steel grey sky and with the temperature falling, Kaarina, 26, is also homeless.

Somebody stole her backpack and sleeping bag Monday.

“Honestly? We were just passing through (from Calgary), and we ended up getting stuck here. My boyfriend’s mother lives in Ontario, and there’s a program (there) to help homeless youth get established. It’ll help us to get our s–t together,” Kaarina said.

At any given time, there are around 300 homeless youth, from teenagers up to age 29, who live on Winnipeg streets.

A new report to be released today says 84 per cent of homeless youth are indigenous.

Most end up homeless around age 18 since many are former or current wards of the child-welfare system.

Too often, addictions and alcohol drive them to the streets — or keep them there.

Here and Now Winnipeg: The Winnipeg Plan to End Youth Homelessness is the result of a comprehensive collaboration led by the Social Planning Council of Winnipeg and the Resource Assistance for Youth Inc.

It takes research that began in 2014 and the concerted effort of around 70 community and social agencies, along with funding by the province and the Winnipeg Foundation, to map out the street lives of the city’s Mappys and Kaarinas.

It paints perhaps the most complex portrait of youth homelessness the city’s ever seen.

Much of that data came from kids on the streets. Some 100 of them took surveys, and many former street kids advised the report’s authors.

The take-home message is that the kids aren’t disposable, said one former homeless youth who is now an addictions worker for kids.

“A lot of the time, people forget kids on the streets are somebody’s children. We forget they’re real human beings. Nobody deserves to be on the streets,” she said Tuesday.

The goal of Here and Now is to develop the vision, plans and principles to integrate systems, policies and programs, states a copy of the report obtained by the Free Press.

“This report is not intended to sit on a shelf. It’s a plan, based on the voices of the youth, We have a realistic action plan, and if we collaborate and integrate our (social and justice systems), we can make a dent in this. Youth homelessness is really preventable,” said Maria Godoy, a co-author of the report.

Godoy sat Tuesday at the Sherbrook Street location of the Resource Assistance for Youth with two ex-street kids to explain the structural, systemic and family breakdowns that send kids to the city’s streets.

Places such as the Sherbrook location work, said Godoy, because they’re non-judgmental. More like it are needed.

The 47-page report builds on promising programs that exist and calls for a wholesale overhaul of the province’s social safety net, including the province’s First Nations, regardless of jurisdictional boundaries with the federal government.

“This is an action plan,” said Christina Maes Nino, project co-ordinator for the report and a community co-ordinator with the Social Planning Council of Winnipeg.

“Youth homelessness is complex, and so are the solutions, but there are four key action priorities that will have a major impact,” Nino said.

Top of the list is the need for a network of regional hubs open 24/7 to boost the capacity of existing youth service agencies.

“The most important thing is a shift in culture about how to address youth homelessness,” Nino said.

The report calls for zero tolerance to homelessness.

“Create an interdepartmental ‘zero discharge into homelessness’ strategy, starting with a co-ordinated provincial policy direction that supports youth (who are) transitioning from any type of provincial government or government-funded care,” Nino said.

That would sharpen the focus for the next steps: a lot more transitional housing programs for youth and greater employment and income assistance to stabilize rocky transitions for youth, Nino said.

alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca