Mobile overdose prevention site to get $589K in provincial funding

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/06/2024 (485 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For the first time, the Manitoba government will provide funding to keep the province’s only mobile overdose prevention site on the road.

Sunshine House will receive $589,000 from the province to fund its mobile overdose prevention site. MOPS is a recreational vehicle fitted with a drug-testing machine where staff members hand out harm reduction tools and provide people a safe, private space to use illegal drugs.

Addictions Minister Bernadette Smith announced the funding in question period Monday, calling the investment a “different approach” to the previous Progressive Conservative government.

“We’ve inherited the heartbreaking legacy of the failed PC government — surging rates of overdose deaths and HIV transmissions. These are preventable deaths and preventable transmissions,” she said.

The funding will help MOPS run until the end of the fiscal year, while Sunshine House awaits the province’s plan to fund a supervised consumption site in downtown Winnipeg next year.

“We’ve kind of always hoped that we would be an extra to a safe consumption site, we would be the folks out there helping along,” Davey Cole, the co-ordinator for MOPS, said.

Sunshine House plans to keep up with its current schedule, which focuses services on the downtown core, but Cole said they hope to expand services to other areas in the future.

“With the addition of a brick and mortar (site), the hope is that we’d move a little bit more mobile, and maybe don’t see 200-plus people a day, because they’ll have a building to go to,” Cole said.

The RV has been in operation since 2022, and MOPS received more than 26,000 visits in its first year, with 20 overdoses and zero deaths, a report released by Sunshine House in April stated.

Sunshine House began fundraising for $270,000 last year to keep MOPS moving after learning federal funding for the site was expected to expire.

The organization announced in December it had received $250,000 from the Winnipeg Foundation and $73,000 in funding from the federal government through an amendment to an existing agreement with Health Canada and the Substance Use and Addictions Program.

An additional $55,000 was raised through community fundraisers. Cole said fundraising will continue, primarily to continue its peer support program, which hires and trains people to work on the RV.

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca