While most people spend cold nights in their homes with the heat turned up, some people have no homes to stay in. The Coldest Night of the Year is a Canada-wide event to raise funds and awareness for homeless people, and Yorkton is hosting its first event to raise funds for Yorkton Transitional Homes for Youth.
Peg Beaton with Yorkton Transitional Homes for Youth (YTHY) says it’s a way to remind people what it’s like for people without homes to live outside on the coldest night of the year. Teams walk outdoors at night to give a sense of what people go through. People will meet at 5:00 p.m., and walk through the city, before meeting back to have something to eat and warm up.
The advantage of joining up with a national fundraising campaign, Beaton says, is that a small organization like YTHY can afford to have a fundraiser. With a bigger campaign, more of the work is done already, which is important when you have a limited staff.
“To operate what we’re operating, we don’t have enough dollars, so desperately we need money as an association to address the needs of homeless youth in Yorkton... We don’t have any time, and we have had to reduce staff because we do not have enough dollars.”
Beaton says that raising awareness is part of the challenge for the walk, because homelessness is a problem that people do not see in the city, but one that definitely exists
“For us here in Yorkton, one of the challenges we find is that people do not believe we have homelessness,” Beaton says.
“We’ve had youth who were sleeping in Tim Horton’s, going to the bathroom, pulling their feet up and locking the door so they could have a couple hours of sleep in warmth. We’ve had kids where the ATM machines in banks, sleeping in post offices, wherever they could find a warm place to be.”
Since opening on April 1, 2011, 55 young people aged 16 or 17 have gone to the two homes YTHY operates for help, all from Yorkton and surrounding area.
“People say “Where were they? We never saw them, they’re not pushing carts on the street.” And they’re not. They are couch surfing, they are staying with friends, they are burning bridges, they are not attending school. For our focus, what kind of community members are they becoming?”
Beaton says that their goal is to help kids in planning years adapt to adulthood. All youth in the home come to YTHY for help, referred by the Ministry of Social Services, whether a ward or what is called a “section 10,” someone who finds it difficult to stay in school due to the situation in their homes. While many people associate places like YTHY with group homes, Beaton explains they are very different.
“Those group homes are what we refer to as the protected model. The protected model has very strict rules and regulations, if a youth doesn’t do something there are punishments for it, and there are consequences in the punishment. The youth coming to our homes we operate very differently. We don’t have two people on staff every shift, we have one person called a mentor who lives in the home with the youth. That mentor is basically showing them what it’s like to be independent.”
The goal is to provide support to kids who otherwise would not have it, and that drives how they run their programming. Beaton notes that a new program, run with the Painted Hand Community Development Corporation, is an independent living program to help kids transition into being independent, which helped 13 young people last year. The program helps kids find housing, helps them with budgeting and finding employment, and living independently. They are also working to buy a rooming house in order to have a “second stage” after young people no longer fall into the age range of YTHY.
“I know I’m a parent, grandparent, and great-grandparent, and wouldn’t we take our kids back when they get out in the world, find out what life is really about, and say “oh my goodness, I am not ready for this” and go back home. These young 16 and 17 year olds don’t have that option without our independent living program.”
Youth are the focus, but Beaton knows that it’s more than youth that are affected by homelessness in the city, and says there are plans to address that in the future as well. An emergency shelter is being planned, which Beaton hopes to see ground breaking in January 2017, which will be for people of all ages, single adults, youth and families.
“We’ve got to get people to realize there is homelessness here. Statistically, for every thousand people in a community, there is one homeless person... How many people have we got in Yorkton?”
The Coldest Night of the Year will take place on Feburary 20, 2016. People can sign up either online at https://coldestnightoftheyear.org/yorkton or by calling 306-783-2340.
