The scramble to find housing for residents of group home in Oromocto

A group home in Oromocto is urgently seeking help from the community to find a new building for five residents before May.

Oromocto Community Residences Incorporated (OCRI) is a non-profit that runs two group homes for adults with intellectual, medical, physical and mental challenges. They’ve rented their home on St. Lawrence Ave. for more than forty years from the Department of National Defence, but recently received word the aging building needs to be knocked down.

Lorri Dejong, the executive director of OCRI, says the hope is to keep all five of the current residents together, many of whom have lived in the home for significant periods.

“The perfect case scenario is that we would find a place, somebody who would be willing to temporarily donate a building, a home, a residence that would house five or six individuals,” she said.

Karine Gallant has lived at the St. Lawrence Ave. home for the last two years, making her one of the more recent residents, but she says she’s loved living there and hopes they can stay together.

“I love living here because I have a lot of friends, we’re like a big family here and it’s really pleasant,” she said.

Dejong says the non-profit operates on a tight budget to begin with, which makes finding a new space that much harder, particularly one that suits their needs. Preferably they would like to keep all five residents together, and in order to meet standards set by the department of social development, that means each resident needs their own room.

“Our problem is that we’re non-profit, we’re a charitable organization. We don’t have a bankroll and we have to find something,” she said.

The longer-term goal is to raise enough money to build or buy a new facility that could house both the residents from St. Lawrence Ave., as well as the residents living in the second home on Waasis Rd. Justin Shaver, the president of the OCRI board, says that the estimated cost would be $1.2-$1.5 million and could take two to three years to raise that much.

“It’s a big ask, but it’s something we need to have done in a shorter time frame to get everyone back together as quickly as we can if they are displaced,” he said.

A capital campaign will be launched by the end of the month through Shaver’s employer EXIT Realty, but he expects they’ll launch several different fundraisers and events as they look to reach their goal.

“There is a lot of hope that by reaching out to the community we’ll have lots of people step up, even if it is with ideas or experience (with fundraising),” he said. But for now, the most pressing need is to find a temporary home for the five people who need it.