People in Montreal who are living on the streets could soon have access to a new facility geared towards making life easier until they find permanent housing.
It’s the new home for Resilience Montreal, a day shelter catering to many Indigenous clients.
According to staff, the 10-thousand-square-foot wellness facility will be somewhat unique.
“This is taking a different approach where it’s basically a spa for the homeless,” the centre’s executive director David Chapman told Global News. “It’s bringing the most possible dignity to the greatest extent, to the most marginalized of the homeless community.”
The space covers three floors of the building which housed the Rowntree Antiques store and an apartment on Atwater Avenue below Saint-Jacques Street. According to Chapman, once renovated, the new space will be double the size of their current day shelter at Atwater and Sainte-Catherine Street.
The aim is to make the facility a one-stop shop and a place of comfort for the homeless, until they are able to find housing.
“Some people will come through our doors and they will need relocating to the north,” Chapman noted. “Others will come through our doors and they will need an apartment, others will come through our door and they will need more mental health follow-up than they’re currently getting.”
Maggie Chittspattio, lead intervention worker at Resilience Montreal, said services will go even beyond that, to make clients, many Indigenous, feel at home.
“As an Indigenous woman I’m very excited,” she said, “because it will be designed in the traditional ways.”
One space, for example, will be made into a healing room designed to look like a Mohawk longhouse, and there will be a bath on the second for anyone who just wants to relax.
All of that is in addition to showers, food, laundry, sleeping areas and various counselling and medical services – things Chittspattio believes everyone deserves, even someone living on the streets, especially because many of the clients have experienced trauma.
“At the end of the day they’re still human,” she said. “They bleed the same blood as we all do.”
She noted the space is needed because the homeless population has grown in the two years she’s been at Resilience.
“I’ve seen it double,” she said. “Actually more than double. It’s growing and we’re running out of space.”
Resilience acquired the building a year ago for more than $4 million, with funds from the federal and provincial governments as well as private donations.
Chittspattio said renovations will be pricy.
“We need to do a helluva lot of fundraising to get this place going,” she laughed.
They expect the centre to be open by 2024.
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