As of Saturday, there will be fewer services available to vulnerable women in Montreal, including those experiencing homelessness.
Chez Doris, which caters to such clients, is temporarily pausing some day services until December at the earliest because of staffing shortages. Executive director Marina Boulos-Winton says it was a tough call to make.
“The reality is that there’s so many people who need help, it’s not a question of too many services,” she told Global News. “There’s just not enough.”
Among the services to be affected are meals, day beds and caregivers. Some limited day shelter help will still be available from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., like mail and phone services, as well as emergency bed reservations for the night shelter.
According to Boulos-Winton, the move was necessary because of staff shortages — they need more than 20 people. They are also being affected by the surge in the number of unhoused people in the city, and it has been taxing on staff.
“We’ve seen a lot of (staff) turnover also because the situations that they are confronted with are much more serious,” Boulos-Winton said.
For instance, staff are seeing more sexual assault victims as well as an increase in the number of clients with mental health and substance abuse problems. With this partial closure of services, Chez Doris staff believe they can better co-ordinate hiring and training of new personnel.
The head of the Old Brewery Mission, James Hughes, says the closure is a sign of the strain on shelters.
“We totally understand,” he said. “This is not an issue that just Chez Doris is confronting with respect to man- and womanpower shortages. We ourselves have some of those problems but luckily we’ve been able to keep services open.”
Staff at other shelters worry they will see an increase in demand for their services as Chez Doris cuts back. At nearby Resilience Montreal, co-founder David Chapman says the number of meals has already doubled in recent months to 450 portions per meal service. Now he expects that number to climb even more.
“The challenge is that with these significant abrupt increases, you don’t budget for this at the beginning of the year,” he explained, adding that it creates a huge problem.
“When you go and try to find money for things like food and people to administer the food and prepare it, it’s actually very hard to find that.”
He thinks governments should make funding for shelters more nimble to handle unexpected demands like they’re about to face.
For now, he needs to find another source of funding — and fast.