The daytime shelter will move to this former Mustard Seed and Champion's Centre location on North Railway Street. (CHAT News Photo/Frank Buck)

By Chris Brown

Started dialogue with neighbourhood

Daytime shelter moving from downtown to North Railway Street

Mar 30, 2021 | 4:17 PM

MEDICINE HAT, AB – A daytime shelter established downtown as an emergency response to the COVID-19 pandemic has found a new location.

As of April 1, the shelter will be at 435 North Railway Street, the former location of the Mustard Seed and Champion’s Centre.

McMan Youth, Family and Community Services Association operates the shelter under a contract signed with Medicine Hat Community Housing Society.

The shelter opened in the 600 block of Third Street downtown in December.

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The following month an appeal to the permit was filed by the City Centre Development Agency after nearby businesses complained about incidents of vandalism and harassment. The appeal was upheld in February and operators had until the end of March to find a new location.

Changes are being made to the shelter’s policy to limit those sorts of problems on North Railway.

Jaime Rogers, manager of homeless and housing development department with Medicine Hat Community Housing Society, says they’ll be restricting all-day services to those known to be sleeping rough or those who used the Salvation Army shelter the previous night.

“What that will do is actually help mitigate some traffic and actually divert those individuals to appropriate services and resources that are readily available to everyone in the community,” says Rogers.

On average, she says, nine people have accessed the shelter nightly through the first three months of 2021.

Rogers also says they’ve proactively had conversations with businesses and property owners near the new shelter.

“I think anywhere that we put a location and a service where people, maybe it’s the regular customers if you will, we’re going to have some pushback in the community,” she says. “And what we really ask the community is that during this pandemic when there’s a lot of stress, isolation, the rates of suicide are up when people are really struggling, that we ask people to be patient and kind with their neighbours regardless of whether they have a roof over their head or not.”

The shelter operates from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily.

It connects people to housing and other recovery-based supports and programming.

“People are struggling with isolation, with suicide, with mental wellness, they can go there and access the right supports and be connected to those right supports and community,” says Rogers. “If they need a place to go to stay out of the elements – so if we get another snow flurry – we want people to be inside and not exposed to the elements where that’s actually going to harm their lives as well.”

Funding to operate the shelter will end on Sept. 30.