Medicine Hat woman takes to the street to raise awareness for homelessness

“If we can all get together, work together, the police, the city, the other organizations, housing, all of us can work together to come to some sort of a solution that needs to be done,” she added, wrapped in blankets.

“Take the action now.”

Stuber’s ask has similarities to a community “taskforce” requested by council as one of the items on its recent shortlist of goals it wants completed by the next election.

Potential stakeholders in the roundtable — such as the Mustard Seed, Medicine Hat Women’s Shelter and others — have already been involved in consultations with staff, the city’s chief administrator said last week.

While Stuber said she didn’t know much about council’s initiative — still in its early stages with a launch scheduled for the first quarter of 2025 — she hopes it will take an empathetic approach and involve the broader community.

“As a community, you don’t just leave people. Like, our family members, if they’re affected by trauma, you don’t just abandon them, right?” she said.

Stuber said the city needs to establish a daytime warming centre and another shelter, potentially with the recently stored sea cans that used to rest in Towne Square.

Medicine Hat has experienced fluctuations in homelessness. In June 2021, the city announced it was the first in Canada to bring an end to chronic homelessness.

That designation was awarded after Medicine Hat met a technical standard where three or fewer individuals were experiencing homelessness for at least six months.

The city lost the status in November 2021 and has yet to return, according to Kerri Sandford, an official with the Medicine Hat Community Housing Society.

“We are seeing an increase in numbers and the shelter is experiencing higher numbers, numbers that we haven’t seen in the last decade,” Sandford told CHAT News in an October interview.

Sandford was a key organizer of the homelessness count in October.

There were 35 unhoused Hatters recorded in this year’s count, according to preliminary numbers that Sandford provided to CHAT News.

Of the 73 surveyed in the 2024 count, there were also 27 who said they were housed and 11 that declined to take part, the data shows. Those figures are still susceptible to changing.

That’s a slight increase over the 31 who said they were unsheltered during the last homelessness count in 2022.

Stuber hopes the community will work in unison on this issue.

“We have to start taking care of each other. And that’s what this is for,” she said.

“I’m hoping that this sparks something.”

by Eli J. Ridder

Medicine Hat woman takes to the street to raise awareness for homelessness

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