‘This isn’t a middleman role’: Advocate praises Medicine Hat’s efforts on homeless reduction

The Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, a national charity, says Alberta’s Community and Social Services Minister Jason Nixon is misleading the public.

“What minister Nixon is doing is knowingly misrepresenting the role of these community-based organizations,” CAEH president Tim Richter told CHAT News on Monday.

Nixon said Friday that government grants would replace funding through smaller organizations. He said it would be more efficient to eliminate the step of the “middlemen” agencies.

Richter said the use of this term was pejorative.

“In order to respond to homelessness, you have to do a couple of really important things. And one is building a coordinated local homelessness response,” he said.

“The Medicine Hat Community Housing Society leads that local coordinated response, and have done some work that has gained Medicine Hat international recognition,” he added.

“This isn’t a ‘middleman’ role. It’s very pejorative.”

Richter said that the province’s decision diminishes how hard the community has worked together to reduce homelessness.

“What makes Medicine Hat so unique is that it, as a community, it has rallied and it has worked together as a community,” he said.

Richter said the city has worked together to organize itself to respond to homelessness, and decide how to distribute funding to achieve its goals.

“What this decision is saying, and what the minister is saying in this decision, is he knows better. Minister Nixon knows better than the community in Medicine Hat,” he said.

Richter said Nixon must not know what Medicine Hat has done regarding efforts towards reducing homelessness.

He said CAEH works with over 80 communities around the country.

They help communities like Medicine Hat build coordinated homeless responses.

CAEH lobbies the federal and provincial governments for the policy changes needed to end homelessness.

They also train communities on some of the skills needed to end homelessness, such as the “housing first” initiative.

Richter said that what Nixon is proposing to do will throw away all of the good work in Alberta.

“He’s disregarding what Medicine Hat has done and saying to everybody in Medicine Hat that’s worked so hard, ‘what you’ve done really doesn’t matter, I know that’. And I think that’s a huge mistake,” he said.

“You’re not going to help improve homelessness in rural communities by wrecking the thing that’s made so much progress in the rest of the province.”

by Jayk Sterkenburg

‘This isn’t a middleman role’: Advocate praises Medicine Hat’s efforts on homeless reduction

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