ARCHES Executive Director explains finances

Of those employees, four are listed as making between $40,000-$79,999; five employees are listed as earning between $80,000 and $119,000, and one person makes between $200,000 and $249,999. While the financial information doesn’t list names, unlike Alberta Health Services, the person could be anyone from one of the doctors or nurse practitioners ARCHES employees, to those in management, says Executive Director Stacey Bourque.

“We pay doctors, we pay nurse practitioners, we pay registered nurses etc. and so the wages are paid at comparable rates to other similar services and Alberta Health Services. We have highly qualified staff who are compensated appropriately in comparison to other health care providers in Alberta.”

Alberta Health Services provides the names and compensation rates of each employee who makes more than $129,809 per year, which includes their base salary, overtime, shift premiums, on-call pay, sick pay, benefits, vacation pay, and relevant severance. The list is more than 9,200 pages and includes everyone from doctors, nurses, and assistants, to IT staff, directors, and managers.

Bourque explains that while most of the money ARCHES receives comes from the government, they follow the rules that every other registered charity or non-profit does in Alberta. That means names and exact salaries aren’t disclosed. That goes for every other non-profit organization in the province.

“Our audited financial statements are available through the registered body here in the province (Charitable Fundraising Act) because we operate through the society’s act, as well as through the CRA. So, there’s nothing that isn’t shared publicly.”

Bourque also points out that those who work at ARCHES and the Supervised Consumption Site (SCS) are often subject to brutal conditions and attracting not only qualified employees but keeping them – can be challenging.

“I think few people realize just how brutal, dehumanizing, demoralizing and exhausting working at ARCHES can be. There seems to be a real inability for people to separate us from our professional positions and the fact that we operate just like any other non- profit operates and get our financials audited externally every year. We follow all of the processes; we follow the bylaws and there’s not another organization in this city that’s targeted the way we are. Personally, and professionally.”

Over the last five years, ARCHES’ role in the community has changed and evolved. The organization went from $255,858 in total revenue and nine employees in 2015, to $7,133,885 in revenue to the end of March 2019. Bourque says she and others have submitted hundreds of pages of grant applications in order to secure the dollars necessary for its multitude of programs, including the naloxone program, the Housing First clinical team (municipally funded), needle collection (initially also funded by the City of Lethbridge, but now provincially funded), COAP (Community Outreach Addictions Program) team, recovery coaching and programming for Indigenous persons, wrap around services at the SCS and numerous health and mental-related programs.

Initially, the SCS was also open from 9 a.m. until 2 a.m., but it now runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That requires extra teams of nurses and others to keep the operation running.

While Bourque says she has not been given any direction from the province regarding funding in 2020, the provincial government is currently reviewing supervised consumption services across the province. It’s not known at this time whether funding will be extended beyond March 31, 2020. The province is putting together the results of its panel that looked at the social and economic impact the existing sites have had in their respective cities, prior to committing to new funding.

The consequences of not have the SCS operating as it is now, argues Bourque, could be substantial. Recently, the site had its highest ever one day usage rate, at 944. In a two-day span, the site had more than 1300 uses, which is what the Calgary SCS sees in an entire month. It is the busiest supervised consumption site in the world.

“I think a lot of people don’t realize is if the doors were to close tomorrow, or we had to reduce hours or people we were able to serve in a day, those 22,000 uses a month have nowhere to go, but to flow back out into the community.”

While she doesn’t say exactly how many “success” stories they have had, Bourque says “many, many” of their current employees are those who have accessed their services and are in recovery. They’ve also had former clients and their families come back to the site to express their gratitude.

Bourque maintains that the site continues to face unfair scrutiny, rather than praise for the inroads being made at the SCS and by ARCHES in the addiction recovery spectrum.

“There’s so much focus on supervised consumption services or our revenue stream. I mean, there are many other organizations that are larger than us, whose revenue stream is larger than ours. You know, we’re no different than any other non- profit and we’ve work extremely hard to build the programs that we have to source out funding, to complete applications for funding. It hasn’t just come to us without us having to put in the hard work. You don’t just put your hand out and somebody gives you money. That’s not how it works.”

At this point, the amount of funding that goes into the SCS is expected to continue to increase. Although Bourque says it won’t be because of the demand placed on the site, but because they’ve secured additional program funding. The new financial information up until March 31, 2020 will be available on the Revenue Canada website.

by Lara Fominoff

ARCHES Executive Director explains finances

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