Thank you so much for having me here. I'm the executive director of One City Peterborough, a multiservice non-profit in Peterborough, Ontario, with a large range of programs supporting those experiencing homelessness and/or criminalization. Our programs are diverse, but what unites them is a vision of a community where everyone belongs and together we flourish. This vision is not possible without a volunteer force of a variety of ages, backgrounds, experiences and skills coming together to imagine a different way of being community.
As non-profits looking to address homelessness and criminalization, we are facing obstacles like we've never seen. The combination of a housing crisis with increasing food prices and a drug poisoning epidemic means that the demand for our services and the intensity of need are increasing at an alarming rate. We operate a 45-bed winter shelter where we're turning away upwards of 15 people every night because we literally have no room. Funding has not increased at the same rate as the need, and it's only through the mobilization of a vast range of volunteers that we're even able to scratch the surface of supporting those most abandoned in our communities.
One such example is our circles of support and accountability program, a program developed in Canada but used around the world. CoSA is a program that helps individuals who have committed acts of sexual violence with safely reintegrating back into the community. This is vitally important, because we know that one of the biggest indicators of reoffence is isolation. CoSA has shown through studies a 70% to 88% reduction in reoffending rates and utilizes volunteers to run the program. These aren't professionals but people who have committed to making their community safer through volunteering and doing hard work. Regrettably, the federal government ended its funding of CoSA, thus many sites have closed.
A community where everyone belongs can happen only when we break down many of the social barriers that exist in our community. We believe that creating a strong volunteer force is one of the important steps to achieving this. A key facet of belonging is a feeling of having a role in something bigger than yourself. With this in mind, we recruit volunteers, not just from the community at large, but also from those we are looking to support. When people are working side by side to create something, it builds a relationship that can challenge many of the strongly held biases we hold.
We have volunteers who are currently living outside and working alongside retirees who, before this relationship, would have referred to those experiencing homelessness as “those people”. A wife of a wealthy retiree once said to me, “Before he was volunteering with you all, when we were downtown he'd cross the street to avoid someone who appeared homeless. Now, he eagerly approaches to see if it's one of his friends.”
This change is one of the utmost importance, as this comes to the heart of why we need volunteers. Non-profits like ours are doing the important work of keeping people alive, but we need to be clear: We are just managing the issue. The type of change we need to see to make any sort of impact on our housing crisis, inflating food costs and a drug poisoning epidemic is going to come from changes at the federal and provincial government levels.
I applaud the steps that have been taken, but we need more. We need to rise up, mentor and mobilize volunteers, because it engages more people in issues on homelessness, on affordability of living.... Once volunteers begin to see what is happening on the ground, it is our experience that often they will begin to see that it is policies that are making our conditions worse and that they need to engage in that. We need older volunteers, because they can remember a time when our society did not abandon so many people on our margins. They can challenge the narrative that it has always been this way, because it hasn't: We have created these conditions. Also, we need young people, because they have the creativity, energy and boldness to challenge these issues head-on. It's through movements of young people that many of the great changes have taken place in our society.
We call for the following: to invest heavily in the non-profit sector. You need our creativity, our nimbleness and our ability to mobilize large swaths of the community to address an issue.
We need to address the major crises we are facing and take bold aggressive action. The increase in homelessness across the country is not because we have seen an increase in people making bad decisions. It's a result of bad policy decisions. If we want more people to volunteer, we need to make it so that fewer people are trying just to survive. We know, though it's not exclusively the case, that people are more likely to volunteer when they don't have to worry about their survival.
Thank you very much.