I wouldn't be the first columnist guilty of using a platform out of self-interest, but I hope you’ll excuse and understand this one.
Let’s agree, Vancouver has a larger problem than it often admits on struggle, vulnerability and hardship. The support systems for our family units often do not hold and our young people fall into duress or lose themselves before they find themselves.
Let’s also agree, as a community any indifference to our social conditions is a mistake that not only deepens the problems but also seeds the ground for greater problems later. Socially and economically, we cannot afford this in our midst.
I grew up in conditions that were not easy but were thankfully dissimilar enough to the homelessness I most lament today in this city: a single-parent household with an overworked mother, moving from place to place when the rent money ran out, in poverty without much food in the flat and in a large city that was increasingly out of reach economically. I can still summon somatically the hunger pang. Had my mother not married as I turned a teen, and had I not been blessed with conscientious teachers, that world I witness from privilege today could have become my world then.
But I was, and am, lucky.
It was thus an honour (and here is where the self-interest enters) for Covenant House to ask me to sleep outdoors for a night, November 17, to raise money for its Crisis Program that takes young people off the street and tries to get them back on a better road.
I’ll be part of what it calls an annual Executive Sleep Out. We’ll be on patches of cardboard, inside a sleeping bag, in the alley behind Covenant House on Drake Street on the outskirts of our downtown.
I’m told there will be a shelter if it pours – I believe a few raindrops fall in November – but no respite from the cold. I doubt this will be shut-eye – more of an eye-opener, and more of a sleepover than a sleep-out, so I will not get more than a snapshot of the homeless landscape we regrettably host.
Covenant House is sadly all too needed in the city. There are at least 700 street youth in Vancouver at any given time and some 1,365 were helped by its services last year. Nearly 40% of them had mental health challenges, nearly 50% had addiction issues and nearly 70% had witnessed family violence.
Of those 1,365, 528 were helped by the Crisis Program.
This could have been us. This could have been our children.
How does the program help? In the short term, it gets someone off the street. In the longer term, it finds someone shelter, perhaps even confidence – 96% say it helped, 83% felt better about their futures.
If we wish a sustainably prosperous city, this is where we need more focus.
But the program demands exceed what the public purse provides, and here is where I make the self-interested pitch: it costs $13,500 to keep the Crisis Program afloat for 54 young people for 24 hours, so my appeal is for you to contribute to my fund.
There will be 43 of us out there, at last count, and cumulatively we’re trying to raise $750,000. Contributing to any of us is fine, and if this column did anything to alert you to the need, to the valuable work of Covenant House, and to reach into your bank account and provide support, then I am grateful as a messenger for those you have helped and whose lives you may have changed.
The URL for my personal page is very long: http://support.covenanthousebc.org/goto/KirkLaPointe. Alternatively, email me at [email protected], and I’ll get your donation to the right place. •
Kirk LaPointe is Business in Vancouver’s vice-president of audience and business development.
