New charitable organization aims to help unhoused people in Sudbury

As tent encampments have continued to grow in Greater Sudbury, a new non-profit organization has entered the conversation to help address the issue.

The Sudbury Centre for Transitional Care has around 40 volunteers who provide outreach and help people experiencing homelessness find shelter.

Jehnna Morin, the organization's founder and executive director, said volunteers have gone out to Sudbury's Memorial Park, where they've handed out food, some warm clothing and items for personal hygiene.

She started the Sudbury Centre for Transitional Care because she found there was a lack of compassion due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

"You know, we don't hug each other anymore, so we have to find some other way to just reach out to these individuals," she said.

Despite its name, the organization does not yet have a physical centre for transitional housing, but having such a space is its ultimate goal.

"The centre would be based on a holistic approach," said Morin. "We would have programming that is trauma-informed and just really working at peeling back those layers that caused the fallout in the first place."

Morin said the city has worked to coordinate access for people but more transitional housing is needed.

"I think their hands are tied for the most part but definitely the housing situation, there needs to be more," she said. "There needs to be more care centres because I actually worked for the Greater Sudbury Housing Corporation a few years back, you know you just see people falling out of the system and back in."

City consultant

To help individuals living in the tent encampments, the City of Greater Sudbury hired consultant Iain De Jong to provide some strategies to address issues that lead to homelessness.

In his report to the city, De Jong said there are a number of volunteer groups in Sudbury that have taken it upon themselves to provide food, supplies and other services to those experiencing homelessness. He cautioned that well-meaning but untrained volunteers can cause more harm than good, "greatly interfering" with efforts to provide a coordinated response.

Morin said she read De Jong's book, The Book on Ending Homelessness, and said his recommendations speak to her organization's mandate.

"It starts with the street outreach and then moves out into a bigger scheme of, you know, the survival, physical health, housing focused, harm reduction, which we don't do, but would resource out," she said.