Winnipeg’s homeless shelters ensuring no one is turned away despite being full

After heavy snowfalls early in the week and wind chill effects making the city feel colder than -40 Celsius the past few days, homeless shelters in the city say they have been full every night but are doing everything they can to make sure no one is turned away.

“We just want to make sure that our doors are always open. The shelter system, we do work together and make sure everyone has a place,” said Mark Stewart, the executive director of the Salvation Army of Winnipeg’s Centre of Hope.

To ensure the right resources are in place for the winter months, organizations serving the homeless meet annually to put an emergency response plan in place to help address issues related to extreme weather.

“We are always full, most shelters are full so the winter response plan has a pop-up shelter that’s opened so we can help anyone that needs to warm up,” said Anastasia Ziprick, the director of development at Main Street Project.

“People are just trying to survive. Like they’re literally trying to survive.”

“There are a lot of people that are experiencing homelessness and have nowhere to go so it’s really important that service organizations get together, we have a coordinated extreme response plan and that is activated as soon as the temperatures drop.”

Tessa Blaikie Whitecloud, the CEO of Siloam Mission adding, “We have been over capacity at night and were working really hard to get the overnight warming centre open. We’ve had some challenges with term positions and filling them and so we’re really hoping that we’ll be able to announce later this week that we’re opening that overnight warming space.”

Winnipeg’s Centre of Hope is already seeing about 500 people a day, and an extra 35-40 people a night. Stewart says their partnership with other agencies has been essential as the demand for shelter continues to grow.

“They’ve actually taken in more people as well so as they take in more people it means there should be less people that were seeing but that’s just not the case right now,” said Stewart.

Winter is a tough time for homeless shelters, and they say they are desperate for the communities help.

“Because of the Canada post strike many shelters, Siloam included are struggling financially because we normally rely on donations coming through right now,” said Whitecloud.

Ziprick adding, “We desperately need financial donations, we weren’t able to get a lot of our donor letters into the mail so we’re doing a lot of appeals for folks to help by donating to Main Street Project.”

More on how to donate can be found on the organization’s websites.