'The street ... is no place for a human being,' says former homeless man at event at Winnipeg church

In an attempt to better understand homelessness, Winnipeg's First Unitarian Universalist Church invited former homeless people and advocates to speak on the issue this weekend. 

Joe Hatch, who was formerly homeless, spoke at the event on Saturday. 

"As far as being out on the street itself, this is no place for a human being," Hatch said. "There is so much deprivation and you have no human rights."

He said he'd spend hours walking just to survive.

"All I could do is walk because … if you sit too long in one place, you can be charged with loitering," Hatch said. "If you sleep in a park, that's not legal, even during the day, you can't sleep in a park." 

The event was a chance for members of the church and the community to hear about the lived experiences of homeless people. 

Debby Lake, who is on the steering committee that organized the event, said the church has been doing a food drive to help for more than 25 years. 

"We know that's just a small drop in the bucket for what needs to happen to make sure that people get help," she said. 

"It's certainly not enough, so we really wanted to look at educating ourselves so that we could do better work. We're looking at doing more advocacy, more witnessing." 

The issue of homelessness is literally right in the church's backyard, which is located on the Assiniboine River, next to Maryland bridge. 

"That was a location where the city tried a really horrible thing of just making loud bangs so that people wouldn't stay there," she said. "That's a horrible thing to do.

"It's important for us to pay attention to the dignity, the human rights of people." 

At Home/Chez Soi study 

Several speakers at the event were part of a study on homelessness, called At Home/Chez Soi, which was done by the Mental Health Commission of Canada and carried out in Winnipeg, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal and Moncton. It was based on the idea that people need housing as a first step in addressing other issues related to homelessness.

"About half of the people [in the project] got housing, the other half didn't … I was one of the persons that got housing," Hatch said. 

Homelessness advocate Al Wiebe, and Ernest Merasty also spoke of their experience in the national study.  

Merasty said he never thought he'd find a home. 

"I thought this was the end of the line for me," he said.

"That was a miracle for me, because it got me off the street, but it didn't change my behaviour immediately, I struggled for several years." 

Merasty said childhood trauma and his experience at residential school led him to problems with alcohol and eventually homelessness. 

After turning his life around, Merasty got involved in a study on trauma-informed care at the University of Manitoba, to train doctors on how to treat patients with a history of trauma. 

"Some of those people have been traumatized, especially Indigenous people because we've gone through a lot of stuff," said Merasty. 

"The genocide that we experienced, cultural genocide, spiritual genocide, and all those kind of things that we still carry around today, that's still hurtful."

'There's not a simple fix' 

The event closed with a round table discussion featuring advocates working with the homeless community.

Lake said the church plans to hold another event like this one, closer to the provincial election this fall. 

"We need to make sure that this issue is front and center for folks who do have the power to build housing, for folks who do have the power to improve our mental health services," Lake said. 

"These are social and community problems, and there's not a simple fix, but we need to start prioritizing and making sure that money is there for things that do work."