System failing homeless families, prof says

By Greg Harris

omeless families in Canada are being badly shortchanged by a system that was never really designed to serve them, according to a University of Calgary researcher.

Dr. Jeannette Waegemakers Schiff, a social work professor who has evaluated emergency family housing across the country, says so-called “total families” — those with two adult caregivers — risk being left out in the cold, or systematically broken up by the shelters they seek assistance from. Schiff will present her findings later this month in Toronto at the first national conference on homelessness.

“ In Canada, 42 out of 51 shelters for emergency family housing routinely send the men to facilities for singles and the teenagers to adolescent shelters,” Schiff says.

“ Those responsible for addressing the housing needs of Canada’s most vulnerable populations need to find short- and long-term solutions that focus on preserving the family unit.”

The shortage of programs to address emergency family housing can be traced, in part, to how the homeless are counted, Schiff says. “When surveyors go into these places to try to count the numbers of homeless families in the community, they of course find only women and children. This suggests the number of homeless families out there has been systematically underestimated.”

Almost all research supports the supposition that families who remain together fare much better than those who are separated, even when they’re living under stresses like poverty and homelessness. But when most shelters are designed to serve singles or single-parent families, the needs of total families go unmet.

Schiff and other researchers estimate that homeless families comprised of two adult caregivers and their children may account for as much as one-third of Canada’s total homeless family population, nearly double what has usually been assumed. Only the provinces of British Columbia and Ontario have publicly funded emergency housing for homeless families that include two adults. In Calgary, homeless parents and their children are referred to the Inn from the Cold program, in which church congregations provide temporary shelter and meals.

“ Inn from the Cold meets a very important need for homeless families, but it can be challenging for the families who use it because they, and their children, have to sleep in a different church every night of the week,” Schiff says. “Homeless singles have many choices, including a state-of-the-art facility, the Drop Inn Centre, but homeless parents and their children must rely on Inn from the Cold.”

Diana Segboer, administrative director for Inn from the Cold, says that more than half of the total 20,000 beds filled by the program in 2004 were occupied by families.

“ Our priority is to provide shelter to Calgary’s homeless families. We also do much more than that by offering a number of programs to help them break free from the cycle of homelessness. When you look at our statistics, there are more two-parent homeless families out there than most people probably realize,” Segboer says.