Outreach - Part 4

Prepared by: Ted McMeekin

HAMILTON ALLIANCE for TINY SHELTERS

Friends, Watch this video of Kitchener’s Award-Winning ‘A Better Tent City’.

Like Hamilton, Kitchener was facing a massive challenge responding to far too many homeless people in their community. It was a humanitarian crisis that was getting worse by the day.

The situation in Hamilton is similar with many homeless people, for a variety of reasons, unable to access existing shelters, city sponsored housing options or to live in a congregate setting. The difficult choices our homeless face is hard to fathom. Often their choice has been limited to sheltering (in tents) in park encampments.

Like the ‘Better Tent City’ a collaborative of Hamiltonians has launched HATS, (the Hamilton Alliance for Tiny Shelters) to enable a compassionate and dignified housing alternative. This initiative will involve the construction of up to 20 tiny (10’x8’) insulated and electrified cabins, each with a bed, small fridge, microwave and fire extinguisher. These cabins will provide short-term transitional housing in a safe, warm and secure community-centered location. Cabin residents will have the only keys to their unit. Most importantly the cabin community will be augmented by a matrix of support services. (eg. physical and mental health, nursing and pharmacy professionals and a cadre of caring community volunteers).

We are currently working with the HWDSB and the City to pin down an appropriate location for this community concept.

As Christians we are called to life and compelled to love This requires that we nurture tomorrow’s hope by healing today’s pain.

Thank you for choosing Affordable Housing and Homelessness as St. Paul’s 2022 Outreach Mission focus. 

All loving and compassionate God, you call us into relationship with you.

Open our ears to the voices around us and our hearts to your persuasive spirit.

In the midst of affluence and the pandemic, help us to hear the cries of those who struggle to simply survive.

Lord, in a world too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love, we pray that you would grant us the wisdom and grace to act with compassion in response to the poor, the lonely and the homeless in our community.

Help us find the courage and resolve to NEVER SELL OURSELVES SHORT on a passion for the possible.

Give us the strength to carry on risking big for the good and just cause of eradicating homelessness in our community.

We ask these things in your precious name.

Amen

• "A Better Tent City”, Ken Galloway, https://vimeo.com/486941338/b087a1c51a