HALIFAX, THURSDAY, JUNE 6, 2002
STANDING COMMITTEE ON COMMUNITY SERVICES
9:00 A.M.
CHAIRMAN
Ms. Mary Ann McGrath
MADAM CHAIRMAN: We will get started and I'm sure we are going to be joined by a few people wandering in. Welcome. My name is Mary Ann McGrath. I'm the chairman. I will go around the table and have the other members introduce themselves and perhaps you can do likewise.
[The committee members introduced themselves.]
[The witnesses introduced themselves.]
MADAM CHAIRMAN: You may start whenever you're ready.
MR. TIM CROOKS: All right. I'm going to move to the other mic. I don't know if that takes a minute to set up in terms of the technical. Are we set, mic-wise?
MS. MORA STEVENS (Legislative Committee Coordinator): It's just for recording.
MR. CROOKS: Great, then I will try to remember to hold it closely although every time you put a mic in my hand, I'm tempted to do my best Elvis imitation. (Laughter) I'm going to resist that temptation today. Since it's being recorded, perhaps I will resist. Thanks, as we just get some of the logistics worked out here.
1
We are really thrilled to be here. We are really excited to have the invitation and we are prepared, as always, to speak with great passion about our work. We are a group of individuals, not only the staff contingent of our association but the volunteer sector as well, who are just extremely passionate about the work that we do. So to have an opportunity to make some opening remarks and to give you an initial overview and then have further opportunity to answer any questions, again we are just thrilled to be here. I'm going to jump right in and I may actually move back to the other side just so you can see this a little better.
The Phoenix Youth Programs - quickly, just as a way of grounding and a point to begin, we wanted to take you through our vision statement and our mission statement. The vision simply reads:
"We recognize the value of all youth, and strive for a world where they live with dignity, free from oppression, in a safe environment. We imagine a society where our services are no longer needed."
Our mission statement:
"We support at risk and homeless youth within our extended community. Our intent is to break the cycle of homelessness by offering a wide range of programs and services. We strive to be a meaningful presence and a voice for social justice in the lives of the youth we serve."
We understand that these are lofty goals. We understand that they will take a lot of work for us to get there, but nonetheless we keep a strong commitment to them and work daily, especially tending to our mission statement.
One of the things we're best known for, initially within the region and now much more extensively than that - we've been recognized nationally and we share that with great pride. It's not something that we sought but certainly take great pride in the fact that it's transpired - we're recognized not only for our level of innovation and creativity in the things we've been able to do but also in our continuum of care. We have a very broad continuum of care. It is perhaps one of the best innovative features of our organization.
Our services are all designed for 16- to 24-year-old at-risk or homeless youth, and we will talk in much more detail about our clients and the general profile of individuals we support, but it's the continuum itself and the broad range of services that really has drawn attention, as I say, not only within the region but from outlying areas as well and from other provinces as individuals and groups struggle to understand how we can most effectively respond to the very complex needs of a homeless population. We have a broad range, and it's through that broad range that, really, we've been effective and able to address the very diverse needs of the population we serve.
Our association goes back to 1984, and our first program, Phoenix House itself, started in 1987. Instead of taking you chronologically through the development of our programs, however, what we would really like to do is take you through in order of arrangement on the continuum of care so that you have an understanding of how a young person in need might first access service and how perhaps not necessarily, but on average, they might move through the continuum of supports that we provide. Again, we're going to highlight some of the programs and hope we can touch on some points and have opportunity through questioning to expand on in much more detail.
Phoenix Centre for Youth is a walk-in resource centre on Coburg Road here in Halifax. Phoenix Centre for Youth is a street-front walk-in service offering counselling, referral to community resources, health care, showers, laundry facilities, food and advocacy. Being homeless really is an exercise of being stripped to the core, to the very bone, to have taken away from you all of the things that are of importance, the things that help define you, the things that help bring you comfort, the things that give you meaning on a day-to-day basis. We need to start by framing in and understanding that homelessness is that very exercise of losing all of those things, most often by way of something that's beyond your control, by an external force over which you really have no influence.
We see a large level of victimization with the young people with whom we deal. When they are first introduced to us, most often through Phoenix Centre for Youth, they come as we would come had we had that experience of losing those important things, and they come confused and angry and frustrated and feeling alone, and come with a high level of disorientation as a result of having survived some of those experiences.
You can see some of our statistics. The total number of Phoenix Centre for Youth, PCFY, and Follow Up - which is a program that we will also touch on and is housed out of the centre on Coburg Road - client contacts is 7,433. (Interruption)
Hi, Maureen, how are you? Good morning. I am the official greeter.
MR. PAUL MACEWAN: Good. Congratulations. I am just doorkeeper. (Interruptions)
MR. CROOKS: I will just wait for Paul to join us. I will tell you in the meantime, this is a bit of role reversal, I can't count the number of classes of Maureen's that I came in late to. (Laughter) I think I remember getting the evil eye at one point and some kind of gentle warning about, please don't do that again. So this is a delightful turn of events.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: Maureen, I think that's a gotcha.
MR. CROOKS: As Paul is helping himself to coffee, I will continue. I should tell you, as we go through these statistics, they are for our last fiscal period, and we run the same fiscal period as government. These statistics take us up to March 31st of this year. These are the number of client contacts we have had through Phoenix Centre for Youth, 7,433. Important to note, the way to track it, that is not the number of individuals but is the number of contacts. Contacts are defined by way of any time that we've delivered any level of service we include that as a contact. Most often that's by way of visit, but it can be by telephone call or also by visiting someone within the community.
Average percentage of females for Phoenix Centre for Youth in terms of the client base is 43 per cent, and for males 57 per cent - also interesting to note those ratios. In terms of new clients for the period 2001-02, 167. It's staggering to us, the volume of young people we're seeing. In fact, as a quick snapshot, over the last two years we've seen about a 25 per cent increase in the demand for our service and as we did the statistics on the last quarter, in the last quarter alone, in addition to that number we've seen an additional 19 per cent. It's really just absolutely staggering. The need is at an all-time high and we leave at the end of the day quite weary and quite concerned about what it means in terms of future need.
Phoenix Youth Shelter. Now, some of you may be familiar with this, we had a very large amount of positive press with the shelter piece and it was a long time coming and it took an extensive amount of work and had great community backing and community involvement. It's really important I think to share some success stories in terms of public education and public relations and the general community's understanding of these issues, and one of the things that I would share with you is that we did an extensive mail drop within the extended community around the shelter. The shelter is at 1094 Tower Road and, for those of you who may know the building, it has a 140-year history of being a spot where communal living takes place and where people are supported. It's owned by St. Paul's Home, a local foundation that many of you will know.
We felt a really strong commitment, as we always do, as an association, to make sure that the community at large knew what we were doing and felt involved and felt that they could have access to us should they have any questions or comments or concerns for that matter, so we did an extensive mail drop throughout the extended community and hit hundreds of houses, leaving information exactly about our timeline, what our intent was, and how I personally could be accessed if people had any comments. What I want you to know is that we received two phone calls - and we were a little concerned when we did the mail drop at what the response might be, because still, sometimes we struggle to get a good understanding out there of our population, and youth sometimes don't get the credit that they deserve - we had two individuals respond, and the first call came in and said I just wanted to say welcome to the community, we're thrilled to have you and we look forward to having you in our midst; the second call was, how can I volunteer?
Since that point we've had great standing in that neighbourhood and have worked really hard to be respectful, have done a phenomenal amount of upgrades to the building itself and to the surrounding area in terms of the outside yard, and have really worked hard at making the neighbours understand we want to be good neighbours and that we're doing very important things within that building. It's a 20-bed facility, first of its kind in the community. Prior to this there was no emergency shelter specific for the use of youth and so it's really one of a kind and, again, it's for 16- to 24-year-olds.
The statistics. It was very much a Christmas story - we opened our beds on Christmas Eve, December 24th. We have 20 beds now in total, but at that point we had eight. Construction was running a little bit behind and we were told again and again and again there was no chance we could be in by Christmas; we repeated again and again and again, oh yes we will. So we opened with eight beds on Christmas Eve and all eight were filled, which is a real commentary as well. You can see since then the average occupancy has been 92 per cent. The total number of clients served to date is 83 - the number of females, 22; the number of males, 61. That's in large part because it's been designed in a way that the ratio of beds is 15 male beds and five female beds. That was based on an extensive amount of research around available services within the community and, so far, it's served us well, that ratio, and the building is designed accordingly to accommodate that.
[9:15 a.m.]
I'm going to ask Patti Melanson, who's our health service coordinator and some of you may be familiar with Patti. She was formerly the Teen Health Centre Coordinator at J.L. Ilsley High School and has been with Phoenix Youth Programs for about a year and a half. We've been absolutely thrilled to have her. She brings with her a lot of experience and a lot of skill and has done just a phenomenal job with the expansion of our health services. So, at this point, I will pass it over to her and ask her to speak to some of those components.
MS. PATTI MELANSON: Thank you very much for this opportunity today. Before I begin to talk about the health service part of Phoenix Youth Programs, I think it's really important to set a context around who the youth are that we see at Phoenix House. These youth are youth who are coming from an unsupported living arrangement. When I say unsupported, that either means maybe a group-home living situation or some kind of residential situation. It might be their family home. Often, they've experienced throughout their lives physical, emotional or sexual abuse and sometimes have lived in great family chaos. So that immediately puts them at a higher risk for lots of things, especially as it relates to health. It's really important to understand what some of those risks are when they're living, like I said, in a very unsupported living arrangement and that might be on the street or it might be coach surfing from spot to spot.
Some of those risks are things like malnutrition, respiratory infections, sexually transmitted infections, basic things like good foot care, psycho-social and serious, serious mental health concerns and mental health illnesses. We also see youth who've attempted suicide, maybe more than once. So the youth, at least the ones that we see, are accessing health services in a very fragmented way. If you think about youth who are living at home in kind of supported situations, they've got somebody who's kind of helping them navigate through that system. They've got someone who's phoning the doctor and making appointments for them because it really hurts when they breath or they've got a sore throat. So they've got someone who's doing a little bit of advocating for them and maybe that's a parent or that's a guardian. That person plays a really important role in terms of youth being able to get good health service.
The youth we see don't have that luxury. They don't have that person doing that advocacy. They're very alone and they're very unsupported. So where do they go? They often go to emergency rooms and I think all of us sitting around the table, coming from different perspectives, know that that's really not cost-effective, but where else are they going to go? The reason that they end up going there is because of the barriers that face them and some of the barriers that they're facing are things like they don't know how to get a family physician, because there are few family physicians, as we know, available to even us as adults who have phones, who have daily agendas where we can write our appointments that we can't get for the next two weeks, to remind us. We also have MSI cards, probably. A lot of youth that we see don't have MSI cards. They don't know how to get an MSI card. They've lost it or it's been stolen.
The other thing that they don't have is money. I know that's really basic and you might think, yes, of course, we know they don't have money because they're homeless and they're living on the street and, of course, they don't have money. But they don't have money and what that means in terms of health care, because we live in a system where health care is free, it's not free if you need prescriptions. I could sit four pill bottles here in front of you right now and tell you that that cost $85 for a young woman who has to get them every week. She doesn't have $85. Even if she goes on social assistance, she still needs to pay a $5 co-pay for each of those bottles and that's $20 a week.
So those are the barriers and those are the reasons that you end up going to emergency departments. We know, like I said, that that's not effective, so our attempt to, I think, be conscious of that and, two things: to say, we can be cost-effective around health service delivery because we can offer things on site, which is what I'm going to talk about in a moment, and the other thing that we can do is have youth receive health care in the way that they are entitled to receive health care, which is in a coordinated, seamless manner and that means that they don't go to the emergency department, get the band-aid for whatever it is that they have come in with, they leave, they get discharged and nobody knows where they've gone. Nobody knows if they're going to make the appointments for the follow-up because
they've got no one supporting them, no one who's saying, you know, I care enough for you to get to that appointment, for you to receive the help and support that you need.
So on-site is really important for youth that we have the fortune of meeting on a daily basis and why it's important is because, like I've just talked about, the context of their lives is that we can't offer things kind of in an adult model. We have to offer things in a way that is youth-friendly to individuals who are unsupported in their lives. So on-site is the only thing that truly makes sense.
As the health services coordinator, I'm a nurse, I guess I maybe should let you know about that and I'm not just kind of coordinating health services, so I offer actually the direct service. So it's a fancy title, but I'm the one they're seeing. I see the youth in the mornings at the Phoenix Youth shelter. So any youth who comes into that 20-bed facility I will within 24 to 48 hours do a full health assessment on them and often what happens is that we learn about serious mental health concerns.
For a young person to hold it together and live on the street, that takes a lot of energy, a lot of mental capacity to kind of keep it together, to keep yourself safe, to keep your bag close to you to make sure that nobody steals it, all kinds of things, just to kind of hold it together. Then you place them and you give them this spot, this place where they can have their own room, they can sleep safely, eat properly, and that's when you see things kind of start to unravel in a way and that's when we start to sometimes see signs of some pretty serious mental illnesses. That's when I also have the opportunity to pick up some serious physical health concerns that youth may be experiencing. They may be epileptic. They may have diabetes. They may have a multitude of physical health concerns that they haven't addressed in the last two to three months. Maybe they have not taken medication, all of those kinds of things.
So I see youth there. Then in the afternoons and late morning I am at the drop-in centre and see youth on a drop-in basis there. Again, some youth make appointments to see me after they've seen me a couple of times and so there's this comfort level. Other youth just drop in and see me and that's what I mean by kind of going to where they are and addressing the needs in a way that's effective for them. They also spend time at Phoenix House which is the residential facility which Tim will speak about. As you can see, some of the things that my job includes and that service delivery includes is I guess, like I said, health assessments, immunizations, care for some illnesses and injuries, mental health support and co-ordination of that, sexually transmitted disease testing, referral to physicians and the acquisition of Nova Scotia health cards.
The statistics range from, in the last year 171 clients were seen by the health service up to - there was a two-year break in health service delivery with Phoenix Youth Programs and so things have kind of restarted with that. Males, it's pretty much the same as the statistics for the drop-in centre, probably the statistics for the whole entire organization
which is we see a higher number of males than females. Mental health visits and physical health visits, there's a 60/40 split on that and I hope that that speaks to you about the concerns around mental health. I'm very open to entertaining questions later on. Thank you.
MR. CROOKS: Phoenix House is probably one of the best known of our programs and again in large part because it was the program with which we started back in 1987 and so this year is its 15th Anniversary. As our reputation has grown within the community even though we have developed significantly beyond the house itself, again, we often get referred to broadly as Phoenix House and we take no objection to that whatsoever because we know it's historically rooted.
Wonderful things happen at Phoenix House and it's really a point - think of it, I encourage you to think of it as a point of stabilization. It's a chance for a young person to go from the routine and the volatility that involvement in street culture necessitates to stabilizing and, not only having a safe place to sleep, but getting three square meals and for the first time in perhaps a long, long time and for some the first time ever, start to think about your future and to dream a bit and to feel physically well with Patti's support and the support of other staff and really start to have a sense that there may be hope. A lot of the young people with whom we work and support have really gone dead in the eyes. There's no other way to describe it to you. You try to engage them and you try to make some kind of contact and any level of hope that has been present has just been pounded out of them through their experiences over the last extended number of years. It's really tragic, and as hardened as we are for having worked in the field for a long period of time, it's something you never, ever get used to. Every time you see it, you're reminded anew of how tragic many of the stories are and how hard the experiences have been.
So Phoenix House is a 10-bed facility, again, very well-received within the community. There was a lot of concern initially, 15 years ago, when that facility was about to be set up. The neighbours were very concerned about what kind of set-up this would involve and an extended number of years later, in fact at our last big anniversary, at the 10th Anniversary, we held a big street party and without fail every neighbour attended. In fact, the folks next door, when they built a new fence in their backyard to keep their dog in the yard, the kids had become attached to the dog and the dog so attached to the kids that they built a big round hole in the gate so the kids could reach through and the dog could stick its head out.
So we've worked really hard at developing good relationships and we feel a strong commitment there in the best interest of our youth and in the best interest of public education. We really want people to understand that a homeless young person is no different from any of us. The sole distinguishing factor is access to opportunities and good support and perhaps some of the considerations around family that have benefited all of us.
In terms of statistics for the house, the total number of admissions for 2001-02 is 26; female admissions, 12; male admissions, 14. Because we will want to speak to this point later on as it relates to the legislation within Nova Scotia and the legislation gap for 16-year-olds to 19-year-olds, it is important to note that the average age of residents is 17.8.
The Supervised Apartment Program this year celebrates its 10th Anniversary and it's a very innovative program and, again, one of a kind in the Maritimes in terms of this population. The way it works is that we have three homes and a live-in support person a professional staff person, in each of the homes and then a whole team that's organized around case planning and providing support to our live-ins as they in turn provide support to our young people. The nice thing about the Supervised Apartment Program is it's the next step of independent living. So the kids have access to their house, have their own keys, do their own meal planning, do their own cooking, all within a supported live-in environment where we have structure and expectations, but a whole lot of fun and a whole lot of laughter and a whole lot of community results from that.
It's an opportunity in a very real kind of way for the first time again for many of our young people to engage them around considerations of future plans, future living environments, what's the downside to staying up and watching TV until 2:00 a.m. when you're supposed to be in school at 8:30 a.m. So a great opportunity for experiential learning, a great opportunity to let them test run that and then to say the next day, so I saw you roll out of bed at 10:00 a.m., can we talk about that and how that might be a problem.
It's really great and again, Saturday past we just celebrated the 10th Anniversary and invited a lot of former residents and there was a great showing, as there always is at those reunion events, and a strong, strong, strong lasting sense of community and we will talk about the importance of that a little later on as well. It is important to note that we have a dunk tank and the very first male resident ever on his very last ball hit the clown's nose and
put me under in the dunk tank and I've never seen him so excited before in my life. So, the things that it takes 10 years to achieve.
[9:30 a.m.]
Statistics for 2001-02, again, the total number of referrals is 35 to that program, admissions seven. So, keeping in mind that the rate of turnover in that program is much less, kids tend to stay, for a longer period, which is the design of the program. So entering into 2001, of course, there were already some residents in the homes. The average age of residents on admission is 19 years and the length of stay is 10 months.
Two programs left to go. The Phoenix Learning and Employment Centre. This is an essential and very important piece in our continuum of care and it is really important that as we start to build a foundation relationship-wise and to start to be part of the restoration of dignity, hope, interest in education and all of those things that follow subsequent to starting
to believe in yourself again, that we have a very concrete and specific way of helping our young people capitalize on newly-developed skills and on their newly-developed interests. So the Learning and Employment Centre is just that.
There are really three levels of service to that program. The first is a drop-in centre. It is important always with this population that as you design programs there is good flexibility and really an opportunity to tailor make things to a young person's need. A drop-in centre at the Learning and Employment Centre is pretty free-flowing. The hours run through the full course of the day. You can come and access a paper and a telephone and really high-end computers and go on-line to look for work and resources abound within that space and are really well-used.
The second level of service is that we have a program called Life Soup which is well-named. It's a whole mixed bag of opportunities to do pre-employment and life-skill development and covers a wide range. What I want you to understand about the nature of our work with homeless young people is that when we first set up that program, we were searching for some curriculum and so we discovered that it was fairly easy to find curriculum that was designed for "at risk" youth. We brought a lot of it in, had it shipped in and ended up sending 95 per cent or so of it back. When the general community talks about at-risk youth, they are not talking about the population that we serve. This stuff was three to four levels more advanced than what our young people were prepared for and able to capitalize on. So we really had to scale things down. It is the most fundamental of issues but when you are dealing with young people who literally have not had access to a toothbrush for a month, to talk about appropriate presentation when you go for a job interview is really quite a stretch. It's just not yet relevant. So it takes quite a period of time to work through on some of those issues.
The final program is an academic upgrading program, basically an alternative school that we have worked very closely on with the school board to receive some support and design from them so that our young people involved in that program can capitalize on the opportunity and do some of their courses for credit, receive credit for them. Again, being homeless is the equivalent of someone pressing the pause button on your development. We have young people who are 17 or 18 years old with Grade 7 or Grade 8 education and to jump-start them back to an age-appropriate level of education is a phenomenally challenging undertaking both for them and for us. So that is the third level of service.
I want you to know that that is a vibrant, hotbed of activity. So the myth about homeless youth not being interested in some of these issues and not being equipped to be disciplined and to follow a schedule and to be actively involved is just not accurate. It is incredible the response that we have had to this.
It is important to note, we have just celebrated our second anniversary and so I have done the stats a little bit differently here and it's important to note that from May 2000 to May 2002, we've had 311 clients through those programs and again, that's staggering for this population.
When we first opened in May 2000, we had 32 contacts and the contacts are recorded similarly to Phoenix Centre for Youth. We had 32 contacts during that month and I just gave you our most recent where we peaked and set an all-time high record. For February it climbed to 566 contacts in the course of one month. Once the word has gotten out on the street that it's worthwhile and a safe place to be and good to pursue, it's just incredible the volume. Again, you can see a similar trend, male clients 56, female clients 44. Again, it is essential to note, because of the legislation gap in Nova Scotia and I assume that most of you are aware of that, the age range for the clients, 77 per cent fall between 16 and 19 years of age.
We have an essential commitment to stay with a young person over the long term. There has been too much transition in too many lives, and so we meet young people who have been just really not treated with respect from a lot of adults and have been transitioned through foster care and a variety of group facilities, and it's just a revolving door. The level of detachment in terms of their ability to form meaningful relationships, understandably, subsequently is very high.
We work really hard at honouring the long-term commitment that we have, and we could very conceivably know a young person at the age of 16 and still be involved in a meaningful way, in their lives until they have their 25th birthday and then beyond that. Not necessarily providing professional service delivery, but on a personal level keep connections of course much beyond their 25th birthday.
The Follow Up Program is designed to honour that commitment and to stay in touch long term, and it is the final transitioning that eases the move from a larger level of dependence on our programs to complete independence and self-sustainability within the community. The Follow Up Program does a variety of really neat things, including holding reunion events and sending birthday cards through to very practical crisis intervention and all of the other components that you can imagine.
We've included the stats here, association-wide, and as an association we consider ourselves to have over 2,100 active clients. Now for a community and for a province that still tends to consider itself not to have a large issue on homelessness by many people's opinion, to acknowledge that here in HRM there are over 2,100 active clients through our association alone is really a wake-up call.
Number of active follow-up clients at any given cycle in a year. The people who would be involved with us actively in the course of a year is - probably about 359, and that tends to hover around the same average yearly. Attendance at reunion events is really high; it's a strong indication of the importance of the role that we've played and of the connections that we've made. It's often the case that when we have a summer barbecue or a get-together over the holiday season at Christmas that we have just an incredible show, and average around 103. Again, percentage of male clients within the Follow Up Program, 53 per cent, and female clients, 47 per cent.
I'm going to ask Steven Mabey who, for a long-standing period of time, has been our treasurer and has worked diligently to protect our financial health and to ensure that we make prudent and very efficient decisions on our financial side, which is also a strong commitment of ours - in his life beyond Phoenix he is the Chief Operating Officer of Stewart McKelvey Stirling Scales, so we've really benefited from Steve's corporate experience as well - I'm going to ask him at this point if he would speak to the essential nature of our community support. After that, we have, of course, 1,000 other things that we would like to get to but are respectful that there may be lots of questions and opportunities by means of those questions to get to some of those points. After Steve, we will turn it back over to you.
MR. STEVEN MABEY: One of the issues that I think Phoenix Youth Programs had to face early on was that there are much - pardon the use of the term - "sexier charities" or organizations to be involved in. It's easy to become involved in the IWK, it's motherhood and apple pie and people like that, and the Phoenix Youth Program is addressing the needs of a group of human beings who may not necessarily be popular, whether because of their dress or their appearance in society or how some people feel they conduct themselves, or basically because it's easier to look the other way when you see a homeless youth on the street.
We had to do some work, and we've been blessed with a core group of volunteer support that's been important to us all along, but at Phoenix we had to, I think a number of years ago, figure out how we could, at the same time - and I feel like Paul Harvey doing the rest of the story now - these people could go out and do the wonderful work they do, we had to get some practical organizational structure in and some business, and I certainly won't call it expertise, but business management so that we were a credible organization. I remember four years ago, when I was fortunate enough to be asked to come on the board, they were scrambling to find people to come on the board, and I'm pleased to report this year that I think they have more people who want to come on the board than are necessary for the replacements.
So board support has been important, but we've had to earn our way that way. I think that's important, and I don't say that from a negative perspective, that woe is us for having earned it. Four years ago we made a conscious decision that we were going to put our house in order, and that included putting our financial house in order. Before you can go and ask
for more money, both from the community - Sharon Avery sitting over against the wall has done an incredible, phenomenal job of bringing our donations from over a three-year period of 270 to 330 or 340 this year, a 22, 23 per cent increase in donations to a charity that still is not popular with the community. We have good, solid support. Those people who get involved stay committed and become passionate about us. Those people who are still on the outside are still wondering who and what is this Phoenix Youth Program.
Sharon has done an incredible job, but Sharon is one person and has been able to do that working with other passionate people. We put our financial house in order, we had some sins we had to confess to and we had to get organized. I think we have a group of staff people who came voluntarily, but kicking and screaming, into accounting and finance. Each person runs their department now. Everybody knows what their budget is. Everybody can tell you what, to the penny, has been spent in their budget, where they're going to go. I was not always the most popular person in the organization but, at the end of the day, we were going to be fiscally accountable and responsible.
MR. MACEWAN: You're not from Truro, are you?
MR. MABEY: No.
MR. MACEWAN: There was a professor named Mabey at the Truro Teachers College who taught mathematics and she would have been very much in approval of what you're saying right now.
MR. MABEY: It must be hereditary then. So, we put our financial house in order, we've trained staff on budgeting and those aspects because we also knew, given the finances, the financial support we were receiving from Community Services, that we could not deliver the continuum of care that these people, professionals, wanted to deliver living just on fixed money from the province. So we had to go out and be reputable so that Sharon, when she walked into a foundation and was making a pitch for more money, was credible. We lacked credibility there for a while, we had good programs, we were working hard but we didn't have the last part of our equation in place. We now have people lined up, financial people who want to come on the board, we have a new treasurer coming on, we've just done, I think, some things right and, certainly not me, it's the staff who bore the brunt of it and got to it. So I think our donations will keep coming.
At the same period of time in which we have raised our donation level 22.5 per cent - pardon the pitch here - but we've had zero increase from Community Services on the funding that we get. We've not come hat in hand and said just keep funding us and we will just keep doing the work irrespective of the money. We're cognizant that there are lots of mouths at the table, there are lots of worthwhile causes out there to serve homeless youth, homeless adults, all kinds of societal ills that had to be addressed. I think it is important to understand
that this volunteer organization has done it on the backs of donations and donations in kind, not increased in their provincial contributions.
I think that's important to recognize when you talk about the community support. I think it's growing, I think it's wonderful that HRDC is, for lack of a better term, having a love affair with the Phoenix Youth Program right now, and there's not many programs that you couldn't go and say, gee, would you take a flyer on this with us, that they're not prepared to deal with this. The problem with that is that their programs are two-years long, so we've had to develop each of these programs as a stand-alone division. If the money runs out for the Educational Learning Centre, it's over, we can't afford to fund it out of Phoenix Youth Programs. So we have to make each one a stand-alone operation so that we can sever the ties that we had to sever the ties. We hope never to be in that position, that ruins the continuum of care that these people are providing to the homeless youth out there, but that's a fact of life and that's reality that we deal with every day when it comes to which bills you have to pay each day.
[9:45 a.m.]
We have a different board. Again, not to belittle the IWK-Grace, but it's an easy big target if you're working for small charities. Being on the board of Phoenix House is not a resumé builder. You do it because you want to do it, because you're passionate about it, but it's not going to be, oh, you were on the IWK-Grace board; it's a whole different connotation in HRM than being on the Phoenix Youth board. But what we've now come to have, we have some passionate people. We have a judge. We've had RCMP officers. We have different people on the board who bring their skill set and say, let's make this work.
I can't speak enough about the community support, when you can increase your donations, not just your cash donations, 22 per cent or 23 per cent over a three-year period, but the donations in kind. People are dropping off clothes, food. We could not feed our clients on the money that we have in the budget for food. If we didn't have food donations from Superstore and Sobeys and people like that, we couldn't feed them. We couldn't meet our food bills.
We couldn't clothe them the way we clothe them without Gap or other people, individuals and corporations, dropping off clothes and saying, here are some clothes, I hope they work. We just couldn't do that. We couldn't do it without donations in kind from telephone companies on phone service. I mean, it is, while we are very vibrant, I would be remiss if I didn't say we are a fragile house of cards here too. It we don't have that community support and if we don't keep the donations coming in, the Phoenix Youth Program of today will just be a memory six months from now. It collapses.
So it's critical in this day and age to understand and recognize that we do have strong corporate support and increasing strong corporate support because, right or wrong, we are becoming a charity of choice. Dreamscape next will be the second or third - we hope to get $50,000 in donations out of Dreamscape. People said, it's too high-end to be associated with the Phoenix Youth Program, but it's worked. It's been popular and we have been blessed to be the charity of choice for that organization and that activity. Sharon has a number of programs underway. Foundations are starting to talk to us. Before, it was a closed door. It just was not a charity that was going to get any foundation to even look at you.
I'm pleased to say that I think we've done it basically on the strength, 95 per cent on the staff and 5 per cent on the board, and the board is not a political board. Everybody leaves their hat and what their personal persuasions are and everything at the door and when you come to a Phoenix Youth Program board meeting, you're there to make Phoenix Youth Program work. I think that's been the strength because there's no question, we've had people that you know in their other lives have every political stripe and persuasion at the table, but it's left at the door and everybody has come together and worked and that's been important for us because we couldn't do what we do if people came in and wanted to kind of always do their own hidden agenda on everybody and wanted to make statements.
So we wanted to be very cognizant today when we came here because the Department of Community Services funding is important. We're not here to bad-mouth - financially anyway - the Department of Community Services and their contributions. We need more money; everybody needs more money. We're prepared to show why you should invest in us and I think we've demonstrated over the last three years a track record which I would stack up against any charity as to our fiscal responsibility and our willingness to put it all into service, not into people.
We have issues of staff people who are making between 80 per cent or 85 per cent of the provincial scale. It is hard to attract the best people when you can't even match the people who are funding your salary structure, but we do it. They come, again because they're passionate. You don't hire as often. You hire fewer people and they carry a bigger load, but you know that when they're there, they're there because they want to be, not because the money is keeping them, in any stretch of the imagination.
When we talk about community support, I talk about the staff as a community too because the staff makes this place go. The board, at best, is 5 per cent; it's the staff who have made this thing fly. It's Tim going to Ottawa and being prepared to deal with federal people. It's Sharon Avery working, you know, she hasn't seen a 40 hour week, maybe the first week she started with us she saw 40 hours and after that, demanding people like me said, well why can't we do that? It's only an extra couple of hours and there are 24 in a day and you need seven for sleep; you've got 17 left, let's go. So we've been somewhat taskmasters, but it's been worth it.
It's been, from a volunteer, and I would say from the board's perspective, I don't think anybody on the board has not been enriched by being in this. Like I say, they can go do anything they want, but when you come to this board and, from a personal perspective, when you manage lawyers all day and then you get to go to a charity like this, it's a nice contrast, it's a great grounding in reality. It's important. I guess I spoke longer than I was supposed to, so I will stop now.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: Paul, did you want to start? Maureen.
MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: Well, it's really nice to see you, Tim, even though I was late, and I apologize for that. I want to start by saying that of course I know many of the staff at Phoenix House, and everything that Mr. Mabey has just said is absolutely true. I have been privileged, I guess, to teach a fair number of the staff in the different programs, and I don't think you will ever find a greater group of people in terms of their passion and their commitment for these issues. I've watched the variety of programs grow over a long period of time.
One of the things that you certainly alluded to but we didn't have an opportunity to talk about in any detail that I would like to know about from your vantage point and perspective is the legislative gap around 16- to 19-year-olds in the Province of Nova Scotia. During the winter, there was a large national study released, and it made reference to the fact that Nova Scotia is one of only two provinces in the country that fails to provide legislative protection through child welfare for young people who are 16 to 19. That has certainly been something that has been of concern to me for a long time, given that I tell people I was the adolescent social worker at the Nova Scotia Hospital on the Adolescent Service Unit there back in the 1980s.
This is something that folks like yourselves have tried for a long time to get governments in this province to address and come to grips with in terms of the gap in services for this particular group. I would like to know a bit more about what it is you would like to see government do in the province, with respect to legislative protection. Then, also, I would like to hear a bit more about the problems around mental health services, because when the Adolescent Service Unit at the Nova Scotia Hospital was there, there were 30 in-patient beds for youth in this province. That service has disappeared. As far as I know the IWK and the QE II have a very small number of in-patient beds.
If you're looking at 60 per cent of your visits, mental health-related, this is very high. I've asked the Minister of Health these questions in the Legislature, and he tells me that the new drug therapies are what allow people to be maintained in the community. Well, I'm sorry, you don't want to have kids 16 to 19 medicated up the ying-yang and put out on the street to try to cope and live their lives. It seems to me that we're really missing the boat on mental health services for adolescents, and we need to do something about that. So there you go.
MR. CROOKS: We're happy to speak to both of those. Do you have a standard length of time for responses?
MADAM CHAIRMAN: No, except that we're supposed to be out of here by 11:00 a.m.
MR. CROOKS: It's a good reminder. You've asked us two pieces, as you can imagine, that we're particularly passionate about. I will address the first with an invitation to my two counterparts to jump in at any time, and then direct the second to Patti. It's quite incredible, in fact not very well-known, that in the Province of Nova Scotia if you're a 17-year-old individual who comes into need for the first time, then God help you. There is no legislation that dictates or necessitates by automatic entitlement that you receive support.
The Act, which is relevant, the Children and Family Services Act, speaks to, and it's primarily Section 14 and Section 19, the ability of the minister that they may apply resources to address the needs of that young person so that if there is a certain consideration or benevolence that's present in a front-line worker that there may be some resources applied. That is, as you can imagine, qualitatively, quantitatively different than a young person within the Province of Nova Scotia having what should be an automatic entitlement to appropriate supports.
I really want to make this clear, we're not talking about young people who "don't like the rules at home" and have a safe environment that's comfortable and supportive and they just don't want to be in at 10:00 p.m. If those young people exist, they are not of the 2,100-plus that we have ever seen at Phoenix House. I cannot drive that home strong enough. They do not exist in our client group. If it was ever the case that a young person came and truly disclosed that that was the only issue, we would say go home by 10:00 p.m. We just don't see those individuals. We see individuals who are survivors of extremely severe experiences that range from mental health issues, perhaps their own, perhaps within the family, to significant levels of sexual abuse and physical abuse and, of course, emotional abuse laced throughout.
We, because we're a port city, see a high level of organized activity around the sex trade and around the drug trade. So we know that often young people who are very vulnerable in very short order fall prey to the predators who have established themselves in that world and take our young person in and without immediate and appropriate, effective intervention then that situation just gets worse and worse and worse. So we always argue, because the concern sometimes for those of us who have a social work background, is that we don't tend to the business case of this, and we make a really strong point that the business case of this is around front-end investment.
We know the longitudinal studies done in Canada and the U.S. that talk about for every dollar you invest that roughly a $7 savings is had on the back end. We know those to be true and so we make the business case in terms of shrewd investments. We live and thrive and are vibrant as an organization solely because we understand the importance of shrewd investments. So we understand the importance of shrewd investments but we also understand the human cost, at the top of everything else, about not providing appropriate supports.
So, Maureen, I'm not exactly clear of the report that you're referring to. I am clear that it has come to attention again in recent times as a large result of the National Youth In Care Network and their study and review of provinces, of which Nova Scotia certainly came under fire, in combination with Ontario and Newfoundland and Labrador, about the lack of appropriate legislation to ensure a very fundamental, primary level of support for all of the citizens of this province. So it's that that causes us concern. What we would like to see done there is, by gesture, a very simple thing. We would like to see the child welfare Act that governs primarily 16 and under and all of the rights and privileges thereof extended until the age of 19. We want those services to exist and to be in place fully and to be moved up to the top age range of 19, which is the age at which the adult system of income assistance is then accessible and eligible to individuals.
We do not want the reverse to happen. It's not helpful because of the nature of the needs and the vulnerability or the marginalization of the young people who fall in that 17 and 18 age range. We do not want the adult system to be dropped down to 16. It's not comprehensive enough. The supports are not large enough and it does not allow for the kinds of interventions that we believe are needed. So by way of an answer, it's really essential to us, not only does it apply to a young person within that age range, it compromises us as an association to get the level of funding that's required to be as effective as we need to be in order to do the work that we need to do. It's as simple as that and because the legislation is not there and not activated, it compromises our ability to receive funding in a certain way at a certain level that allows us to do the kinds of things that we do.
[10:00 a.m.]
Steve touched on it very briefly, but you can see the level of community investment, it's huge. It's at an all-time high - $355,000 in straight cash is our fundraising objective from the community, from the private sector and corporate sector this year. You add to that $250,000 or thereabouts, the value of donations in kind. We have three homes, our largest homes are owned by St. Paul's Home - again a local foundation, a wonderful, wonderful group - that we estimate are well over $150,000 in value in terms of if we were to rent or to lease that space on an ongoing basis and that's just three of our properties and that does not include the value of professional service that's also donated, if our people, our clients were on the child welfare side, the services that we would pay for and ensure were in place as part of our continuum of support for them.
So it's both a blessing and a cause of concern the level of support that we have. It allows us to be extremely well entrenched within the community and have a very high level of support as a result, but also compromises us that should that wane at any time, should we have another world experience that causes people to retreat and be concerned and not be forthcoming with their money, then we feel it in an immediate kind of way and it's not a stretch. After 9/11 the media buzz was that donations, donations as far as we could track, were up to relief orders primarily and to the Red Cross and to the groups that were doing the kind of front-line response either specifically in New York or here at home and weren't up - we did not see it in terms of us being a non-profit organization.
We had just launched what is our biggest individual donor appeal just prior to that and it was down by almost 20 per cent as a result of 9/11 which is very atypical for us and so we know that an event like that can cause immediate concern and so we look for a higher level of funding and more stability in funding, not only in terms of years out that it's guaranteed for, but the mechanisms by which it is advanced is also a significant issue to us. So all of those pieces eventually come home and are tied to the issue of the legislation gap for 16-year-olds to 19-year-olds.
MR. MACEWAN: What is the name of the Act that you thought should be extended up to 19-year-olds?
MR. CROOKS: Children and Family Services Act.
MR. MACEWAN: Children and Family Services Act.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: You asked about the mental health question?
MR. CROOKS: Yes, sorry, so we will pass it over. Steve has just reminded me there's also a significant point in there that we would like to make which is the duality of the funding process. We could have a child who's a young person, who's 17, and receiving support under the child welfare system and a young person who has received some level of support through the adult system of income assistance and the discrepancy there is huge. It's huge in terms of what you're entitled to and funded for clothing or what you're entitled to and funded for mental health supports, as an example, access to a councillor, a paying proposition, and so that's really significant. We can literally have one kid in one bedroom in Phoenix House and a kid in the next room and have very different levels of funding and one who needs to go through our donations and one who has the ability to provide appropriate clothes for themselves. So it's not lost on us.
MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: This is a young person who came into the child welfare system before they were 16?
MR. CROOKS: Yes.
MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: Who the agency maintains as a ward, versus somebody who hasn't been in that situation, who at 17 comes into your service and they're in precisely the same circumstances, but funding is available for one youth and it's not for the other.
MR. MABEY: It's huge. The financial gap is huge between the funding and what we have to do to try to get clothes and bus passes, simplistic as that, for the child who comes in at age 17 and has not been a ward of the province.
MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: Dental care, eyeglasses and clothing.
MR. MABEY: All of it versus somebody who was there at age 16, comes in and it's paid for, and how do you explain to two 17-year-olds living in the same house you can do this and you can't do this or we will get there, but it will be a slower process. I mean, it just creates havoc and talk about human dignity, I'm a lesser person because I wasn't a ward of the province when I was 16.
MR. CROOKS: Because I wasn't in crisis a year earlier.
MR. MABEY: Exactly.
MS. MELANSON: Or I was but I didn't have the courage to talk to anybody about it.
MR. CROOKS: So I will turn it over to Patti, on the mental health side, to speak to that issue. I will say just very quickly what we've really appreciated, and even more so in recent times, is an extremely positive connection with people working in the mental health field, both on the adult side and the child and youth side, and we interpret that as identifying a large understanding that there's a large acknowledgment of the need for appropriate mental health services for this population. So there's also a large acknowledgment of the shortness of resources to adequately address that issue, but what has been interesting is, on a professional partnership level we've worked, as is always our inclination, very effectively with both sides to make sure that with the resources we have we can provide wraparound services to the best possible degree. Our ability to do that is largely compromised and that's what I will ask Patti to speak to, as well as the kinds of mental health issues we struggle . . .
MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: Can I just ask for a clarification? Do you get Department of Health funds for your health clinic and does it come through the department if you get it, or does it come from the capital district?
MR. CROOKS: The Department of Health directly to the funding vehicle of the IWK, who is our partner on that piece and it pays for Patti's activities.
MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: Okay. Thanks.
MS. MELANSON: My activities? (Laughter)
I'm not quite sure what the knowledge level is around mental health and mental illness, so I'm just going to talk very briefly about that. Emotional distress and psychiatric problems are probably three times more common in youth who are homeless or street-involved than youth who are living in supported home lives. So that just hopefully begins to set the context for you. After that it's really important to understand that the first onset of psychosis is quite common in males, and quite common in males who are between ages 18 to, say, 23 - people who have the potential to have a psychotic illness, and what I mean by that is psychosis can lead to other things.
So psychosis then kind of translates to schizophrenia. It can even translate to severe depression, and it can also translate to bipolar manic. Those are terms that maybe you're familiar with. Bipolar is severe mood changes, and we're not just talking happy one day and sad the next day, we're talking, you know, I can go play with the Montreal Canadians one day and then four days later be so suicidal that you need to be hospitalized because you can't ensure your own safety - or maybe there are larger times in between, but when I talk about mental illness that's what we see in our young people. I'm not talking about youth who just really don't want to get out of bed today, I'm talking about youth who are severely, have chronic persistent mental illnesses.
What happens, and you have to kind of, I think understand the context, is that with mental illness, if you have the potential for mental illness - and lots of us do, a very high percentage of the population have mental health concerns or mental illnesses, so I mean we're talking us in here, we're talking the entire population - what can happen is that for a young person who is homeless or not living in supported living arrangements, they increase their risk. And I don't say that in a blaming way, but their risks become increased because of the kinds of behaviours that they engage in and the sorts of things that they engage in might be heavy drug use. Heavy drug use will bring on a psychotic episode. It just fast-tracks it, if you will, and then it keeps it going if the way that you cope with that illness is through drug use and drug abuse.
So that's certainly one of the things that we see, and not always, okay? But that's certainly important for you to understand, that even though the person at 18 who's experiencing their first psychotic episode, it probably was going to happen for them, but other things, being homeless, being without food, using drugs, living in abusive situations, those are all stressors that just kind of fast-forward it. The wait lists for mental health services is extremely long. The 16- to 19-year olds we serve and, as mentioned, if they're not within the child welfare system then we're kind of going here to there to everywhere to try to get them service. The services that are free - this is central referral at the IWK - and they will stand behind the stat also - they have upwards to a six-month to a nine-month wait.
So that's for youth who are experiencing depression and who are maybe self-harming. The youth who have severe mental illnesses, there are supports in place through the IWK and through what's known as the shared care program, shared care model through the IWK and the North End Community Health Centre. Again, we're still talking waits, not as long for severe mental illness, but it's really, really difficult to get youth to use the services because the services are not set up in the way that addresses the context of that young person's life.
I will give you a little example of that. There a young woman who has a list of diagnoses that would probably go as long as your arm. How many of those apply to her, I question, but they started at an early age because she's a system kid and she has kind of kept those, you know? One of the things that she really, really hates is going to the hospital - you can imagine - she has spent a lot of time there, sometimes in a forced manner. So for her to have her weekly appointment with her psychiatrist is a pretty stressful time. She often forgets it - wink-wink, nod-nod. The reason she forgets it is because she's been pretty unsupported and the other reason she forgets it is because she doesn't want to go to the hospital.
So I drive up Spring Garden Road looking for her the other day because that's the only way that I'm going to get her to come to the appointment. I find her hanging out at the library and say, did you remember your appointment? She came with me and said, oh yeah, I forgot it and thanks so much and she was really grateful. I think what she was more grateful of was not that I reminded her of her appointment to go to the hospital to see her psychiatrist - because she really didn't want to do that - I think what she was really grateful for is that somebody actually wanted her to get there too.
Those are the kinds of things and if we had the opportunity to provide services that were more street-based, that were more, I guess, based within the context and within the lives of the youth that we serve, then I think we'd see better - and I hate this word, but - compliancy, around stuff.
The other point I want to make too and Maureen talked about medication, if a youth does have a severe mental illness, they do need medication. Lots of the medications that are available that Maureen probably knew about a number of years ago when she worked in the Nova Scotia Hospital in the adolescent unit, were very sedating medications. Extremely sedating. They put people in kind of the staring catatonic state and they walked around and probably weren't very aware of their world. The medications that are available now for psychosis and schizophrenia are much better. However - I'll just throw this at you - if they're on income assistance, some of those medications aren't covered by Pharmacare. So even though they have their insurance and they have Pharmacare, the medications aren't covered for it and so then it's the fast track of how do I get this medication for this person?
We've managed to partner with a number of very, very good spots within the community - the North End clinic, the shared care model, there's a wonderful pharmacy in Musquodoboit who does great things like blister pack medications for youth - they come in
these little individual blister packs and they don't charge us for that, they provide little medication alarm alerts so that they can be reminded to take their medications, so we're really trying to look at the whole picture. I hope that addresses some of what you needed.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: Mr. Pye.
MR. JERRY PYE: Thank you, Madam Chairman, and I don't think I'm imposing on someone. I'm going to be somewhat brief because I have to leave and I thought that maybe I would not get a chance to question.
First, I didn't know that it was as simple as just extending the age of the children in the Children and Family Services Act in order to cover them. I thought that we might be looking at some legislative change to deal directly with legislation on youth issues and so on. However, if that's as simple as it is, then we can certainly look at changing or extending the age limit to be covered under the Act.
[10:15 a.m.]
I guess the concern that I had is that when you spoke earlier, you talked about the growing needs and the growing concerns around youth. You also stated there was an increasing demand and the need was at an all-time high. Those were the kind of phrases that you used when you originally started out and I'm wondering, is that because of the existing environment out there, if you want to ask that kind of question? The pressures that are now placed upon families because of the demands out there, that you're seeing the increased number of youth coming and seeking services and shelter. Also, to Mr. Mabey, with respect to fundraising ventures, I'm very pleased to see that you were able to get a 22 per cent increase in funding over the last year, but my concern is that's not going to be consistent and it's not going to continue. The reason I say that is because government in its bent towards reducing the annual deficits and reducing the debt, tend to offer less funding to agencies and organizations so they're out there competing for all the entities - service clubs, the foundations and all - which are limited in their ability to fund raise.
I guess therein lies a concern because we know that transition homes have maxed their points out of fundraising. Children's intervention centres have maxed their points out of fundraising and we do know that a lot of money that was normally raised through casino nights and auctions is now money that's taken in by way of the casinos that are government-run entities now. I'm just wondering, is there any thought around that whole notion of how you keep pace with one, your fundraising venture, because of government's inability to continue to provide the funding; and, two, what are the pressures with respect to the increasing demands and the all-time needs out there that you see? Just briefly if you can.
MR. CROOKS: I will be brief. I think you've spoken to it already. It's exactly that. A lot of change in recent times has put increased pressure on families who are already living, in many cases, below the poverty line. I will capture it in one line for you like this - some years ago a young person had their first meeting with somebody at the centre and the question was asked - the presenting issue question that we like to ask as social workers - what brought you to this point, what has brought you to our door and what has put you in need. The young person thought for a moment and then very seriously and very intensely answered, I ate the last can of tuna and I got kicked out of the house.
It's that final line that families exist on here, oftentimes on a day-to-day basis. Finally that young person had reached an age where the parent felt they couldn't cope anymore and it was literally the straw that broke the camel's back and so they were kicked out of the house and hadn't the skills to manoeuver and manage the world so they quickly landed on our doorstep. The problem is, from the time that happens where a family who is often a loving family, completely overwhelmed and not supported by a system in the way that it should be, kind of breaks and there's a breaking point and someone's put out. We're concerned about the delay period from when that happens to when they first access us and the things that can put a young person at harm, set them back in their development or compromise them completely, if not put their life at risk, are really great. We feel that pressure and try to respond to it on a day-to-day basis.
So, in the mix are all of those kinds of issues and it's not coincidence that with the growing volume and growing demand come the increase in mental health needs that we've seen and intensification of those, the increase in substance abuse and substance-use issues, and all of the things that accompany living with that level of anxiety and that level of stress and a complete absence of appropriate resources. So, just very quickly, that's what I would say to that and I will let Steve speak to the other.
MR. MABEY: We have a number of funding issues, and you're absolutely correct, on the house of cards that we're continuing to build upon, and we have some things with the Department of Community Services that we've had to remove. For example, there are a number of organizations who provide care services that don't fundraise completely. We think, from our perspective, fundraising makes us a stronger organization so we're not trying to say don't make us fundraise, let us just have big grants and not do anything. We think fundraising is important. It's tough and it's a smaller pie in some ways because there's more mouths at a table. The United Way is booting out charities and they're looking for the same money and all those things, so it's maxed out.
Point two is, the current funding arrangement with the province requires that for every dollar over $250,000 that we fund raise, we're supposed to lose $1 in funding. So where's the incentive to go out and fund raise above $250,000? Now, to date we've refused to give them the money back and basically, they've agreed to our stonewalling and accept that calling Steve is a waste of your time, so don't bother. But it's in our contract, for every
dollar we fund raise above $250,000, we lose a dollar in funding. I think that's disincentive, that's not incentive to make yourself fiscally responsible. We tend to ignore it.
It's a real challenge. The pie is smaller and all those types of things, but I think that at some point in time, from our perspective anyway, the government has to look at and Community Services has to look at how it puts its money out to all the groups, and the groups have to come together. There's great inconsistency. I now sit on another one, the Association for the Development of Children's Residential Facilities, at the Reigh Allen Centre in Dartmouth. There's a facility that's fully, 100 per cent funded, they do no fundraising. I'm getting involved there and saying, this is crazy, you people should fund raise.
It's not nice to ask people for money, but on the other hand I think it contributes to the sense of passion and commitment to the organization if you have to go out and put a little personal pride on the line and ask for some money and ask for donations. I'm saying that between the two funding, the funding is inequitable. One doesn't have to do anything other than get - I think it's 75 per cent government grant, 25 per cent per diems, and then you have the Phoenix Youth Program which is prominently all, I would say, two-thirds per diem and one-third grant, and then it has to do fundraising and all those things.
I think there are some inconsistencies in how these different organizations are treated across the board by the Department of Community Services that need to be looked at. Who's to say that you can't provide a better quality of service, overall, if there was some sensibility brought to the funding and to the groups, but it is a house of cards.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: Thank you very much. Barry Barnet.
MR. BARRY BARNET: A couple of things. One is that this morning, and the last couple of weeks - and I believe it's been Thursday mornings - CBC has highlighted various youth throughout different programs. This morning, actually, was one of your clients, I believe. I find it very helpful to put a real person and a perspective on that. I think that's kind of the thing that I think as a group you should be encouraging, more media attention to the particular clients so that people can get a more human side of what it is that you do. It certainly was enlightening to me, the CBC program article this morning on the radio.
A couple of things. One is that from a curiosity perspective, you didn't really talk about this but do you track where your clients come from, geographically? I know that in my community there is a perception that we don't have a homeless issue at all. In fact, I suspect we simply transfer it to the city.
MR. MACEWAN: Downloading. (Laughter)
MR. BARNET: We download it, yes. Where do your clients come from, geographically?
MS. MELANSON: I will let you cover geographically in a minute, but I want to just address one point with you that's really important. I worked in Spryfield at the Mainland South Teen Help Centre for eight years. A number of people, I think in smaller communities, think that there's no homelessness here. Homelessness has a different face in small communities, and that's really important for us to understand.
There aren't individuals on street corners wanting to squeegee your windows and panning for money in small communities, what they're doing is they're couch-surfing. They're going from place to place to try to live at a friend's house for a couple of weeks until they kind of wear out their welcome there, and then they're going to another friend's house to live there. They're going to an aunt's place, things kind of erupt there, they end up somewhere else. There's this constant chaos of just trying to find a place, and maybe you get a spot for two weeks or maybe you get it for a month, but then it's upheaval again, and you're going again. That was my experience working in Spryfield, which I think might be, in many ways, maybe the same for the youth in your community.
MR. CROOKS: Yes, I would agree with that. That's certainly been our experience. To speak to the kind of demographics of the population, on average - and it varies a bit year to year, as you can imagine - about 75 per cent of our clients come from HRM and the outlying area. The remaining 25 per cent come from other rural areas; of that, probably 22 per cent, 23 per cent, rural areas of Nova Scotia, and the other small percentage, other areas outside of Nova Scotia.
Increasingly, though, we're concerned about the trends, and the trends are that, in Halifax, a couple of things are happening. Young people are migrating to what they believe
to be the promised land of Halifax, if they have a problem and they're living in a rural area. So that's a significant issue. We've worked extensively, increasingly and now extensively, with other groups in rural areas to share our expertise, to share our kind of evolution and the learning that we've had through that process and to provide whatever help that we can. Both within the province and throughout the Maritimes and beyond we've been sought for that expertise.
Increasingly, what's of concern to us is the trend of people in need in rural areas coming to Halifax, and beyond that the increasing trend, even more so within Atlantic Canada, Halifax being the last stop before young people head to Toronto or Montreal. When you talk about some of the pressures that we have as an organization to work with the funding that is not as extensive as it should be within our organization and the pressure that that creates, on the other side is service delivery; the pressure that we feel is huge. We know that, for many, we are the last stop and we have a very limited window of opportunity to make the kind of connection we need to make so that that young person, completely ill-
equipped, does not head off to Toronto or Montreal. I can tell you with great emotion the amount of times that we've had an opportunity but not had enough resources or enough flexibility in our programming and because of limited resources, lost somebody.
I think of a young woman I was close to, in particular, who headed to Toronto and in very short order we discovered was working within the sex trade and was eventually killed. We live with that pressure every day. It's huge. We know that there's about a six-month curve there, on average, between someone heading to Toronto or Montreal and us hearing really bad news back, either by way of other young people that we know or through direct connections with people who deliver service. Covenant House in Toronto, we're closely connected with and, in more recent times, have established a new connection with Dans la rue in Montreal. So oftentimes we hear this. We know in a vibrant, trackable kind of way that it comes back to the shortfall in legislation and our inability to respond in a way that could have been more appropriate for that young person, that is directly tied to our limited resources. It's significant pressure.
MR. BARNET: I suspected that to be your answer, specifically in terms of the geographic area, where people come from, and what the situation is with people going to Toronto and Montreal. I recall clearly, in the early 1980s when I was leaving high school and looking for opportunities, the urban myth was that great things happen in Calgary. All you have to do is show up and people are going to look after you. In fact, I suspect that Calgary has dealt with a lot of the issues that we're dealing with now as a result of that myth that you simply showed up and they gave you a job and they looked after you and everything is going to be great. I suspect that's some of the mindset that's bringing people to Halifax in terms of just show up and you will be looked after. We have to do something about that, there's no question about that.
My final question is with respect to HRDC. I'm reluctant to knock HRDC because they do good work with the youth, but one of the biggest criticisms that I've heard is something along the lines of what you said here today, the fact that these things expire. They don't have any shelf life at all. I know in my community in the last year or six months, HRDC has been out there with a pot of money, just throwing it around and doing good things, but nothing that's going to last beyond the customized, self-designed program to fit an application that came in. There are a couple of programs, specifically, that are doing great work, but there's no expectation that this thing is going to go on beyond its application life and the problem is that whether they're good, bad or otherwise, they expire and nothing takes its place, or pressure comes on other levels of government or the community to continue this on. To me it seems we're creating false hopes and expectations by not having programs that have shelf life beyond the original application.
I don't know how we can convince them that there is probably a better way to spend their money, rather than simply going out on these one-offs that last six months or eight months and only help that small group of people that are there that day. I think that there's
a better approach to developing something that is going to have a long-term impact. I guess what I would like to know, is that what you're saying with respect to HRDC, the two-year program, and do you see that as an issue as well?
[10:30 a.m.]
MR. CROOKS: It's always an essential with us, as you can well imagine and as you have already spoken to. Anytime we sit down with either level of government the thing that we want to drive home is we cannot be here today and gone tomorrow. We have actually done more harm if that is to be our approach than if we were never here. So you can't bring light back to someone's eyes and talk to them about renewed hope for tomorrow and then follow it the next day with an announcement of, oh, bad news, we're out of here. You just can't do it. Ethically, we're bound not to approach our business in that way. So the strategic positioning that we've done always around our finances, as Steve had talked to earlier and as I will repeat now, is it's essential to us that when we meet with either level of government that we're very clear about the cycle with which the funding will run and what our needs are within that process.
We're extremely pressed, also, in different ways, depending on how the funding works in terms of how our non-profit organization needs to run. So we need the ability as we expand to make sure that we have money for our own infrastructure, that we aren't just being cavalier about, sure, let's add another program and keep our administrative resources the same. It just becomes irresponsible to do so and becomes an extreme risk to the association. So there are considerations not only around the longevity of funding, but the kinds of things that can be funded. As Steve has said, we've had an extremely positive working relationship with HRDC and certainly have matching mandates in terms of the kind of service delivery that we're wanting to do, but whether on a federal level or on a provincial level, it's always a magnificent concern for us, as Steve has spoken to, in the period in which, since 1998, we haven't received, to our core funding, any increase from the province.
MR. MACEWAN: Since 1998?
MR. CROOKS: Since 1998. We've increased our own fundraising objective, as Steve has also noted - I want to hold them up side by side - by 24 per cent or beyond. I mean, that's just straight cash, those figures. That doesn't even speak to our increase of donations in kind. So we're saying, we're keeping our end of the deal, we're hustling like wild here and we have a good level of community support and we're noted now, nationally, for our innovation and for our effectiveness in working with this population. We just hosted Street Kids International out of Toronto, who said, when I asked the question innocently, how did you know to contact us - we held a forum with people province-wide to come and talk about youth issues - they responded, you're known in Toronto and we were told there is one choice, it's Phoenix, call them.
Again, we share that, not because it's an opportunity to pat ourselves on the back, but we share it because here is an opportunity within this community to point to a group that's creative and innovative and having great success and to say here's a good test run of how we should look at some long, secure funding to see the real impact of providing that on the front end and then building an exact business case on the back end about the savings that that represents to the health system on mental health issues in terms of labour market activity involvement for our youth population - and we know the employment stats for youth in Nova Scotia, they're abysmal - to all of those other considerations that when you track where that actually lands, it represents significant cost savings. We know it to be true because we've known the kids over a long period of time.
The young man who I told you about earlier who put me in the dunk tank announced on that same day, I'm graduating community college. Now that kid hadn't been out of his house in ages when he first came to us, and had no aspirations and no hope of any educational pursuit at all. He finished while he was with us. He was the first male graduate while staying at Phoenix House, through massive support on our end, a lot of hard work on his part, but massive support on our end, and then comes and announces, I've graduated community college and I'm going back for more training because now I have a dream of what I want to do in the end. We think, there it is. It took awhile to play out, but there's the business case. Without that kid being introduced to us I guarantee you he'd be on assistance until the end of time.
MR. MABEY: On the funding, I want to make it clear that when we talk to HRDC - and there have been a number of breakfast meetings where I've kept my hands warm in their pocket - we've always brought Community Services with us, Deputy Minister Ed Cramm and their senior staff, we've said, we don't want to go down this path without our other partner, which is Community Services, and we want you to understand what we're doing. To the extent that you can ever get any kind of funding commitment from them we've said, this is a two-year HRDC project, we don't really want to go down here unless there's some warm, fuzzy feeling that Community Services thinks this is a valid project and wants to be there at the end of two years, because somebody's going to have to fund it, unless HRDC renews its program. Every one of these types of programs, we've brought them to the table and tried to get a partnering of the two sources, sometimes successfully and sometimes we will wait and see in a year's time what commitments people have really made to the effort.
MADAM CHAIRMAN: Cecil Clarke.
MR. CECIL CLARKE: Obviously the funding dilemma, you have indicated in terms of your own internal structuring and positioning yourself to do that. Mr. Pye is not here, but one of his comments with regard to the province, and obviously the generosity and the social conscience of the federal government is only as large as the processes that it went through to give them the position to be there.
The other thing that I recogni