Operation Come Home (OCH), an Ottawa organization that works with youth experiencing homelessness, is receiving $1.3 million from Health Canada to extend its counselling and substance use programs.
At a press conference in Ottawa on Monday, Yasir Naqvi, Ottawa Centre MP and Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health announced the funding, which will be allocated to a peer-led program and allow OCH to hire additional counselling and support staff.
The program, which supports youth aged 16-25, is led by peers with personal experience with homelessness or substance use and will deliver information, resources and harm reduction supports, first-aid and overdose response training, and ongoing access to social supports and counselling.
The staff will also work closely with hospital and treatment centre programs, Naqvi added, to deliver wraparound services.
“A lot of the time, when you talk about the work we’re doing at Operation Come Home, we talk about homelessness as a statistical problem, as a trend, and we sometimes forget the young people — the faces — that are impacted by the work we do,” said John Heckbert, executive director at OCH. “Publicly, it becomes abstract, but this is not abstract for us.
“These are our kids, and they need our help.”
Katie Price, the program coordinator at OCH, said the funding will allow the organization to hire five additional staff: four peer support case managers and one counsellor.
“This program is about saving lives. It’s about making sure the most basic need required is there,” Naqvi said. “And it’s about enhancing public and community safety.”
In an interview with Ottawa Compass, Heckbert said there are between 200 and 250 youth experiencing homelessness in Ottawa. OCH offers drop-in services that offer food and resources to youth, as well as long-term support and counselling. Before the funding announcement, OCH was only able to employ one case worker, serving about 15 or 20 youth with long-term case management. The additional staff hired with the Health Canada funding will extend the full capacity for case management up to about 100 youth, he explained.
“This is a game-changer for downtown, for sure,” Heckbert said. “I think it will have a measurable impact on the safety of young people that are accessing our programs.”
Combatting addiction and homelessness is a “long-term process” with a variety of factors, including family circumstances, disability and health concerns, poverty and mental illness, explained Heckbert.
“It’s not as though there’ll be an immediate reduction in overdoses, per se,” he said. “But over the course of the project — which for us is four years — there’s going to be a lot of really great progress made, and I think that it’s going to be the youth that are truly impacted.”
