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Permanent day spaces for homeless Calgarians coming by July

February 19, 2025

Permanent day spaces for homeless Calgarians coming by July

Credit: Aryn Toombs, LiveWire Calgary

By this summer, unhoused Calgarians will have two new permanent spaces to get a shower, use a washroom, connect with community, and get trauma informed help and support.

The day spaces are intended to be year-round accessible, as an evolution of the City of Calgary and Calgary Homeless Foundation’s extreme weather response programming.

Jessica Cope Williams, Vice President of Community Impact for the Calgary Homeless Foundation, said that the new spaces came about as a result of what has been learnt from warming spaces operated across the city.

“What we’ve been learning through the last three years of the work is that a warming space is so much more than a space to warm up, and there is a need for safe, dignified, trauma-informed spaces for people to be at all year round,” she said.

“That really aligns with some recommendations that came out of the city’s Downtown Safety Leadership Table, about the need for people who are experiencing homelessness to be during the day, as other alternatives to parks, libraries, and transit.”

The two-year initiative is being launched as a partnership between the City of Calgary, the Calgary Homeless Foundation, Calgary Police Service, and the United Way of Calgary and Area.

One day space location will be in the downtown core, while a second will be located elsewhere.

Cope Williams said that both the locations, and the service provider that will operate them, would be announced in March. That process is being decided by an RFP.

“We are so fortunate in the city to have such extraordinary, very skilled, compassionate providers and services. That’s why it was really important for us to take this idea to community and say, ‘here’s kind of a general idea of what we want to see with day spaces. Now you tell us what you think this should look like,’” she said.

“We will be looking for a service delivery partner with expertise in serving this population. I think that’s the primary piece, and then really looking for a service provider who’s aligned with the idea of space as a service.”

Creating a safe space where unhoused individuals can receive appropriate supports

She said that meant creating a safe space where individuals would feel comfortable and receptive to receiving social support services.

The kind of support services that locations like libraries, parks, and Calgary Transit stations do not and cannot provide.

“That actually is a really simple concept. When you think about natural supports, how good it is to walk into somebody’s home and feel like you’re welcome there, that’s the experience we want people to have when they come into a day space,” Cope Williams said.

“They don’t have to ask, ‘hey, can I take a shower?’ It’s ‘hey, this is, this is our shower area.’ This is where you can pick out some supplies that you might need. Over here you can have a sandwich, and that’s all delivered, served up to them without them having asked for it, or having to feel like they have to sneak around.”

Another aspect is addressing the partnership approach, to ensure that the larger community feels safe from social disorder.

On Jan. 29, Calgary Police Commission heard from the Calgary Police Service that calls for social disorder were up by 76 per cent on Stephen Avenue, which coincided with increased reports of drug use, drug poisonings, anti-social behaviour, and garbage bin fires in alleyways.

“The Downtown Street Engagement Team (DSET) began daily deployments to provide visible police presence and learned that several social agencies were attending Stephen Avenue during the morning and dinner hours daily to hand out food and water,” CPS wrote in their report to commission.

“This coincided with reports of increasing numbers of unhoused persons congregating in front and inside of businesses in that area, resulting in confrontations with staff and customers and decreasing perceptions of safety.”

Deputy Chief Raj Gill said that during Feb. and March, the service would be putting a greater emphasis on Stephen Avenue and associated areas.

CPS statistics indicated that 315 referrals were made by the Calgary Police Community Engagement Response Team to the province’s Navigation Centre, and 44 by patrol officers, between Oct. 1, 2024 and Jan. 20, 2025.

Cope Williams said increasing the perception of safety from the public comes from having those day spaces available.

“We want to make sure, whether it’s a perception issue or an individual’s experience issue, we want to make sure that the space is there. That’s the bottom line. We’ve got to make sure the space is there,” she said.

“So we’ll keep working on taking that partnership approach and making it available for those folks. We know it’s a need, so we’ve got to respond to the need.”