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SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Hearts were warmed but fingers and toes were chilled this past Tuesday during an event to raise awareness of the struggle many Yellowknifers face finding affordable housing.

Maj. Jo Sobool, executive director of the Yellowknife Salvation Army, stands in front of a table of hats that were free for anyone who needed them at the National Housing Day's Yellowknife event. The toques were brought to Yellowknife as part of a Hats for Orphans campaign and any remaining were to be distributed in the Salvation Army’s holiday hampers, Sobool said. - Laura Busch/NNSL photo

An outdoor barbecue lunch marked National Housing Day, hosted in Yellowknife by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) and the Yellowknife Homelessness Coalition, to raise awareness about affordable housing. Similar events were held across Canada.

Homeless people, politicians, representatives of non-profit organizations and people from all sectors of the community gathered under a tent and shared a warm meal and conversation on land that will eventually be the Betty House transitional home for women.

"You've got to do something like this to bring all the different levels of people together," said Sandra Turner, CMHC corporate representative for the NWT.

Deputy mayor Mark Heyck, told the crowd how appropriate he thought it was to be standing in sub-zero temperatures talking about housing issues.

Dave Hurley, president of Habitat for Humanity NWT, later told Yellowknifer this was the organization's first public event in Yellowknife, although volunteers have been working on getting the non-profit group up and running for more than a year. The group hopes to become officially affiliated with the national Habitat for Humanity organization within a couple of weeks and plans to have its first community build this coming summer, Hurley said. Habitat for Humanity helps people build affordable housing.

People gathered around two fire pits to talk about issues less formally. Most conversations revolved around keeping warm - a never-ending issue for those living on Yellowknife streets during the winter months.

Epikghout Ekpakohak added wood to the fire as he talked about the difficulty of moving to Yellowknife from his hometown of Cambridge Bay, Nunavut. Ekpakohak works at the Yellowknife Tree of Peace and lives in the men's Aurora Oxford House, a facility which requires residents to remain sober and work towards bettering their lives.

He is now on a healing journey, he said, and hopes to get his life in order and travel to Vancouver Island on the west coast of Canada to visit loved ones who live on traditional land.

Ekpakohak was only one of the people to tell stories about homelessness and Yellowknife.

Per capita, the city has a dramatically larger homeless population than other major Canadian centres. Five per cent of Yellowknifers use emergency shelters, compared with 1.1 per cent of Torontonians, and just 0.5 per cent of the population in Halifax.

"With our housing, the very little housing that we have and the expensive housing that we have, often people find themselves homeless and have to access sheltering agencies," said Dayle Hernblad, homelessness co-ordinator for the Yellowknife Homelessness Coalition.

"Our vision is a community where nobody is homeless or marginalized," she said. "Basically, what we're all doing is working at it in different capacities and different agencies. And we work as a collaborative body on homelessness issues in Yellowknife and, really, virtually across the territory."

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