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Headquarters for help More funding needed for Tuk shelter, Healing Drum Society program
Kassina Ryder
Northern News Services
Published Monday, August 5, 2013
TUKTOYAKTUK
The Tuktoyaktuk's women's shelter needs more funding to keep up with demands for service, says its executive director.
Laura Boileau, the program facilitator for the Wek'eeakaa Healing Program, says the program offers free counselling for men who have used violence and abuse in relationships. - Katherine Hudson/NNSL photo |
Bessie Hagen said the Aimayunga Women and Emergency Foster Care Shelter is much more than a shelter for women and children in Tuktoyaktuk. It is also used as a homeless shelter for women with nowhere else to go, an advocacy office assisting with everything from applying for housing to using a Food Bank and a foster home for children.
Hagen said the shelter has become a headquarters for anyone in the community needing help.
"The government doesn't think of those things, what we have to go through as a shelter here," she said. "It doesn't necessarily have to be violence. We're just about everything here."
The shelter shut down in 2007 and was reopened in 2009, said Arlene Jorgensen, director of social programs with the Beaufort Delta Health and Social Services Authority.
Since it reopened, Hagen said the three-bedroom shelter has not only housed women and children fleeing violence, it is also used as a homeless shelter. Similar to communities in the rest of the territory, Tuktoyaktuk has few housing units and waiting lists are long. If a family arrives at the shelter in the dead of winter, staff can't simply turn them away.
"We have the homeless here," Hagen said. "We do take them in."
Only women, girls, and boys under the age of 12 are accepted, she added.
Hagen said staff regularly spend time linking those seeking help to available resources beyond the shelter's capacity.
"You're everything to them," she said. "You're looking for housing, you're looking for transportation, you direct them to counselling, to the health centre, to income support."
Hagen said the shelter receives a little less than $270,000 annually from the territorial Department of Health and Social Services to operate. The money is used to pay rent in the building, which is owned by the hamlet, provide for day-to-day costs and pay staff salaries.
The building, which Hagen said was built in the 1960s, needs regular repairs. She said the shelter has to apply for funding every year.
"I don't know why they can't fund us for three to five years," she said. "We never know if we're going to be open."
Hagen said as of mid-June, the shelter had four children in its care awaiting foster homes. It can sometimes take weeks to secure suitable homes, she said.
There are two full-time staff, including Hagen, and about nine casual workers. This allows the shelter to open whenever it's needed, which Hagen said has been steadily increasing.
"We've been busy daily almost since April," she said.
The majority of clients are women escaping violence in their homes. Hagen said she believes it's unfair women are tasked with finding secure shelter in a domestic violence situation. She would like to see resources allocated in another direction.
"The worst part is, what I really disagree on, is why does a women flee her home when a man can easily be removed?"
Working with men who have used violence and abuse in relationships is Laura Boileau, the program facilitator for the Healing Drum Society's pilot Wek'eeakaa Healing Program. Through the program, put on by the Coalition Against Family Violence and funded by the community justice division of the Department of Justice, men are offered free group or individual counselling.
"It's a program to find out what men want in their relationships and how the program can be helpful in moving them towards the kinds of caring, respectful relationships that they want," she said.
"The prevalence of family violence in the communities is enormous, we need to find effective ways to address that," said Joe Pintarics, executive director of the Healing Drum Society, adding the effects of alcohol abuse and violence are far-reaching.
He said now that the Nats'ejee K'eh Treatment Centre in Hay River is slated to close at the end of September, he believes the Healing Drum Society can help guide possible new programming in communities. The Department of Health and Social Services plans to redirect funding from the centre into on-the-land programming and mobile treatment.
"I'm hoping that it will mean we will have some kind of role in defining how the services are going
to be taking shape for the in-community portion," Pintarics said. "We've been doing that for a long time. I think
we have some expertise."
He said that expertise comes from years of working with individuals and communities. The Healing Drum Society was formally registered in 2004, but had been working with residential school survivors since the 1980s.
Pintarics said the society recognizes that family violence and alcohol are symptoms of deeper problems.
"Alcohol is essentially a painkiller," he said.
Abuses suffered at residential schools are often motivators for those who drink, he added. Helping individuals understand why they drink is key to helping them quit, he said.
"We need to find ways to engage every individual in the resolving of what is happening in their life," he said. "Every one of us is caught somewhere between the life we dream of for ourselves and the life we get."
Andy Langford, the health department's director of territorial social programs, said addictions and family violence are often caused by the same sources.
"You would have to look at all the factors that contribute to addictions, unemployment, poverty, the legacy of residential schools," he said. "There are all sorts of
social and economic conditions that contribute to addictions, so they would play a role in the incidents of family violence."
Pintarics said the society's Embracing Our Human-Nest program, which travels to communities delivering recovery programming for residential school survivors, is at risk due to a lack of federal funding.
"The Aboriginal Healing Foundation will end its existence as of this December, we are going to lose that funding," he said. "I would hate to see that wisdom that we've acquired over those years lost because the funding has shifted."
Pintarics said staff are now working on alternative sources of funding to keep the program going. He also said the centre is looking at expanding its other programming to include a possible healing lodge and a halfway house to assist men released from jail.
Langford said the health department is also working on a new campaign aiming to combat high incidences of family violence in the territory. The multimedia campaign is just at the beginning stages now, but will use Facebook, radio and print to reach as wide an audience as possible, Langford said.
The idea is to change people's attitudes toward violence and stop accepting it in their communities, Langford said.
The campaign is expected to launch before the end of the fiscal year, he said.
In the meantime, Hagen said she wants government representatives to visit the shelter she runs and experience what frontline workers see every day.
"The government should come and see for themselves," she said.
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