‘The homeless, they’re not here. You’re speaking on their behalf’

Roughly 100 people gathered on Wednesday night at the Tree of Peace Friendship Centre for a community roundtable on homelessness hosted by the City of Yellowknife.

Those in attendance included community members, city councillors, and one MLA, alongside representatives of the Yellowknife Women’s Society, Housing NWT, Salvation Army, NWT Seniors Society, local businesses and the GNWT.

A group of students from the University of Toronto also took part. A federal representative from the Reaching Home program was in attendance but did not speak at the event.

Throughout the evening, groups sitting at mixed tables were tasked to come up with answers to questions such as, “If down the road in 10 years, no plans worked, what would the Yellowknife homeless situation look like?”

At the end of discussion periods, a speaker from each table came to the microphone to share their ideas with the room.

One speaker, Georgina Franki, told the crowd: “The homeless, they’re not here. You’re speaking on their behalf.”

Franki, an advocate for homeless people who recently began work to establish a tent encampment in the city, said people without homes felt intimidated by the event.

In an interview afterward with Cabin Radio, Franki said that before the event, “There were quite a few [homeless people] that were in here, and they looked around, and they were intimidated.”

“This doesn’t look like homeless. It’s so full of white people making decisions for us, we’re gonna go,’” Franki said, characterizing how she believes people felt.

“They were shaking… it’s probably their trauma.”

Franki wants another roundtable for people who don’t have homes to share their thoughts.

“It would be nice if their voice is heard of what they go through on a daily basis, how to survive on the street, as they are being targeted by the drug dealers and by people who just don’t like homeless.” she said.

Another speaker, Tina Wrigley, told the crowd not enough Indigenous people were there.

Wrigley, who identified herself as a former day school survivor who had experienced homelessness, emphasized the importance of lived experience.

Wrigley is a student in the Indigenous Counselling program at Rhodes Wellness College. “I’m preparing myself to become an advocate for my community,” she told the crowd. “Give us a chance… put us in a facility where an Indigenous could help another Indigenous.”

Wrigley also emphasized the need for more supports and treatment centres to address mental illness. “That’s what we need to help our homelessness, to take care of the mental health.”

The event was facilitated by Wally Czech from the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, or CAEH.

Czech, a psychologist, estimates he has run about a dozen such roundtables at communities across Canada, along with similar events and training sessions for service providers on things like trauma-informed care.  

The roundtable events are usually attended by a mixture of city officials, people who work in the service organizations, and some community members, Czech said. “There’s always an under-representation of the people who we’re talking about. There’s never enough of the people who are actually experiencing homelessness that are here.”

After the event, Czech said, he’ll gather all of the information provided from the discussions and provide a report back to the city. The report will include “the general gist” of what people are feeling as well as recommendations for next steps.

In Thompson, Manitoba, the CAEH recently reviewed the entire community’s efforts to deal with homelessness, which included a meeting similar to the roundtable discussion in Yellowknife, then completed an extensive report with recommendations.

Thompson “took basically all of the recommendations from that and really started making some drastic, sweeping system changes,” Czech said.

Those changes included developing a lived-experience Leadership Council, which is “actually guiding most of the work from a coordinated system perspective. That was huge,” Czech said.

“It’s quite a unique and very cutting-edge thing to have basically all people experiencing or have experienced homelessness be kind-of directing the change.”

For Yellowknife, Czech thinks one of the key recommendations from the CAEH is going to be to “build upon the amount that the folks that are experiencing homelessness are involved at the table.”

“You heard the one lady say that they were intimidated to come… there’s got to be efforts made to mitigate that, so that they feel like they can share their thoughts and their voice.”

Mayor Rebecca Alty said the city was hosting the roundtable as an informal opportunity to have a community discussion, and to talk about what various levels of government – and residents – can do to help.

Alty said that while the city has received a lot of federal housing funding in the past few years, “we still need more.”

She told the crowd a “what we heard” report from the night’s discussions will go to city council and the GNWT, and will also be made available to the public.

Yellowknife Elder Emelda King, who opened and closed the event with a prayer, said she liked “the idea that people are coming together to address the issues.”

Homelessness will be an ongoing issue, King said. “I feel like they need to also dwell on the root causes of it.”

“I feel a lot of times they think of homelessness as just street people, but there’s a lot of people that are homeless, like the working poor,” King said.

“We need to address [all factors] to have a nice balance… rather than just concentrate on one, and not just put all the money in one big building that houses only a few.”