Six takeaways from a review of Yellowknife’s Street Outreach

“You can make more money working at Tim Hortons than you can being an outreach worker with this program.”

Consultant Scott Robertson said finding the right money to pay for an expanded Street Outreach program is crucial as he set out his evaluation of how things could improve.

Street Outreach provides safe rides and necessities like food to Yellowknife’s street-involved population.

More: A day in the life of Street Outreach

The program is currently run by the Yellowknife Women’s Society, which receives $360,000 in annual funding from the city.

For years, there have been calls to give the program more funding and ramp up the services it provides in a city of 20,000 where hundreds of people have no home.

“You only need to look at the current day shelter that no not-for-profit agency would take on, and so a government agency is running it at twice the cost as what they offered someone else to do it for,” said Robertson of the kinds of funding available for services like Street Outreach.

“How do you expect an agency to recruit and retain quality staff in a competitive marketplace?

“It also sends an important message – or maybe a negative message – to say to the most vulnerable people in our society: ‘We’re going to give you the cheapest possible resource we can find.'”

Over the past year, Robertson’s firm Triage Metrix studied Street Outreach to come up with ways it could do more and how it could be funded.

There were no easy answers but the report, extending to around 170 pages, tries to give council a way forward. The city has maintained that it cannot alone fund an improved Street Outreach and other levels of government must help.

Rob Warburton, a councillor since 2022, said Robertson’s evaluation of Street Outreach was “probably the most detailed and honest report we’ve read since I got here.”

Here are six of the most important things covered when Robertson presented the findings to council on Monday.

People really like Street Outreach

Robertson said Street Outreach is “highly valued by the members of the street community, by the business community, by city residents, and it’s a very important service.”

His company received more than 600 online responses from residents and spoke with businesses across the city alongside politicians, RCMP and municipal enforcement.

Robertson, a former nurse who “worked in just about every corner of the healthcare system,” described how valued Street Outreach is among local healthcare staff and said the program had provided nearly 8,400 rides last year alone, helping people get off the streets into a safe place.

But he warned the program is “currently being operated on a month to month basis,” adding that the Yellowknife Women’s Society was running Street Outreach at an annual deficit of $50,000 – and even then, the society might not be capturing the true cost.

He noted, too, that anecdotal evidence suggests Yellowknife’s population of people without homes “has increased substantially in recent years.”

Here’s what it could look like

As part of his evaluation, Robertson walked council through what Street Outreach could look like if you redesigned it from scratch.

He set out a two-year timeline for a new-look program to be established, while acknowledging that if an existing operator (like the women’s society) brought resources to the table, the time needed might be shorter.

The report’s main recommendations for an expanded program are:

• different operating hours;
• more outreach activities;
• more referrals to other agencies and case management; and
• more walkabouts or foot patrols.

His model would have operating hours of 12pm-12am, running later than the current hours. The program would need a well-maintained vehicle and a backup on standby, he said, acknowledging the various vehicle-related issues that have plagued the current program.

Street Outreach also needs a better system for triaging the people who need assistance, he said, raising the prospect of eventually establishing a dispatch system that could tie in to the one already used by the city.

“What we found is that the vehicle responded sort-of on a first-come, first-served basis, without necessarily being efficient in terms of, ‘Well, if we go to this end of town, we can pick up this group of people.’ It was a lot of back and forth,” he said.

“Some of those efficiencies would allow more time for those people that are otherwise driving the van to then perform outreach activities.”

More time for outreach, and the right staff, could mean more ability to proactively help people on Yellowknife’s streets at earlier stages of need, Robertson suggested.

He gave the example of who responds when there are fights or other concerns in downtown Yellowknife.

Robertson envisages outreach workers who can be “triaged to get to those situations on a quicker basis and provide interventions that are based on relationships.”

“When you see the police coming, you might not be happy about it. If you see the person that always brings you sandwiches, is someone who you can talk to, is there to help you out? That’s a very different approach in terms of how you can de-escalate,” he said.

His report advocates for more staff training, higher salaries, more of a uniform or branding to the service so people can recognize it more readily, better data collection (which he said had begun) and more consistent policies and procedures.

He expressly ruled out a few ideas, saying there was no evidence that trained paramedics would do much to improve the service and a mobile shelter wasn’t needed.

What it would cost, and who pays

The model for an expanded program set out by Robertson would cost about $850,000 in year one, $820,000 in year two and then $950,000 in its third year as more staff are brought on, he told council.

If that’s too much – in the past, council has been reluctant to find that kind of money – he said the hours of service could be reduced or staff salaries could be cut from the figures he had used, though he noted each of those comes with consequences like reduced program availability or more staff turnover.

Underlining the scale of the issue, Robertson said the Street Outreach program’s current workers “are paid half of what the shelter workers are paid.”

The big problem for the city, for years, has been finding someone else to foot the bill.

Robertson said he had experienced a similar problem during his research.

“There is not a single funding source that’s going to just say, ‘Yes, we will fund your outreach program,'” he told council, noting a conversation he had had with the NWT’s Department of Executive and Indigenous Affairs, which has homelessness within its portfolio.

“They’ve set up a team whose job, their first task, is to take on homelessness. And we met with them and we said, ‘OK, great, where’s the money?'” Robertson recounted.

“They said, ‘We don’t have money. Our job is to coordinate all of the resources and players and people and bring them together.'”

But Robertson said Street Outreach in many ways represented the perfect program for the GNWT to be shown doing that coordinating.

“This is a great opportunity to take a package as a proposal to government funding agencies – particularly the body that sits under Executive and Indigenous Affairs that is tasked with coordinating the services and finding these resources – to say, ‘Here, this is ready to go,'” he said.

Robertson emphasized that downtown businesses, which often express frustration at the situation, surprised him with their level of commitment to being part of the solution.

“We specifically went to people that we knew had a lot to say on this and expected to get an earful of ‘get them out of here,’ but everyone that we went to instead said, ‘Look, this is a problem that we need to do something about and we want to help find solutions,'” Robertson told council.

“It’s very encouraging that, in particular, the downtown business community was so eager to participate in solutions rather than just say this is a problem that someone needs to deal with.”

This isn’t just a Yellowknife problem

Yellowknife’s municipal leaders have long maintained that one reason funding to address homelessness must come from elsewhere is that it’s a broader issue.

Local politicians have said people come from across the territory and then have nowhere to go in Yellowknife.

Robertson said his company’s findings backed that up, and he quoted some rough numbers uncovered through its research.

“Around 90 percent of the people that we interviewed from the street population are not from Yellowknife. They’ve come from other communities in the Northwest Territories,” he said.

Of that 90 percent, about a tenth came from somewhere else in Canada, he added.

“This is not just a Yellowknife problem, but the problem is visited upon Yellowknife from the rest of the territory,” Robertson continued, calling on MLAs to invest in services in the city that will “support the people from your communities who are currently here,” then try similar outreach approaches and peer support in other communities.

Men without homes have no real shelter space

Robertson said “many people don’t realize” the situation facing men in Yellowknife who don’t have a home.

“If you are a man living on the streets of Yellowknife, there is nowhere for you to stay for more than 12 hours at a time. There’s no men’s shelter,” he told council.

“You can go to the day shelter and then at night, you can go to the Salvation Army or the sobering centre. In the morning, you’ve got to get up again and move. You’re always on the move. There’s nowhere to keep your stuff. You can keep it in a bin at the day shelter, not secured, on a shelf.

“The fact that people always have to move from place to place, by default, is going to make your homeless population very visible on the streets.”

Robertson shared that insight by way of illustrating that Street Outreach can only play a part in a broader suite of solutions.

“Outreach itself does not solve the problem of homelessness. … this is one piece of the puzzle,” he said.

“If the shelters are full, the shelters are closed, or if it’s someone who has been banned from the shelter, the Street Outreach program can’t pick them up. They have to stay where they are.

“That person can’t stay outside at 40 below. So where are they going to go? They need to survive, so they’re going to go into a stairwell. They’re going to go and hide out at the hospital. They’re going to go somewhere else.”

What happens next?

Robertson told councillors that the City of Yellowknife must “steer this in the short term” to make sure Street Outreach continues, then “hopefully you can hand it off to somebody else in the future.”

City council must now decide what that short-term steering looks like, and how many city dollars are required.

Does the city try to fund Robertson’s vision of an expanded program for a few years in the hope that doing so brings more government partners to the table? Or does it try to secure extra funding now?

Can existing federal funding or other grants be repurposed?

City staff will draw up a response to the Triage Metrix report and then council will discuss next steps.

Stephen Van Dine, Yellowknife’s city manager, said the report was good enough that the city hoped to use it “very effectively” to lobby other levels of government for help.

Whether the city can do much on its own, Van Dine added, would be up to councillors.

“Given the experience we’ve had with the program to date and the expenditures that we’ve got to date, how confident is city council with this level of spending at this moment in time? What is council’s tolerance for wanting to carry that out for multiple years?” Van Dine asked as he set out the dilemma ahead.

“We can certainly run those numbers and put it in front of council. That will be certainly a question for council to consider in light of other priorities facing the City of Yellowknife.”