Long-standing emergency shelter on Frederick Street closing this summer

The emergency shelter at 84 Frederick Street in downtown Kitchener is set to close its doors as of early this summer.

The YW Kitchener-Waterloo has a lot of history at the location as the non-profit organization first moved into the building in 1914 and has operated an emergency shelter there since the ’70s.

“The frank reality is, we’ve outgrown that space,” said YW K-W CEO Jennifer Breaton. “The building is aging, it requires a lot of capital infrastructure to support it, and it’s not designed to meet the complex needs of the clients we support.”

In addition to the aging infrastructure, Breaton said the Y-W is also developing what they’re calling a ‘bold, new vision’ for an emergency shelter model.

“We’ve listened to the voices of the women that we support in this redesign; what is it that they want, what is it that they need. We think we’re gonna come forward with a model that’s probably smaller in scale, that really attaches resources and care planning to the needs of the client,” said Breaton. “It’s much more than a roof, much more than a meal — it really is looking at how do you address some of these root causes of homelessness.”

While the Y-W KW is still in the early stages of planning for what lies ahead, Breaton said everything is on the table in terms of what the new emergency shelter model will look like and where the locations will be.

“What our preliminary data would suggest, is we would probably need a couple smaller emergency shelters that offer options for women,” explained Breaton. “So you could imagine with a scattered site model, you could have options for women who are maintaining their sobriety, you could have options for women that includes safe-use spaces.”

The new shelter model is being developed in response to the 2022 Project Willow report called Don’t Tell Them You’re Homeless, which gathered insight from women experiencing homelessness in Waterloo Region who use emergency services.

Breaton said the new system will be sized to meet the needs of the women and gender diverse people they serve.

“One of the things we’ve heard over the last year doing this planning when we speak with our staff, is that we’ve really tried to serve everybody. Sometimes when you try to serve everyone, it’s actually felt like we’ve served no one,” said Breaton. “So I think by providing the smaller, targeted, meaningful, impactful investment to the women we support — we hope to produce far greater outcomes moving women to independence.”

Breaton said you don’t have to look far to see examples of innovative solutions to support vulnerable people, pointing to the House of Friendship’s ShelterCare model and the region’s managed hybrid outdoor shelter site on Erbs Road.

“We envision a shelter model that really looks to leverage some of the things we’ve learned in our region and then apply them to women, because quite frankly there’s been a significant gap in how we’ve supported women experiencing homelessness in our region,” said Breaton.

The current emergency shelter at 84 Frederick Street has 66 beds and the YW K-W plans to permanently close the site by Jun. 30.

Breaton said the organization will work with their clients, agency partners, and the Region of Waterloo to ensure everyone has somewhere to go during the transition.

“We want to have a long runway so that we can work intensely with the women that we support to ensure that everybody has a safe place to stay. We’ll be doing that work with our community partners over the coming weeks and making sure we have a plan for every individual who is staying in our shelter.”

While there’s no concrete timeline for when the new emergency shelter model will be up and running, Breaton said they’re hoping it’s done as quickly as possible.