EDMONTON - Before he got an office, Jared Tkachuk walked around the downtown library, looking for regulars who often fanned out to the edges.
There, they pushed their chairs to face the windows, propped their feet on the ledges and drifted to sleep under a bundle of coats.
Some came with their lives on their shoulders, including sleeping bags, folded-up tents and garbage bags full of bottles.
Others came with mental illness and talked to themselves.
“I hate to say it, (but) people who are marginalized, they are even at the margins at the library,” said Tkachuk, one of three outreach workers at the Stanley A. Milner Library on Sir Winston Churchill Square. “A lot of people, they think they need to be anonymous. They’ll just go and keep their head down because most of their interactions are negative ones, people telling them, ‘You can’t be here, move it along, be quiet.’ ”
That’s not Tkachuk’s job. He was hired in July 2011 as part of a three-year project to help homeless people in and around Edmonton’s downtown library. The project’s $605,000 in funding from the provincial Safe Communities Fund ends in April 2014, but the library hopes to roll it into its annual budget.
Since August 2011, Tkachuk and two other outreach workers have approached more than 1,000 people, though not all were ready to accept services. Tkachuk and his colleagues call many by name and link people up with housing, addictions counselling, psychiatric care, medical teams and identification. Doing that work from the library makes sense, Tkachuk said.
“We found a number of people aren’t necessarily comfortable at Boyle Street or Bissell Centre,” Tkachuk said. Someone with schizophrenia may be uncomfortable seeking help in busy, loud drop-in centres. Others, Tkachuk said, don’t like the stigma associated with shelters and prefer to find solace in the public library, one of the last truly public spaces in cities. Homeless people are often kicked out of shopping malls, Tkachuk said. He knows others who have received loitering tickets for hanging out in Sir Winston Churchill Square.
“They belong here no matter what,” he said of the library. No illegal, threatening or obnoxious activity is condoned, but the Edmonton Public Library allows people to nod off, at least in chairs.
When people complain — “This is a library, not a shelter. Why do you let these people sleep in here?” — Tkachuk explains how exhausting it is being homeless, sleeping in shelters among 200 snoring people, waking up early and worrying about how to stay safe on the streets.
“We’ve really unearthed a hub (of need at the library),” Tkachuk said. “The mainstream agencies — Boyle Street, Bissell, E4C (Edmonton City Centre Church Corporation) — they are so strapped themselves and so every day we have more and more people falling through the cracks. A lot of them are ending up in the library. And for many of them, we’re their last lifeline. We get people who have to use the library by default, out of survival. ”
Tkachuk said he tries to give them back some of their humanity.
There, they pushed their chairs to face the windows, propped their feet on the ledges and drifted to sleep under a bundle of coats.
Some came with their lives on their shoulders, including sleeping bags, folded-up tents and garbage bags full of bottles.
Others came with mental illness and talked to themselves.
“I hate to say it, (but) people who are marginalized, they are even at the margins at the library,” said Tkachuk, one of three outreach workers at the Stanley A. Milner Library on Sir Winston Churchill Square. “A lot of people, they think they need to be anonymous. They’ll just go and keep their head down because most of their interactions are negative ones, people telling them, ‘You can’t be here, move it along, be quiet.’ ”
That’s not Tkachuk’s job. He was hired in July 2011 as part of a three-year project to help homeless people in and around Edmonton’s downtown library. The project’s $605,000 in funding from the provincial Safe Communities Fund ends in April 2014, but the library hopes to roll it into its annual budget.
Since August 2011, Tkachuk and two other outreach workers have approached more than 1,000 people, though not all were ready to accept services. Tkachuk and his colleagues call many by name and link people up with housing, addictions counselling, psychiatric care, medical teams and identification. Doing that work from the library makes sense, Tkachuk said.
“We found a number of people aren’t necessarily comfortable at Boyle Street or Bissell Centre,” Tkachuk said. Someone with schizophrenia may be uncomfortable seeking help in busy, loud drop-in centres. Others, Tkachuk said, don’t like the stigma associated with shelters and prefer to find solace in the public library, one of the last truly public spaces in cities. Homeless people are often kicked out of shopping malls, Tkachuk said. He knows others who have received loitering tickets for hanging out in Sir Winston Churchill Square.
“They belong here no matter what,” he said of the library. No illegal, threatening or obnoxious activity is condoned, but the Edmonton Public Library allows people to nod off, at least in chairs.
When people complain — “This is a library, not a shelter. Why do you let these people sleep in here?” — Tkachuk explains how exhausting it is being homeless, sleeping in shelters among 200 snoring people, waking up early and worrying about how to stay safe on the streets.
“We’ve really unearthed a hub (of need at the library),” Tkachuk said. “The mainstream agencies — Boyle Street, Bissell, E4C (Edmonton City Centre Church Corporation) — they are so strapped themselves and so every day we have more and more people falling through the cracks. A lot of them are ending up in the library. And for many of them, we’re their last lifeline. We get people who have to use the library by default, out of survival. ”
Tkachuk said he tries to give them back some of their humanity.
“People already feel safe and comfortable in here and welcomed, so for us, we’re finding it very fertile ground to do work,” he said. “We would love to be a home away from home for people.”
That’s a challenge for some to accept, Tkachuk said.
“A library is like a church. It’s sacred space,” one woman wrote in a letter.
“It’s just not that way anymore,” Tkachuk said. “It’s gone from being a resource headquarters where people come and get resources, to them trying to be more interactive with the community and engaging people. … To be engaged when you’re at your darkest place has been hugely uplifting for a lot of people.”
jsinnema@edmontonjournal.com
twitter.com/jodiesinnema
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Who has been helped by library social workers?
David MacMain, a social worker at the downtown public library, got the call from the 19-year-old as he was ready to jump off the High Level Bridge.
“I just wanted to phone and say goodbye. You guys were so great to me today, but I decided I can’t go on. This is it for me.”
MacMain immediately phoned police, who successfully talked the man off the edge and into hospital.
As soon as the man was released the next morning, he went back to the Stanley A. Milner Library and got help.
The office of the outreach workers soon found him stable housing, from where the man sought mental health counselling and went back to school. For a man who faced many barriers — cancer treatment, a street-involved mother, homelessness — the library helped out, transitioning a conversation about unpaid library fines into a relationship with the outreach workers.
“If he didn’t have Dave to call that night, if the library hadn’t been able to refer him anywhere, that could have been another sad stat in our suicide files,” said Jared Tkachuk, another social worker at the downtown library.
- The man laid out all the details: He had irritable bowel syndrome so severe, he kept losing jobs over the time spent in the bathroom. No, he didn’t have a doctor, but relied on medicentres. No, he had no home except the Hope Mission/Herb Jamieson Centre.
The next day, Tkachuk took him to the East Edmonton Health Centre, where a nurse practitioner wrote a letter stating the man couldn’t work for medical reasons and needed financial assistance. The nurse also set up medical tests.
Tkachuk then phoned a rooming-house operator, who found an available room without even meeting the man. A social worker got involved and set up accounts for the money and rent.
The man became quiet, then spoke up.
“To tell you the truth, I’ve been through so much lately which didn’t work out for me that I just assumed this wasn’t going to work out,” the man said.
Tkachuk continued: “His plan that morning, after it failed, was to ask the doctor for as many pain medications as he could get and he was going to find a quiet place and take them all.”
- Last winter, 48-year-old Rob Helbak’s bed was a pile of cardboard and a foam mattress, plus five or six blankets on top. Staying warm wasn’t the problem. Staying clean and legitimate as a homeless person was, Helbak said, especially after living off and on the streets since he was 14, addicted to morphine and heroin since his 20s.
“I don’t do shelters well,” Helbak said.
But it was February, then March 2013, and Helbak had been on methadone treatment to replace the opiates since December.
“I’m getting too old,” he thought to himself of the street life, and the fact he’s hampered by back and liver ailments.
Helbak got Tkachuk’s name from a friend, met with the library social worker a few times and suddenly had a clean room with a shared kitchen and bathroom in April.
After $500 rent, Helbak has $127 left over — he cleans the house and picks bottles for extra cash — and imagines returning to school to become a youth worker.
In the meantime, he stays comfy at his rooming house and occasionally drops in to the library where it’s easy to meet friends and find out about free lunches, available jobs and agencies gifted with a whack of winter clothes.
“They need programs like this you don’t need to go look for,” Helbak said.
from: Edmonton Journal
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