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Many ways to tackle homelessness, including tax returns

January 8th, 2012 · 5 Comments

One of the things I’m struck by every time I go out and talk to homeless people or those who have relationships with them is that, as much as affordable housing for that group is needed, sometimes it’s not the only route to solving a problem.

Port Coquitlam Mayor Greg Moore told me, during a chat that was mostly about incinerators last week, about the homelessness numbers dropping dramatically in his community. He mentioned that a church program to do tax programs had helped bring the numbers down.

Based on that shred of information, I tracked down Joyce Lissimore, who’s featured in my Globe story here, a retired schoolteacher who started doing tax returns for low-income people and discovered that, for a select group, she was getting enough back to help them accumulate enough money for that tough first hurdle in renting an apartment: the first month’s rent plus security deposit.

It’s not the first time I hear about the good work of a small, unknown group of people helping getting housing for people. On a visit to the new Dunbar social housing project recently, I ran into a woman who has been helping run the shower program at Kits Community Centre for local homeless people for years

As I learned when I talked to her, and all the guys at the new project who were delighted to see Penny Rogers when she came to visit them, it’s because Penny and her colleagues spent the time helping the guys fill out forms and make it to interviews with BC Housing that they got rooms. Without the help of those volunteers, the guys sleeping behind shops on Broadway and Arbutus might never have known or bothered to go through the process.

There’s been a fair amount of (accurate) reporting lately on the Vancouver Foundation’s findings that the biggest problem many of us identify in the city is a sense of disconnect and loneliness.

But that seems to recede a little, for me, when I hear about folks like this.

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