Helping Hand Initiative hands out food, warm clothing and supplies on the river bank on Friday evening. From left: Marie Merasty, Jeremiah Jobb, Jonathon Cook, Reina Morin, Ashton Naytowhow, Shelly Laliberte. Harmony Nayneecassum (not pictured) also attended. (Alison Sandstrom/paNOW Staff)

By Alison Sandstrom

Helping Hand Initiative

Grass-roots group organizing to help people experiencing homelessness in P.A.

Nov 2, 2020 | 2:47 PM

The number of people sleeping on the street in Prince Albert has inspired a group of young people to take action.

Jonathon Cook, a student at First Nations University of Canada, was moved to respond by a photo he saw on Facebook.

The image posted by Bev Masuskapoe has been shared over 500 times. It shows a group of people sleeping on the pavement beside an air vent downtown.

“When I saw that I just really needed to do something,” Cook told paNOW.

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Through Facebook, Cook connected with classmates and friends to form Helping Hand Initiative. The group began raising money through GoFundMe and put out a call for donations of warm clothing and other supplies.

On Friday they gathered on the river bank to hand out hot soup, bannock, donuts and warm drinks. Winter clothing, blankets, care packages, sleeping mats and a few tents were also available for people to pick up.

In total Cook estimates, around 25 people dropped by to eat or take supplies. An equal number of community members came to drop off donations.

Members of Helping Hand Initiative also handed out care packages in the week leading up to the Friday event and many have been involved in similar initiatives for much longer.

Organizer Ashton Naytowhow said his reasons for participating were personal.

“I had an uncle who lived on the streets and he passed away outside 7/11, they wouldn’t allow him to warm up, he froze to death out there,” he said. “And for me every year I try to look for donations but it wasn’t until these guys – they took the initiative and it blew up.”

Naytowhow said there’s lot of organizations addressing homelessness in Prince Albert and doing great work, but there’s still gaps in services.

“There’s just a lot more people on the streets than they can handle,” he said. “There’s always full capacity at these shelters.”

Prince Albert’s cold weather shelter recently doubled its capacity from 10 to 20 beds for the winter. Organizers of the shelter believe a variety of factors related to the pandemic will likely lead to an increase of people on the street in Prince Albert this winter.

Shelly Laliberte of Helping Hand Initiative said people experiencing homelessness have told her the increase in fencing in the downtown has made things even more difficult for them.

“They want those fences down,” she said. “Because that was their warm place and they took that from them.”

Helping Hand Initiative plans to continue collecting and distributing donations. Organizers are also looking to grow the group, register it as a non-profit and potentially acquire a physical space to work from.

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alison.sandstrom@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @alisandstrom