No provincial funding to keep P.A.’s Stepping Stones Shelter open over spring/summer
-
Share on Facebook
-
Share on Bluesky
-
Share on X
- Copy Link
After a busy winter, Prince Albert’s cold weather shelter, Stepping Stones Shelter, closes Friday.
YWCA Prince Albert CEO Donna Brooks had asked for provincial funding to keep the 20-bed facility open through the spring and summer. Those dollars weren’t in the provincial budget.
“There really is nowhere for a lot of the people who were using that shelter to go,” Brooks told paNOW, explaining other shelters in the city have limited space and don’t accept people if they’re highly intoxicated. “So, it does create more people out the street. The only difference is the weather’s warmer, so they don’t freeze to death.”
Normally run as a 10-bed seasonal operation in the basement of the YWCA’s Our House Shelter downtown, a special COVID-19 top-up to federal funding for homelessness allowed the YWCA and its partners to double the cold weather shelter’s capacity this year and move it to a much bigger location at the P.A. Exhibition Grandstand. Longer hours allowed staff time to connect interested clients with services and housing.
