October 25th 2022 will be our Annual General Meeting and we are looking to round out our Board of Directors.

We encourage and celebrate diversity and invite Indigenous, people with diverse and lived experience, 2SLGBTQ+ and all equity seeking groups to apply for open vacancies on our Board of Directors. Our Board serves in a volunteer capacity and this year we will have three open positions.

Please RSVP your attendance by emailing: aurora@carmichaeloutreach.ca

If you’re looking for a project that will help you give back to the community, we just might have the perfect opportunity for you!

We’re seeking support to meet our storage needs. At Carmichael Outreach, we run on a tight budget, so needs like this often tend to fall to the wayside. We know that better storage solutions would improve our ability to serve the community, allowing us to store things like furniture, bulk items, donation overflow, and more!

This would also help us reduce the need to turn away donations when we are overflowing.

A couple of potential storage solutions we are looking for include:

Sturdy wall shelving for our programming storage room

We would love to have larger shelving installed in our programming storage room, where we could fit large tote buckets full of all kinds of supplies. This will allow us to make use of all the vertical space we have available in this room to store things like craft supplies, games, movies, and more, all of which will help us to improve our ability to offer recreational programming

Outdoor sheds, shipping containers, or metal bins for storage

We would love to have a space like this on site where we could store donations of furniture and other supplies for our Housing Support Program. These items are stored to be used when we help move people into housing, so that we can ensure their houses are homes.

Thank you once again to all of our friends in the community. We are so grateful to have such a great group of people in our corner, and are looking forward to see what the future brings.

Sincerely,

The Carmichael Family

Night #1 is over!

This morning, I had a chance to pop by and say hi to this year’s Five Days for the Homeless participants. I asked them how their first night went.

They talked about feeling the cold snow hit their tarp, and just being thankful that they had a way to cover their faces.
They talked about how much it snowed last week, and how they could only imagine the impact that would have had on our city’s homeless.
They talked about someone bringing them muffins, and the guilt that they felt in accepting food when they know that not everyone on the street is that lucky.

I am so glad that we have these passionate and understanding people heading up this year’s campaign. They are stepping out of their comfort zone to stay outside for these 5 days, but they know that their experience this week won’t even begin to compare to the experiences faced by so many in our community.

Five Days for the Homeless is important, not just because of the money it raises, but because of the awareness it raises surrounding this very real and very pressing issue in our community. For many of us, it is difficult to imagine a life without a home. Our homes are where we go to lay our heads at night. We invite our friends into our homes to socialize. Our homes shelter us from the cold, rain, and snow. They store our belongings and our memories. They give us an address, that we can list on our identification and health cards. Our homes help to give us humanity.

It is often said that a person’s home is the extension of who they are. Depriving a person of a home is depriving them from a piece of their own identity.

In 2015, a point in time count was conducted in Regina to determine how many of our own were living without a place to call home. There were 232 total people found on the night of the count.  232 people, just like you and I, living their lives without the safety, comfort, or security of four walls. While this number is alarming on it’s own, this does not even begin to capture the whole picture. It doesn’t consider the countless individuals forced to couch surf, stay with friends and family, or hide out in abandoned shelters. The problem of hidden homelessness is an extremely prevalent one in our community, especially due to the frigid cold temperatures we see here in Saskatchewan. According to Statistics Canada, 8% of Canadians surveyed in 2014 reported experiencing hidden homelessness at some point in their lives. This number is a reminder that being off the streets and “hidden” from the public eye is not the same as being in a home.

We are excited and proud of the University of Regina students for dedicating so much time and energy to this campaign, and to this important cause. We can only hope that, one day, homelessness will be a thing of the past, and campaign’s like these can disappear.

Together, we can end poverty and homelessness in our community.