Carmichael Outreach offers warm haven from the cold

When the temperatures get dangerously cold, places like Carmichael Outreach become a warm haven for people who don’t have many other options during the day.

At the new location on 12th Avenue, people hold the door for each other as they hurry inside to warm up. As temperatures dipped down below -20 C with windchills below -30 C outside, inside the newly renovated building, the drop-in centre upstairs was warm and and the atmosphere was busy but calm.

A 19-year-old woman who says people call her Midnight was hanging out with her friend Keleisha, 20, who also only used her first name. With a shy, slightly sad smile, Midnight explained she hasn’t had a steady place to live for about four to five years.

“It feels like you have no one,” she said. “It just feels like you’re helpless.”

Midnight comes to Carmichael for the food but spends a lot of her winter days at the library. She relies on friends to find places to stay.

“There’s usually a lot of people at the library and we always help each other,” Midnight said.

Despite that help, the young woman said she would warn others not to let people walk all over them and to look out for themselves first.

“If you put others’ needs before your needs, it always puts you in a bad place,” she said.

Keleisha has also been couch-surfing off and on for the last four years. She said she wants to get her life together, but whenever she finds a place to stay, she gets kicked out after a few weeks before she can get back on track.

“I wanted to go back to school and get my life figured out,” she said. “But when you’ve been on the street for so long people kind of just don’t believe in you.”

Keleisha describes Carmichael as a helpful place because employees never say no to people unless they really disrupt other people. In this weather, she appreciates warm clothing more than ever, pointing out that she has four coats including a trench coat she likes because it keeps her legs warmer without ski pants.

For Keleisha, having a dog provides a sense of support and extra motivation to find somewhere to stay.

“When I have no place to go, I don’t want to leave her out in the cold so I have to find a place for her and me so I’m stuck being somewhere I don’t like to be,” Keleisha commented. “But she’s been good, helping me kind of get on the right track.”

Mike Badger is another regular at Carmichael Outreach. He has a place to live right now, but he’s worried about getting evicted at the end of the month. He has been homeless before.

“I have been here and there. I’ve been homeless for five years was the longest. Slept in banks, slept in parkades, slept in people’s cars,” Badger said.

He said finding a warm place to sleep is always the hardest part of dealing with the cold weather in the winter.

“Either you’ve got the shelters to go to and sometimes they send you out because they have no room, and then you’ve got detox and if you don’t have detox then where else are you going to go? Parkades, banks, anywhere where there’s heat,” he said.

Through the day Badger said homeless people often rely on Carmichael Outreach or the library or malls to warm up. He said it is a nice place to spend time with people and it provides help to those who are struggling.

A network of community-based organizations and homeless shelters in the city employ a cold weather strategy in the winter months to try to make sure everyone has a warm place to sleep at night. A list of available shelter spaces can be found here.