NOTHING ABOUT US WITHOUT US
The Saskatoon Anti-Poverty Coalition (SAPC) is a group of concerned persons and organizations who are dedicated to addressing the causes and effects of poverty.
SAPC meets the first Wednesday of every month from 1 pm to 3. The next meeting of the Saskatoon Anti-Poverty Coalition will be held on October 5th , 2011. Location is the meeting room of St. Paul's Hospital Cafeteria. Everyone is welcome.
For more information about our group, call our office at 955-5095 or email antipoverty@sasktel.net.
Street Activity: Baseline Study 2011
The Saskatoon Panhandling Task Force, based on surveys of Saskatoon residents and fact finding visits to other cities has made recommendations to city council. Recommendation 1 is that the city hire a small experimental group of “Community ...Support Officers” to work in identified trouble areas of the city. Based on the Calgary model, these officers would be a mix of social worker and neighbourhood watch. In the most positive interpretation they would be intended to connect people with services (shelter, housing first, food, intox, detox, etc.) and in this way channel street problems into programs dealing more closely with their root causes.
ReplyDeleteBut the principal goal of the program according to a “Street Activty Baseline Study” would be to increase perceptions of street safety by first creating a uniformed presence. Only secondarily would the end of the project be to ensure that people are not on streets because they have nowhere else to go. Justified or not, resident's fear of “sketchy people / strange, bad people/ drunk people / addicts” may far outstrip any of the project's humanitarian concerns. In the wrong hands, the project may amount to nothing more than putting a benevolent face on the current policy of moving the marginalized along and pushing them out of sight.
For the time being at least the project is a positive alternative to the mean-spirited directives of other cities. But its success remains dependent on whatever visibly human face the citizenry discovers in its target clientele. The extent to which it merely aids in masking the city's root problems will directly reflect city management's accomodation of public disregard.