Winnipeg’s fight against homelessness is entering an optimistic new chapter, according to Mark Fleming, a seasoned housing advocate and chair of the Reaching Home Community Advisory Board (CAB). In a recent interview, Fleming shared his positive outlook on the city’s homelessness initiatives, fueled by unprecedented collaboration across government levels and the community’s united front.
In a candid conversation with Oraye St. Franklyn, Communications Coordinator for End Homelessness Winnipeg’s Reaching Home, Mark Fleming, Chair of the Community Advisory Board for Winnipeg’s Reaching Home program, offers a unique perspective on the battle to end homelessness.
Good afternoon, Mark. Thank you for the opportunity to interview you. Can you please share a bit about your journey and what motivated you to become involved with initiatives aimed at ending homelessness?
Mark Fleming: Well, I’ve always kind of worked in non-profits, child welfare and community-based organizations since I was young, so it’s kind of led me to that. And I’ve actually seen firsthand, the effects of homelessness and the effects of not having a proper home and the basic needs through my work with the friendship centres and different organizations that I’ve been a part of. I’ve been in housing advocacy field, but I joined the Reaching Home CAB in 2015. I was approached by the then-chair, Nigel Mohammed from Assiniboine Union, who reached out to me and thought that I would be a good voice on the CAB. So I said, yeah, I went to check it out. And a few years into it, I became vice-chair. And then I believe for the last four years, at least, I’ve been the chair. The rest is kind of history, just being involved on the housing side of things. Being on the CAB has given me an opportunity to see things through a bit of a different lens, and I was just really fortunate to learn from some very, knowledgeable and passionate, people on the board that were there when I first started out. I had an opportunity to learn and be part of a lot of different situations and how to make difficult informed decisions.
What aspect of working on the Reaching Home program has been the most meaningful to you personally?
Mark Fleming: Well, I think part of it is the evolution of the CAB itself. Being involved when the Community Entity was the City of Winnipeg, and just seeing it grow into End Homelessness Winnipeg and the direction it’s taken, and being able to, see a proposal, an idea and concept, all the collaborative work of partners, and kind of see all the work that’s put into these proposals, and actually seeing these projects go from an idea on paper to actually getting to go tour them when they’re open is actually really something special to kind of be part of for myself. Some of the things that I am really, truly proud of in the last few years that we’ve been able to do is increase the mobile outreaches. That was something important to me – being able to actually take services in to help the homeless where they are. And I, continue to want to expand that. The putting together of our emergency funding for the weather, was something that I really felt strongly about and wanted to make sure it we actualised it. Now it’s something that’s going to be there all the time and you know, we just wanted to make life easy for the homeless. I think part of what we do is that we try to make sure that we’re centered first on the homeless themselves and what’s best for them. And it’s not always easy, but we have a lot of very smart individuals on our board, on our staff teams, and you know, they help us make these decisions the best they can.
Speaking about your role as the Reaching Home CAB chair, what have you found to be the most effective strategies in addressing homelessness through the Reaching Home program?
Mark Fleming: As board chair, I feel my most important role for the CAB board is to make sure that we’re getting the information that we need to make our decisions. We do rely a lot on the staff and the technicians to provide us with the answers to the questions that we do have. I do my best to make sure that everybody on the CAB has a say and it’s part of the conversation. We have people that have more experience in certain areas. So, my role is to make sure that we leave no stone unturned, and that people have a chance to talk and that we’re making decisions based on what’s best for the homeless people that we have in our city. That’s kind of my biggest role. I don’t make a lot of the decisions as chair, I kind of just guide the conversation. I think for me, the philosophy is to be transparent and, ask the hard questions; engage in those conversations.
We’ve had to make really hard choices on where to put our money. People think we have an abundance of money. We don’t. When you have $9 million to give away and there’s $29,000,000 in proposal requests, it’s really hard and creates some really difficult conversations. So, my role is to make sure that we have those conversations and that we’re looking at, all sides of those issues to make sure that we’re providing, putting that money that we’re entrusted with, to give to the community in the place we believe is best suited.
With regards to impact, can you share a story or an example of how the Reaching Home program has made a significant difference in the lives of individuals or the community?
Mark Fleming: We provide not total funding, but we do a lot of supportive funding to a lot of different programs and organizations throughout the city of Winnipeg. We’ve been able to provide anywhere from $8 million to $18 million annually, depending on what we get from the federal government. We fund everything from Housing First programs, to non-Housing First, transitional housing, shelter, shelter prevention, outreaches, prevention programs. We fund emergency response and then we fund a lot of capital as well. We don’t have the money to provide full capital funding to a lot of projects. But we do try to make sure that we help out with projects that we can key into. What I’m really proud of that we’ve done is that a lot of our capital money has reached out to a lot of organizations. And to me, being in the nonprofit, sometimes getting a little bit of extra help on things that are small like roofs, windows and small supplies make a big difference. Things that you just don’t have enough money for when they happen. So, it’s just really cool to be part of so many things and to see so many projects out there. But you know Winnipeg is a leader in Canada with a lot of the programs and services that we do in here. There is a lot of other strong CABs out there don’t get me wrong, but Winnipeg is definitely in the top echelon of CABs as far as what we do and what we’ve been able to accomplish, even with Coordinated Access and everything else. So, I’m very proud to be part of the CAB board in Winnipeg.
Impressive. Looking at the challenges now. Every program faces challenges. So, what are some of the obstacles encountered by Reaching Home? And how have you and your team worked to overcome them?
Mark Fleming: Part of what we do with the Reaching Home funds is to determine what’s eligible and what’s not eligible for funding, guided by our policies and procedures. So, there’s times where we’ve had to turn down projects because it’s an ineligible expense. We just can’t fund it. At times like that, we rely heavily on the staff at the CE to help us find a way and how do we can help while keeping it in line with our mandate and policies. We do have issues sometimes; certain organizations may have slippage. That’s when we ensure we spend the money because, we want to make sure that every dollar that we get goes into the city of Winnipeg and we’re not giving anything back. We work really hard to make sure that that happens. Then there’s things that just happen, within the city of Winnipeg. To get a project off the ground. You get a lot of, sometimes bureaucracy that you have to go through that really, really kind of makes the process a lot slower than you’d wish. This then impacts on costs with increases. So, we always get people coming back, “Well, it’s going to be this much more.” And then we to try to maneuver that. So, we’re always trying to figure out, how to best do our work without sacrificing the programs and services that we already fund. It is a bit of a tough game when you don’t have enough money to make what you need. But I feel we do a good job, and I think the staff at CE do a fantastic job helping to guide us and make sure that we have the information to make decisions to the best of our abilities.
OK. Thank you. So, what role do you see the community playing in the success of the Reaching Home program?
Mark Fleming: Every so often, every five years, we need to review and update our community plan. I know that in the beginning we’ve done several consultations on building our community plan, and then there’s a lot of other Community plans. The city Winnipeg is coming up with a plan of action. The provincial government last year came out with a plan. On homelessness, Reaching Home has its own plan. And End Homelessness Winnipeg has its own plan, and then we try to incorporate the UN Declaration on the Right to Housing. We ensure that we’re thinking about all these things when we’re making our decisions. So, it’s not only the community, but it’s also trying to make sure that we see everything else that people want to do. When we’re crafting our plan and what we want to do, we make sure that we bring all that together as well. As you know, we do want to hear from communities, we want to hear not only from communities, we want to hear from the staff that is doing the work. The people out there that are the real meat and potatoes of what we do is the staff that’s working. One of the things that we’re planning a conference this fall to really engage the community in Winnipeg and just say, hey, what do you want us to do with this? So, we do want to make sure that the community’s on board, and we’ve always asked and we’ve put out word, we’ve been looking for new members on our CAB. So, we’ve always encouraged people, if you want to have a voice and you want to be part of this, we’re always looking for people to work. We’re looking for people right now, you know, new members. So, if you’re interested and you feel like you, you have an experience and you want to add your voice, by all means, just reach out to the CE. Let us know you’re interested.
I’m sure they’ll hear through this medium and they’ll reach out. Can we look at partnerships? What’s the importance of partnerships and collaboration in the work of Reaching Home? How do these relationships enhance the program’s success and impact?
Mark Fleming: Capital. For instance, if we don’t get enough money to do a capital project from start to finish. Capital projects are so expensive. Costs of projects before and after COVID has seen increase between 20 to 30% on some projects and for us, this is part of why partnerships are very important. We can’t solely fund our entire projects. So, the more partnerships they have, the better it is for us to put our money into something that has other funding attached. Nowadays, it’s really hard to have just single funders for a project. So, the importance of finding partners and developing relationships is critical, especially when you’re dealing with housing, especially if you want to build housing. Well, you might be a housing provider now. But you’re going to need the wrap-around support. You’re going to need someone that works with the client, and with the tenants. So, it’s extremely important and what we’re very lucky within the city of Winnipeg that we have fantastic organizations and group and funders that are willing to work together. There is a good desire to have these partnerships. And I think the sector understands that. it just amazes me sometimes when we see proposals the amount of partnerships and collaboration that are going out there. And I think that really is something that needs to be celebrated.
Thank you. It’s insightful to know about the network of partnerships that keep Winnipeg kicking. I’m aware that you’re also a member of the National Indigenous Homelessness Council. Can you kindly share a bit about the Council?
Mark Fleming: The National Indigenous Homelessness Council is relatively new; we’ve been around for about 2 and a half years. The membership is actually made up of representation from the Community entities as well as the CAB boards from all the Indigenous CABs in the country. Right now, there’s about, well, I hope I get this right, between 18 and 20 Indigenous CABs throughout the country. So, our membership base is that we have an Indigenous forum every year where we bring members from across the country together to kind of give us guidance and direction. I’ve been the Secretary-Treasurer, now pretty much since the get-go, we had one staff, we’re now up to four staff and looking to hire more. We’re negotiating with the federal government to expand some of our projects and services.
We’re going to be launching a new website. So, the goal of the National Indigenous Homelessness Council is to actually advise the federal government and federal government departments on Indigenous-based homelessness with Indigenous-based responses. One of the things that we’ve been working on that’s come under our watch is the PATH process, which is the Indigenous story-based intake assessment tool that’s going to be coming out and being moved into a pilot project soon, which we’re hoping maybe Winnipeg will be one of them. It’s basically more of a culturally based assessment tool where people can tell their stories and more on a more traditional way that will hopefully over time replace some of the ones that we’re using now such as SPDAT.
We have a working partnership with the Canadian Alliance on Homelessness, which is fantastic. We just had a board-to-board meeting with them. So, we are growing and we’re looking forward to even being able to host our own conference. Part of what the role is, is to also help the Indigenous CABs and Indigenous CEs on best practices and bring them together and help build those stories. Something that we’re really, really want to make sure we do is being able to build the story of what Indigenous homelessness is within Canada, and what we believe is the best way out of it. This is important. It is of Indigenous by Indigenous, for everyone. It’s kind of how we want to make sure that our programs and services are going to be recommended to flow from. So that’s a little bit, but like I said, there’ll be more to come, and we’ll start hearing more of it as we grow. We’re in the early stages of development right now.
Is there anything else you would like to share about your experiences, the Reaching Home program, or the issue of homelessness that we’ve not covered?
Mark Fleming: I think that there’s a need for the federal government to expand and enhance the project. It needs to be funded longer term. We know that staff retention is one of the biggest challenge due to short term funding. When we talk to people, we hear things like staffing is a big issue and it’s really hard to retain good staff for these organizations that are at the front lines, they don’t know how long their contracts are going to be or things along those lines. So, we’re really trying to push to say, let’s have long term funding. That’s why we started to do 2-year funding now because we need to recognize the hard work of the staff. Most of the staff are also underpaid, over worked and put in tough situations. That’s something that I’ve been pushing to the federal government. We need to pay these people more. We need to retain these people. We need to treat these people better because they’re the frontline workers that are going to make that difference.
If we don’t have those staff working and doing what they need to do, then we’re never going to make a dent in anything. So, to me that’s a very, very big issue. And along with that are the safety issues, with addictions and alcoholism and mental health. It’s not always an easy job. I do commend anyone that works in the homelessness field. Know that you’re doing good work; great work and I just hope that soon enough they’ll be recognized for that treated a little better. I guess it’s kind of what I would like to see. I’d also like to see a lot more mobile services. With that we can go into encampments and do much more for the community. And of course, there’s always the need for more housing. I mean that’s something that’s going to take time. I just hope the three levels of government continue to work together and build the relationship that helps provide solutions, because if they’re not all on the same page, nothing is going to really move forward. So, it’s optimistic right now.
For the first time since I’ve been on the CAB I really feel optimistic that all three levels of governments are willing and ready to work together. So, we hope to see some really good things happening from their collaborative approach.
Thank you. Thank you so much for your time.
Mark Fleming: You’re welcome. Thank you for having me.