On this Indigenous People holiday, I find myself hustling to make an 8:15am train heading to a InUnity Alliance conference - “Meeting the Moment: Advancing Access and Impact for Our Communities” and the lessons have already begun. As I approach the train station, a man is curled up in deep sleep, no shoes, disheveled laying on a piece of cardboard on the raised section of the sidewalk. It truly bothers me when I see this; I am that person that always has a few dollars in my pocket to give away, narcan and/or food. This is the richest city in the world right? I have a few moments to spare so I take out narcan put some money in the kit and gently place it right beside him in the hope that when he wakes up- breakfast at least? Another person (assuming from the street homeless community) who saw me do this, screams at me and said “he sleep, he don’t need no narcan, he need food, some money- why don’t you do that?” I looked at the man and said “I did” and he turned to me and gave me the thumbs up. Lesson: Distributing narcan is the floor- we can rescue a life all day with Narcan, when are we going to restore lives. We know what people need to end this vicious cycle of homelessness: access to crisis services, treatment, housing, employment and healthy food. So off to the conference I go, knowing what I already know hoping this time something will change.
It can change with the example you set, Ann-Marie Foster, FACHE.
One person makes a difference
See you soon! Safe travel, thank you for sharing what we all encounter in this city. There is so much work to do.
We keep showing up just like we are supposed to for one person at a time.. enjoy the day
Thank you for sharing this, Ann-Marie, and for what you did on the sidewalk that morning. Your line that Narcan is the floor, and that the goal is restoring lives, says it better than most policy papers. What we hear from the mission-driven organizations we work with is that the gap sits between the crisis response and what comes after: treatment, housing, work. The programmes that change things are the ones that follow people through that whole path. A lot of what we do at Omdena starts from the same goal of making those handoffs work.