Peterborough Currents

In 2023, the City of Peterborough implemented two new initiatives to respond to homelessness in the city and to offer low-barrier services for people whose needs were not being met by the existing shelter system at the time.

Those two initiatives were the modular housing community on Wolfe Street, where 50 sleeping cabins replaced a tent encampment, and the Trinity Community Centre, which was funded to provide overnight shelter for six months of the year and a daytime drop-in program year-round.

In February 2024, four people who were instrumental in designing and delivering these two initiatives participated in a panel discussion to share what the process was like, what they learned, and what challenges remain. The panelists were: Alex Bierk, Christian Harvey, Auden Palmer, and Jessica Penner.

The panel was part of the Community Symposium on Housing and Homelessness, which was hosted at Trent University by the Research for Social Change Lab, the Peterborough Drug Strategy, and United Way Peterborough and District.

Peterborough Currents is sharing highlights from this panel discussion in this podcast episode.

UPDATE: This discussion was recorded on February 23, 2024. At the time, the Trinity Centre's overnight shelter was set to close for the season on March 31, and mention of this closure is made a couple of times in this podcast. On March 25, 2024, One City Peterborough confirmed to Currents that the shelter will remain open until at least the end of April with support from United Way Peterborough and District.

CREDITS: This episode was produced by Will Pearson. Audio recording by Ayesha Lye. Intro music by Jordan Cook.

SUPPORT INDEPENDENT LOCAL JOURNALISM: At Peterborough Currents, our mission is to serve the citizens of Peterborough with in-depth and community centred news. If you value our work, please support us financially: https://peterboroughcurrents.ca/support-us/

Peterborough is one of the toughest places in Ontario to find an affordable home to rent. A report from earlier this year put Peterborough at the very bottom of Ontario cities for rental vacancies, with only a one percent vacancy rate. The same report also showed that the average rent for vacant units was increasing at a much steeper rate than the average rent for occupied units.

Because of these pressures in the local housing market, Peterborough Currents invited all of the major party candidates in the Peterborough area running this 2022 provincial election to speak to their positions on a handful of specific housing policies. Three candidates accepted our invitation: Greg Dempsey of the Liberal Party, Jen Deck of the NDP and Robert Gibson of the Green Party.

Listen to these candidates speak to policies like rent control, vacancy control and working with housing not-for-profits in this episode of our podcast.

Election Day is a matter of days away, and to help you make an informed decision about who to vote for, Peterborough Currents has interviewed all six candidates running for Peterborough–Kawartha in the 2021 federal election.

We asked each candidate to introduce themselves, why they're running for office and what are the key takeaways from their platform.

Take a listen and meet the candidates who want to represent our community at the federal level.

Candidate interviews begin at the following timecodes:

• 01:24 Robert Bowers, Independent candidate
• 09:40 Michelle Ferreri, Conservative Party of Canada candidate
• 17:07 Joy Lachica, New Democratic Party candidate
• 26:27 Paul Lawton, People’s Party of Canada candidate
• 35:52 Maryam Monsef, Liberal Party of Canada candidate
• 44:18 Chanté White, Green Party of Canada candidate

Credits

Interviews by Ayesha Barmania and Will Pearson

Editing and production support by Leina Amatsuji-Berry

Hosting and audio mixing by Ayesha Barmania

Music courtesy of Erika Nininger, find her music on Bandcamp.

Support our work

This reporting comes to you from Peterborough Currents, a reader-supported and independent journalism outlet serving the Peterborough community. You can help make more reporting like this happen by becoming a financial backer.

Make a donation today.

On Monday, Peterborough’s city council sat for the last meeting of 2020 and voted to approve the budget documents drafted by city staff with amendments. Peterborough Currents has been covering these deliberations for the past month and in this episode, co-publishers Ayesha Barmania and Will Pearson go over the highlights of this meeting so you can hear what happened.

Episode transcript

Hey – Ayesha here, before we get into the podcast, I wanted to let you know about something that we’re trying at Peterborough Currents. As we look ahead into 2021, things are still uncertain and 2020 has been a heck of a year for Will and I to try and start a business. And the one thing that we’re realizing is that to become a sustainable operation, we need the financial support from our audience. And that’s why we’re asking folks to support our work for 2021 by becoming monthly sustainers. If you head over to peterboroughcurrents.ca/supportus you can sign up to support our work. It really means a lot to us if you’d consider contributing. And thank you!

Hello you’re listening to Peterborough Currents. I’m Ayesha Barmania.

This is the final episode of our Budget Week Podcast and to help me wrap up our coverage of the 2021 Budget deliberations, I’m here again with Currents’ co-publisher Will Pearson.

Hello.

And so today, Will and in this episode, we’re going to go over some of the highlights of the City Council meeting on Monday when council voted to approve the budget documents which we’ve been going into over this series. And before we get into some of the clips we want to play, I just want to say that this was the last City Council meeting of the year, and the budget was just one item on a pretty long agenda and pretty much all of the amendments to the document had been proposed, debated and voted on during the Finance Committee meeting at the end of November, which we covered in episode 5.

But there was one thing added at this council meeting but there were also 27 citizen delegations that spoke to council about the budget. And to kick us off, Will, there was one in particular you wanted to talk about.

Yeah, so I want to bring up a delegation that was delivered by Reverend Brad Smith from St. John’s Anglican Church on Hunter Street. St. John’s runs the One Roof Community Center, which is a meal program and a drop in center for people that are marginalized or homeless in Peterborough. And funding for the One Roof Community Center was always kind of baked into the homelessness budget all along. But it only came up at this last city council meeting because throughout November, there were some negotiations going on about what the service agreement would look like in 2021. And basically what was going on in those negotiations was One Roof was trying to secure some extra municipal funding to make up for a drop in the fundraising that it’s been able to do because of the pandemic. Currently, the City funds One Roof, but with $208,000 a year and the expectation is that they’ll deliver one meal per day, One Roof has been able to fundraise and through its own resources deliver two meals a day as well as additional activities, social supports, and like a community center. And so when One Roof was trying to get more funding so that during the pandemic who could continue to offer that enhanced service, it seems like the city wasn’t interested in increasing its support. And so the recommendation was to hold it steady at $208,000. Despite the fact that there is no increased need, especially for food programs, right now, during the pandemic.

The issue of food and security is not going away. In fact, as we’ve already seen, in the last six months, the number of community members accessing the meal program at One Roof is increasing as people’s financial resources are hit hard by the pandemic. If the city is going to issue a request for proposals for a meal program, it must do so seriously, including a credible amount of funding.

So that was Brad Smith from St. John’s One Roof had asked for $450,000. So more than double the funding of 2020. They kind of lowered their bid to $375,000 when the city balked at that, but then the city kind of held firm at $208,000.

So Reverend Smith, on Monday night, told city council that he signed the agreement, even though he didn’t feel like it was the best thing for the community.

When I was informed that our first and revised proposals would not be accepted and that the City would accept a new one year agreement. I felt compelled to accept the terms. With less than two months left in the current agreement, there wasn’t sufficient time to rebuild One Roof Community Centers model without the City as a partner. So this was the only way to keep the program alive. Otherwise, all of...

The Peterborough Drug Strategy was started in 2009 as a way to bring different organizations together to coordinate a joint response to the drug crisis. Today, they’re the name behind the projects making headlines responding to the overdose crisis: from the Consumption and Treatment Services site to the Mobile Supportive Overdose Resource Team and many more.

It is an unincorporated collective with four core member organizations that each represent one of the four principles that underlies the group’s approach to drug use: Peterborough Public Health represents prevention; the Peterborough AIDS Resource Network (PARN) represents harm reduction; Fourcast represents treatment; and the Peterborough Police represents enforcement.

There are also 13 partner organizations that are a range of not-for-profit organizations, government agencies, and other bodies that work with or provide services to people who use drugs.

The drug strategy coordinator Jessica Penner says that having all of these voices at the table helps to identify the biggest needs in the community and come up with projects to address the gaps between mandates, oftentimes leveraging limited resources in the community to reach ambitious goals.

Listen to this edited interview with Penner on what the drug strategy is and how it works.

Episode transcript coming soon.

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