City to roll out community engagement team, mental health strategy for ByWard Market, Lowertown
Taylor Blewett, Ottawa Citizen
Publishing date: Dec 12, 2021 • 1 hour ago • 6 minute read
Amid a confluence of challenges that include a homelessness crisis, toxic drug supply and pandemic disruptions to businesses and services vital to community well-being, one thing is clear: the Lowertown-ByWard Market neighbourhood needs some help.
In hopes of addressing this, work has started on a mental health strategy for the community. In the interim, the city will be rolling out an engagement team of dedicated staff – which will also cover the Sandy Hill neighbourhood – tasked with listening to the concerns of residents and local businesses and trying to coordinate responses to some of the complex challenges the area is grappling with.
“As in many communities across the City, the pandemic has had a visible and negative impact in the densely populated communities in the ByWard Market and Lowertown areas,” community and protective services associate GM Laila Gibbons told this newspaper, via email.
“The concentration of businesses, residents and social services has highlighted the need for a new strategy aimed at improving the health of the entire community.”
It’s still early days with planning ongoing, and stakeholders’ feelings about initiatives range from relief to optimism to wariness.
The new community engagement team, “really is a model of coordination of services and relief for the community in terms of making the calls and ensuring that the gaps in the community for response … are addressed, frankly,” said Rideau-Vanier Coun. Mathieu Fleury. “Because people get tired of calling 911 or 311, and then never get the resolution.”
What would the team actually look like? City staff who are visible in the community, Fleury explained, connecting with businesses and residents. As issues emerge – maybe it’s a pattern of petty crime or activities related to mental health or addiction challenges – staff could take that information and work with partners to respond.
They’re expected to start their outreach work in the first quarter of 2022.
When you take the historic concentration of social services and supports in a single geographic area, and add to it changes in the drug supply, mental health and housing challenges, “it really starts to create a pressure cooker of a situation,” said Ottawa Markets executive director Zach Dayler, “where residents are frustrated, businesses are frustrated and absolutely, those who need these services are frustrated.”
For Dayler, it’s critical to not just identify the problem but to consider what he called “action-oriented solutions,” and if community stakeholders are on board, to find ways to contribute to those solutions.
Take the engagement team as an example. Ottawa Markets could step up and offers space in their ByWard building for that team to operate out of, Dayler suggested.
“I actually think if we’re going to have a robust solution to the problem, we have to dig a little bit deeper collectively in those things.”
Meanwhile, Ottawa Markets is doing its own planning to address one of the challenges it sees – the morning-after disarray from ByWard Market nightlife – in the form of an employment program offering a few hours of work cleaning up and resetting the area for low-income residents served by local organizations. There’s also a plan to provide a space next season for those who are creators to sell their wares.
The median household income in the ByWard Market and Lowertown areas are $54,686 and $34,677, respectively, according to Ottawa Neighbourhood Study data.
“When I compare that to our Parkdale market, for example, where the average income is over $100,000, you think, ‘Gosh, well, yeah … We need to structure the space for those who are here.’ And start building in more ownership,” said Dayler.
Sandra Milton, whose portfolio on the Lowertown Community Association executive involves community safety, said the association wants to work with the city, and understand more about the community engagement team pilot project and whether it will address the issues they have.
These include improperly discarded drug supplies, public drug use and bathroom behaviours. “Really we are looking for decentralization of services, said Milton. “We have many social services, many shelters, the injection sites … We cannot continue this way.”
Sandy Hill is seeing many of the same challenges, according to Action Sandy Hill Community Association president Susan Khazaeli. Longer-term solutions also include, in her eyes, stopping the concentration of social services in the ward, as well as a safe-supply drug policy approach and significant affordable housing investment. More immediately? Additional needle drop boxes, garbage receptacles, some public bathrooms and more proactive patrolling in the community to connect people in distress with the appropriate services.
Ottawa Inner City Health Executive Director Wendy Muckle said she thinks the community engagement team is a great idea. Area residents and businesses see around them a community that has changed, and Muckle believes it’s important to understand their perspective.
“I do think that the conventional way that those voices have been heard isn’t working for people right now. They don’t feel like they’re being heard. And so this is a great way to make sure that … people are asked directly and do have a voice in things.”
As for the broader ByWard Market and Lowertown mental health strategy, it’s a model the city is working on with Ottawa Inner City Health, public health, the police service, social service providers, businesses and resident representatives, said Gibbons, which will be piloted in the area. The project has been allocated $435,000 from the police budget, and Gibbons said implementation is slated for Spring 2022.
The plan is to develop a 24/7 community response team “to assist local residents and business owners in resolving issues using a neighbour-helping-neighbour model,” she said, as well as to increase “clinical care outreach” to people struggling with mental health or addiction, and to “facilitate seamless transitions to existing programs, services and sectors.”
There’s an app being designed for residents and businesses to report, in real-time, incidents of concern.
“Information from the app, combined with expert knowledge, will be analyzed and actioned in an effort to reduce social disorder, provide support and care needs of individuals and make changes to service systems to better support the community,” said Gibbons.
Muckle also sees community-derived data as an important tool. It can help determine if something is a pattern, rather than a one-off incident and whether a situation can be resolved through an individual intervention or calls for a system-level change.
“This is really a process to bring people together for them to decide as a community, what’s a problem, what’s not and what do we want to do about it?” she said.
Lowertown Community Resource Centre executive director Matthew Beutel sees potential for the mental health strategy to be beneficial. “The devil, of course, will be in the details and how it’s rolled out and how folks are involved,” he said.
For Beutel, the process has to be “properly inclusive,” and involve adequate consultation and consideration of all stakeholders – including those residents who live in Lowertown but don’t have organized representation.
It also wasn’t clear to him by this point the extent to which the initiative would lead to “an increase in the appropriate services by the appropriate people,” and whether increased resourcing and investment to respond to needs would be provided.
“Because if it’s just a strategy of what should be done without accompanying resources to get it done, then it’s not going to be worthwhile.”
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local...rket-lowertown
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