The homeless tenting site next to the Rail Trail in Kelowna.

(ROB MUNRO / iNFOnews.ca)

After five years and at least $1 million in Kelowna taxpayers’ dollars, the Journey Home Society is no longer part of the city’s efforts to end homelessness.

An independent review of the organization’s effectiveness, delivered to Kelowna city council last Jan. 9, convinced them it was time to cut the connection. In July, council announced it would not renew Journey Home’s five-year memorandum of understanding that ended Dec. 31, 2023.

iNFOnews.ca obtained that report after a Freedom of Information request but anything that may have been critical of the organization was redacted.

“The change is happening because we’ve heard from community that there is a desire for a greater involvement from the city to take a leadership role,” Colleen Cornock, the city’s new social development manager, told iNFOnews.ca in early December.

In that interview, she echoed the key points of the review.

“The (Journey Home) strategy is widely supported, viewed as continuing to be relevant,” the report says. “However, the strategy requires a ‘re-set’ with a clear governance structure defining roles and accountability along with renewed and targeted priorities.”

READ MORE: With the death of Journey Home it’s unclear how Kelowna will tackle homelessness in the future

Journey Home was created in 2019 following a city council task force on homelessness and was considered to be a “backbone” organization pulling together all the agencies working in that sector with the aim of “functionally” eliminating homelessness by 2024.

The city contributed $150,000 in each of the first three years of its operation and $250,000 in the last two, as well as spending thousands more on other initiatives dealing with homelessness.

“(Journey Home’s) strengths include collaboration with other cities to support joint advocacy to senior government for integrated data management and, locally, solid leadership in specific areas including data transformation, outreach coordination and coordinated access,” the report says under the heading: Effectiveness in Backbone Role.

That is followed by a heavily redacted section that, presumably, dealt with areas of concern.

The report was compiled by an as yet unnamed independent third party in consultation with “stakeholders.”

Two of the biggest agencies working with the homeless population in Kelowna are the Kelowna Gospel Mission and John Howard Society. Both run emergency shelters. John Howard also manages a number of supportive housing complexes.

“Collaboration requires trust and I think that Journey Home struggled to create trust with shelter providers and housing providers in the city,” Carmen Rempel, executive director of the Gospel Mission told iNFOnews.ca. “Honestly, I think it was its undoing,”

She would not provide any details about why there was a lack of trust.

“It’s hard for me to share without just bashing another organization,” Rempel said. “I don’t want to speak negatively of people when it’s not necessary or helpful. It’s kind of dissolved now.”

Patricia Bacon, executive director of John Howard, was equally reluctant to give specific details but did talk about areas of concern.

“There were definitely some ebbs and flows in the stakeholder engagement,” she said. “What we would like to see is that there’s a consistency in understanding the work, the priorities and how we engage the work together and how we understand collaboration and how we understand each other’s priorities.”

There’s no question that Journey Home, under the directorship of its executive director, Stephanie Gauthier, did some good work.

Bacon noted that Journey Home got funding from the federal government’s Reaching Home program to initiate things like a “by-name” count of the homeless and tried to coordinate between agencies to eliminate duplication of efforts.

“There’s the (federal) initiatives and the idea of what those are and then there’s the actual work to do it,” Bacon said. “I’m sure Stephanie was doing all that because the feds weren’t saying: ‘Here’s all the things and we’re doing it for you.’ They were saying: ‘We want you to do a by-name list and we want you to be getting to functional zero and building a strategy and tools and concepts and ways of working to functional zero.’ That was coming from the feds but the actual work was meant to be done on the ground by the people in the community that are invested in the work.”

She also gives Journey Home credit for bringing the issue of homeless to the forefront in Kelowna.

“That was a very valuable thing that they did because it’s all part of raising the consciousness and raising awareness around the issue,” she said. “When you go: ‘What are we going to do about this?’ first you have to raise awareness of the issue and how complex it is and what some of the pressures are and those kinds of things and they did do that. They were making sure that Kelowna was talking about homelessness and it needed to be talked about.”

But, she said, there were definitely some lengthy “ebbs” in communication that she hopes the city, as it takes on the backbone role, will eliminate.

“To me, as a partner in the homeless serving sector in Kelowna, that’s where I would be hopeful that we would see in an invigorated model, that we will see that kind of consistency of engagement, consistency of communication and consistency of sharing and understanding priorities,” Bacon said. “We’re all working on our stuff and then we’re all sort of asking: ‘Are we still all rowing the ship in the same direction?’ I’m hoping we’re really clear on that – that we’re all, on a very high level, working towards the same ends.”

READ MORE: Why sheltering the homeless in the Okanagan isn't enough

Rempel, for her part, said the homeless serving sector, on its own, is working very well together.

“You can look at the relationship between Kelowna Gospel Mission and bylaw services just to see a beautiful partnership of collaboration together,” she said. “Or Patricia at John Howard and Kelowna Gospel Mission. We get together. We share ideas.

“I had a conversation last week with four different community stakeholders to talk about joining together in a project. There’s really, really awesome collaboration and partnership happening in the social services sector every day. It’s actually one of the joys and privileges of my job.”

They both praise the efforts Journey Home made doing a tough job, complicated by what Bacon called the “beast” of COVID that made it a real struggle to find ways to work together.

“Generally speaking, when you’re trying to accomplish a system-wide change you’re going to need clear roles and responsibility, that’s just basic leadership,” Repel said. “That can be really tough.

“When you’re talking about a backbone organization that is gathering a group of stakeholders together to work on a shared goal, that’s a complex group of people who all have their own mandate and their own funding. It’s tough to be the ones who are calling people together to do a work when you have no authority over them. It requires buy-in to get anything done.”

It seems, however, that the “buy-in” was either lacking from the beginning or faded away.

While the city has no direct authority over organizations like the Gospel Mission, they do have big influence, Rempel said.

“I know that, when an invitation comes out from the city to have a conversation about things, people show up to that meeting,” she said, noting that, while people showed up when Journey Home called meetings, “something was lost along the way.”

Now it’s up to the city to turn the ship around and make sure everyone is pulling in the same direction.

“That’s the hope,” Rempel said. “I think there’s some opportunities for them when it comes to emergency winter planning, like any sort of extreme weather response stuff. I think it’s cool for the city to take a lead in that. I think that’s awesome.

“There is a such an amazing group here, some great organizations doing some great stuff and they’re hungry and ready to think systems-wide, to think partnership. If the city can be the conduit to make some of those conversations happen and bring some of the structures, I think we’re ready to enter that conversation as a group.”

But, she added: “It always comes down to relationships and trust.”

The report to council included three options.

One, to re-invest in Journey Home, was rejected for things like accountability being at arm's length, it not being engaged in housing development, having no formalized relationship with provincial partners, having a lack of capacity and “currently no ability to incentivize alignment with sector shareholders.”

Setting up a separate, new organization came with challenges like not-for-profits facing labour shortages, needing to build trust with stakeholders, whether they would have the ability to “convene/coordinate a complex multi-layer system” and accountability, again, being at arm's length.

The third option, of the city taking over, was promoted, and adopted, for reasons like the city is a neutral body, has strong relationships with social agencies and the provincial government, works with senior governments on social housing and has the internal infrastructure and expertise.

What was not said in the report is the role city council can play in all of  this.

“You will be able to say to your councillor: ‘Why are you spending time on this?’” Bacon said. “The councillor will be able to talk about why they’re spending time on it and why they carved it out – in all the work the city has – why they said this is work we’re also going to do. I think it sends a really good message because, this issue of housing precarity, we’re all talking about now. It’s a beast.”

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