The Mission Youth House (MY House) on Proctor Street is down to two employees.
Manager Calvin Williams says the organization dropped from five employees down to two in the past year due to employees relocating or taking new jobs. Greater Vancouver Youth Unlimited employs Williams and one other employee.
MY House is a collaborative program between organizations such as the Fraser House Society, Mission Community Services and Greater Vancouver Youth Unlimited. MY House also receives a fee for service grant from the City of Mission.
“We have reduced our staff…and we haven’t been able to recover,” Williams said. “As our staffing has gone down, our youth that have been coming through have gone down.”
MY House is open during the day but it isn’t an overnight facility. According to Williams, numbers are down since the pandemic. Before COVID, about 10 to 15 youth would frequent the facility on most days but now the number has fallen to about five.
According to MY House’s monthy intake statistics, an average of 21.7 youth came to the facility per month in 2022 with 3.1 of those young people known to be homeless. This is down from a monthly average of 26.2 people per month in 2021.
“We’re under capacity right now,” he said. “We can care for quite a bit more youth than what we do. It’s not because there’s less homeless youth or less youth needing our services but it’s just now there’s a different distribution of services,”
In addition to staffing difficulties, Williams cited the new youth centre at the Mission Leisure Centre and the shelter at the closed motel as reasons for the decrease in numbers. He says it helps to have more resources available and MY House continues to do the best they can.
“We’re getting a lot of really good one-on-one work done,” Williams said. “We’re still getting very valuable work done — getting youth into treatment centres, helping them reconnect with family, stuff like that.”
The organization has identified two new youth workers to hire, but their salaries aren’t budgeted. The youth house is trying to source new funding so they can start work.
READ MORE: MY House being called a success
“We’ll be able to double our impact on the amount of youth we are able to care for through outreach,” Williams said. “It will help us to go more to where youth are at and also extend the hours that we’re open.”
Williams says the young people that come to the youth house are often struggling with substance abuse. The substances that provide the most issues are alcohol, fentanyl and meth. A bulk of their work is helping young people to get ready to go into treatment.
“Either addiction or just problematic drug use in their life, that’s the biggest thing we see,” Williams said. “Whether they’re homeless or if they are sheltered, that’s still a factor.”
The youth house treats young people up to 24 years old with support provided beyond that as alumni if required. They treat youth as young as needed with the largest age group between 19 and 21.
“That’s when a lot of them age out of government care,” Williams said. “They’re struggling.”
The Mission Youth House is currently searching for donations in the way of food supplies such as dry and non-perishable food items. The organization recently took to Instagram to ask for donations of guys’ clothes and the community stepped up. The area is no longer a need for them.
“We rely a lot on donations,” Williams said. “We don’t get funding from any single source - we do get the odd little grant but about 70 per cent of our budget, including staffing, is reliant on donations.”
The youth house has been open for eight years. Williams says the organization sees an uptick in donations during the holiday season but the following months can be slower.
@dillon_white
dillon.white@missioncityrecord.com
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