Thunder Bay’s new Homelessness and Addiction Recovery Treatment (HART) Hub is operating alongside People Advocating for Change Through Empowerment Inc (PACE).
The location at 510 Victoria Avenue East is temporary for the Hub while renovations are being completed at the permanent location at 409 George Street.
“Pace has allowed us over the next couple of months to integrate some of the Hart Hub services into their current location on Victoria while we work through our last-minute details with the location that we will be landing our HART Hub Location at,” explained NorWest Community Health Centres CEO Juanita Lawson. “There’s a lot of great work that needs to happen. But yes, the long-term goal for the permanent location would be (to be opened) by June for sure.”
PACE already has workers on hand supplying food, supplies, and gear for the winter season.
“We’ll be embedding into the PACE location, a nurse. nurse practitioners, system navigators, and then we’ll also have staff from some of our other organizations that are funded to support the HART Hub once they’re hiring is completed and some of them have completed that also use some of the space out of pace,” added Lawson.
“We know we’ll be looking at housing because that’s a big part of the HART Hub model, which is to make sure that people have adequate access to housing or identification, so those are some of the things that will be embedded into that PACE location.”
PACE, the Elizabeth Fry Society, Norwest Community Health Centres, St. Joseph’s Care Group and Alpha Court are some of the organizations providing services through the Hub.
“So those are some of the partners, but we do know that we have many other organizations in our community that we want to embed in and create some really nice integrated pathways for other services that they offer,” explained Lawson. “We’ll get our work off the ground and then we’ll be reaching out to all of our community partners who we are all engaged with in many different ways.”
This comes as Norwest’s Path 525 Safe Injection Site was one of the sites forced to close after the province announced that it was establishing new rules for safe injection sites last August.
The rule change made it so the sites would no longer be allowed to be located near schools or childcare centres.
The sites had to close by the end of the day on Monday.
Path 525 provided drug consumption and treatment services, giving their clients a safe space to consume illicit substances.
