When mother and child flee family violence they may not have anywhere to go, but a six-month project based in Saint John will be studying ways to change that and support these families.
The project is called Thrive and is the recipient of over $241,000 in federal funding. For the project, First Steps, which helps young mothers and moms-to-be, is going to be working with six homeless and other non-profit service providers in and around Saint John to create a model to tackle this problem.
Executive Director of First Steps, Sharon Amirault, says in our region — from Sussex all the way to St. Stephen — we have extremely high rates of domestic violence.
“There’s tragic statistics like, children under 12 experience domestic violence greater in Saint John than in any other place in Canada, so we know it’s a problem,” Amirault tells CHSJ News.
“What we know is the way we’re doing things now, are done with great intentions, great people, but we know that there has to be a better way because we’re not seeing the problem go away, we’re not seeing the need for less shelter beds, for less interventions.”
Saint John-Rothesay MP Wayne Long made the funding announcement at First Steps. He said there were over 500 applications for this particular funding, which came through the Innovative Solutions to Homelessness funding stream of the Homelessness Partnerning Strategy, and tells CHSJ News it was an easy sell.
“First Steps was right at the top of the pile and I was very happy to help push that even further.”
Long says the hope and expectation is that the Thrive project will see the creation of a plan that can be adapted for use by communities across Canada.
“There’s no question that the expectation is that if this is done right, and I obviously know it’s going to be done right with Sharon and First Steps housing, that this is something we can model, we can scale and use this as a roadmap,” he says.
