Areas of Impact:
Current Initiatives
Image by Ivaan Kotulsky
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Street CCRED partnered with The Drop In Centre (DI) to participate in the 2020 Park(ing) Days event. This annual competition hosted by The City of Calgary and the Alberta Association of Landscape Architects invites participants to create a fun, interesting and interactive display in a designated City parking space. Street CCRED and the DI set up a living room and dining room on Kensington Road to demonstrate the need for basic household donations and to showcase the efforts of the DI’s Donation Centre. Street CCRED also took the opportunity to speak with pedestrians about the negative health effects that homelessness causes. We are proud to have received an honourable mention in this year's competition.
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The role of the Mobile Street Health Team (MSHT) will be two parts, 1) clinical health supports for persons experience homelessness through the CCT Paramedics Team and 2) case management wrap around supports from the new Health Navigator positions created from the grant. Currently in Calgary, the CCT Paramedics team is a Mobile Integrated Healthcare (MIH) resource dedicated to overcoming the obstacles to care faced by patients living with homelessness, addiction, and poor mental health. “Past research has shown that homeless individuals often face significant barriers to accessing health and addictions supports, and accessing/adhering to treatments (or medications) when they are prescribed. Homeless individuals also often feel unwelcome in health service settings, which may decrease their desire to seek support when needed, exacerbating many health issues” (Evaluation report pg. 3)
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With the support of Street CCRED, several agencies, individuals and volunteer groups joined forces under the umbrella of COPE to help strategize ways of delivering community education, training, capacity building and advocacy related to overdose prevention and harm reduction. COPE training was initially customized to meet the needs of individual client organizations for on-site delivery but with the onset of Covid-19 the program pivoted to an online webinar format. Opioid epidemic and Covid-19 training was provided to approximately 600 frontline health and social service staff thanks to the support of the Calgary Foundation and in partnership with Boys and Girls Clubs of Calgary and West Side Harm Reduction. Efforts continue in Calgary and more recently in Lethbridge where the epidemic continues to claim an alarming number of lives. Read more HERE and watch one of the training webinars below.
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