Sending an SOS: Matawa First Nations challenges Thunder Bay to help fund outreach program

Matawa First Nations Management is challenging businesses, other Indigneous agencies and the entire Thunder Bay community to join them in supporting the Street Outreach Services program (SOS), run by the northwestern Ontario city's Shelter House.

Shelter House is hoping to raise $200,000 to keep the program running year-round. Currently, operations have been suspended until late fall 2017.

The SOS program takes homeless, intoxicated or other at-risk people off the streets and transports them to hospital, a detox facility or the shelter.

"It's very important," said Katrina Mendowagan, one of the people who has benefitted from the program.

"It helps us get to our medical appointments, picking us up when we need a ride to come back home, or when we're stuck at the hospital, detox, the police station."

She believes it helps many people in the city, especially by freeing up police and emergency workers to answer other calls.

"We really need it, and I'm not just speaking on my behalf, but everybody else needs it. It'll help the hospital, it'll help detox, the jail, Balmoral [the police station] places like that," she said.

'Our duty and our responsibility'

"It is our duty and our responsibility" said Matawa First Nations Management CEO David Paul Achneepineskum of the group's $10,000 contribution.

"We need to help our own people. We can not rely on government or the city of Thunder Bay itself to do all that for us. We have the ability and the will to do that."

Achneepineskum sees supporting the SOS program at Shelter House as just another way of helping people from Matawa communities, who come to Thunder Bay and have run into housing or substance abuse problems.

"We need to do our share to ensure that our people are safe, healthy and ensure that we don't have any more incidents where they're forgotten and they die on the streets and that's really sad to see."

The SOS program received another $6,300 towards its goal, from the Thunder Bay Community Foundation, courtesy of an anonymous donor.

As of April 18, Shelter House had raised just under $25,000.