On a beautiful spring day, I met with Sandra, the manager at Newcastle Place to interview her about the program, the upcoming transition to HEARTH, her staff, and a bit about her background.
Newcastle Place started in 2018 when BC Housing purchased property at 250 Terminal Avenue to locate modular buildings to provide temporary supportive housing for people residing at ‘tent city’ in the downtown area. This temporary housing was court ordered. Within days, Newcastle came to life.
The focus at Newcastle place has been to provide an affordable, safe, secure home for people who have a low income, have been or are at risk of homelessness, and require support with mental health and/or substance use.
Within the next few months, Newcastle Place will be transitioning into a new type of BC Housing programming called HEARTH (Homeless Encampment Action Response Temporary Housing). As part of the changes, current clients will be moving to Cornerstone, a new supportive housing program in Nanaimo operated by Connective Support Society.
The HEARTH program will accept clients from shelters that are housing ready. “They won’t be clients who are sleeping rough who aren’t necessarily housing ready. These will be people that have already been vetted in the shelter system. They will come here through referrals from the BC Housing Coordinated Access table. This will open existing spaces for those sleeping rough to give them a chance to get into shelter beds to follow some structure and some rules and prepare themselves to be housing ready,” Sandra explains.
This new process ensures that there is a more effective system in place than there has been in the past. The hope is that after spending time in the HEARTH program, clients will move into subsidized housing, permanent supportive housing, affordable housing, or market housing.
HEARTH will be very similar, from the outside as well as the inside, to what Newcastle is like now. ICCS program staff will be the same as will many of the agencies who already have connection with ICCS.
All clients moving into HEARTH must be housing ready and will have gone through a vulnerability assessment (VAT) and filled out a supportive housing application with BC Housing. Client will be transitioning from shelters – with shelter operators making the referrals.
Newcastle currently has around 34 staff including casuals and support workers. In addition, they have two case workers, a full-time kitchen coordinator, a part-time cook and a janitor.
There is also Alexis, ICCS’s LifeSkills coordinator, who comes in frequently in the evenings. She sometimes brings guests and works on things that clients are struggling with. One of the things she has been very successful with is helping clients with downsizing, organizing and anti-hoarding.
Melanie, a volunteer ICCS chaplain, drops in quite a bit at Newcastle. She is aware of the move to HEARTH, so she touches base with some of the residents because even though they are excited to get their own apartment at Cornerstone, there is still some anxiety and trauma about leaving a place where some of them have been living for three, four or five years and where they are familiar with staff.
“We see people crying, seeing them changing their minds, seeing them struggle with packing, so it has to be a gradual move to keep everybody safe and able to cope”, Sandra says and adds “you move two or three clients at a time so they can get a little bit adjusted and then everybody can cope. After having established a bond and a connection over the years with the residents they started feeling safe with our case workers. So, it’s been a bit of trauma for my staff and for the clients to move.”
To make the transition a bit easier for her staff “we all did some brainstorming and after connecting with one of the Island Health psych nurses, I decided to start a Newcastle Wellness Club, Sandra says.
“It’s in its infancy right now, but we’re celebrating staff birthdays once a month with a communal cake for all the birthdays in that month. We are doing a speaker series for staff. We just had our first talk yesterday where an Island Health nurse spoke about cumulative stress and how to deal with it.”
“We’ve planned some other things, like hike day. We are also going to set up a wellness room where staff can decompress after a crisis. There, they can just level back out a little bit more peacefully than under the fluorescent lights in the staff room. The wellness room will also include an emotions wheel and some decompressing/self-care items. Let’s say staff is dealing with a death or an overdose or a crisis or a trauma we can debrief with each other and use the emotions wheel. We can talk about our feelings. You want to address that stress immediately so it’s not overly cumulative.”
Then there is the “buddy system”. Staff have the opportunity to connect with someone they might not know, but they can go straight to that person whenever there is a stressful event and talk about their feelings. In this business, when you are dealing with a crisis, staff often have to compartmentalize or ‘postpone’ their feelings. We want to make sure we keep an open door for debriefing and decompressing after any stressful event. That goes for staff but also for residents always!
A term Sandra uses is reboot, i.e., how to manage your emotions immediately after a trauma “so you’re not walking out of here at the end of the day carrying that weight of the crisis or the trauma with you,” she explains.
“With all the changes happening right now, we really felt that we needed to bond as a team. We are so client focused; I think it’s really important to say this is staff only. And that’s why we invented the Newcastle Wellness Club.
It is my favourite thing right now that we’re doing. And I really can’t tell you how many changes I’ve seen. The staff yesterday said they felt better going home after the talk on cumulative stress because there were so many good constructive tips,” Sandra notes.
In more serious situations such as the death of a client, the Newcastle manager will book the Mobile Response Team (MRT) to attend the site. Professionals such as psychologists and social workers are equipped to help staff respond to stress.
It is important to Sandra to have immediately available resources in place to deal with the day-to-day stresses. “It’s okay to cry, it’s okay to be scared, it’s okay to debrief right away, it’s okay to go sit in the wellness room and decompress for five minutes before you leave,” she says.
It’s inspiring to hear Sandra talk about the culture she and her staff are building. It’s invaluable to develop the kinds of internal resources that will help staff deal with the stresses that come with being a front-line worker.
For clients, there are onsite resources available such as two case workers who work with them to set goals and fill out paperwork on various matters. There are many services on the site including regular nurse and doctor visits, a MSDPR outreach worker for help with support payments, and Island Health staff come on site regularly to support their clients—there is the ACT (Assertive Community Treatment) team, the SUS team for substance abuse and there is the Community Support Team (CST).
In addition, there are other agencies that aren’t affiliated with Island Health. Health Matters (NARSF) offers STD and HIV testing and they hand out harm reduction equipment or put on a self-care clinic.
“In our sixth year here, we have a lot of wonderful connections with professionals who really work well with us and who admire what we do at Newcastle because it isn’t easy,” Sandra explains.
If a client wants to go to treatment and wants to discuss options, staff might call the SUS team who then works with that client to get them into treatment. Some clients might have serious mental health issues. They are usually followed by the ACT team which has a specific focus on acute trauma, and they work with those clients.
Public health outreach comes on site every two weeks with a doctor and two nurses. If a resident doesn’t have a doctor, they can get a referral.
With all the wraparound services offered, Newcastle is almost like a little village, buzzing with life and activity.
Sandra has worked in supportive housing for 18 years, initially in women’s shelters. “That started things for me, and I’ve stuck with it,” she says and notes that she worked with BC Housing as ICCS Outreach coordinating the move of residents at Tent City as Newcastle was being set up.
ICCS is very fortunate to have such a caring and dedicated manager and team at Newcastle/HEARTH.