Adsum Outreach Team
Adsum Outreach Team supports community members who stay in hotel or in shelters throughout the Halifax Regional Municipality. The Outreach Team Managers oversee various programs and services outlined below which include:
SHelter Diversion Support (SDS)
The Shelter Diversion Support program works predominantly with families and parents who have children in their care. Many shelters support people depending on their gender or age, making it inaccessible for families with children under the age of 18. To ensure families can stay together, SDS works with hotels within the HRM to provide hotel room for families, while working with families and parents to find more permanent housing solution. Depending on program capacity and room availability, we provide support to single women/ gender-diverse people and couples.
Journey home
Through the Journey Home program, staff can provide wraparound community-rich services to keep African Nova Scotian families housed safely, supported, and together. Adsum for Women & Children is committed to developing a Housing First model that is culturally appropriate and safe to support African Nova Scotian families while building a program rooted in community.
Diverting Families
Diverting Families works directly with single parents and two-parent families and their children who are in crisis due to homelessness or impending homelessness. We seek to address their immediate need for safe emergency housing and longer-term secure housing by offering a variety of interventions ranging from eviction prevention and rapid re-housing services to ongoing outreach support to families to maintain housing. We know there is no ‘one size fits all’; each family’s needs are unique to the family. Our goals are to avoid any stay in a traditional emergency shelter wherever possible, and to minimize the number of moves that children have to experience.
We also provided support that includes, but is not limited to, a temporary rent supplement, payment of rental arrears, power arrears, or moving expenses to prevent homelessness, as well as the purchase of furniture, food boxes and grocery cards when indicated.
This focus on diverting families from shelter becomes increasingly important when we look at the long-term impacts of a shelter stay. Research shows that any stay in a shelter negatively impacts children into adolescence and beyond. Halifax is not alone in facing this dilemma. Family homelessness is a huge burden for the country and for those experiencing it.
Putting an End to Child and Family Homelessness in Canada states “Children who live in homelessness run the risk of doing poorly in school, developing negative health and mental health outcomes, having behavioral issues and struggling to exit poverty as adults. Research into the causes of youth and adult homelessness shows a connection to their living situation and experiences as a child. By focusing on prevention and ending children’s homelessness, we are able to stem the flow of people into homelessness in later years. From September 2017 to March 2019, Diverting Families provided housing support to 60 families. We housed 48 of those families; and 87 percent of them were housed without having to stay even a single night in a shelter. The families who did have to use the shelter stayed, on average, 15 days before moving to housing. Through the Diverting Familiy program we offer the following services.
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Our housing clinic is a line open to all women, gender-diverse and families within community looking for housing support. It serves as a triage space allowing staff to learn more about a person’s needs, outlining resources available that could be best suited for them and supporting housing advocacy.
Additionally, staff can assist community members looking to complete subsidy applications, housing applications and BNL (By- Names-List) referral form. This is a voicemail service, community members looking to access our housing clinic must call and leave a voicemail with their name and contact information. Staff will follow up with community members to schedule an appointment on Fridays between 10:00am and 12:00pm.
Phone Number: 902-423-1687
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This programming provides on-time funding support to community members needing financial support to cover the cost of power and rental arrears. The goal of this program is to provide families and individuals with one time support to prevent eviction. To qualify for this program, applicants must be:
Living in the HRM
Have not received funding through this program in the last year
The program prioritizes applications from families and women and gender-diverse over the age of 55 , depending on demand will provide funding to single individuals and couples.
Contact Information
Meghan Hansford, Outreach Program Manager: (902) 800-0086
Shelter Diversion Services (SDS): (902) 717-4837
Housing Clinic and Diversion: (902) 423-1687