If you are in need of help please call (902) 423-4443.
Adsum for Women & Children has emergency shelter, short and long term housing, programs and services for women, families, youth and gender-diverse persons.
Our Programs
Housing and emergency shelter
Adsum believes that everyone has the right to a safe and secure home. We also believe that no one size fits all, so we have developed a range of shelter, housing and support models that work in properties owned by Adsum and by the private and public sectors.
Adsum for Women & Children operates four locations throughout the Halifax Regional Municipality: an emergency shelter, Adsum House; and long term affordable housing in Halifax and Dartmouth with supports on site - Adsum Court and The Alders. and The Sunflower. Adsum also owns four condominiums in Clayton Park that are rented to single moms and their families.
We know that housing ends homelessness, and appropriate supports are often what help people to remain housed. That’s led us to set up a housing support unit. Employees offer client-centered support, guided by a Housing First philosophy, to help people make connections to housing, and to maintain that housing and prevent evictions.
Given the increasing number of families we hear from in crisis, we are focusing more on identifying housing options and supports for families through a program we call Diverting Families from Shelter to Home.
Diverting Families - Housing Support
While Adsum House shelters mothers and children who are in crisis, we know that emergency shelter is not the ideal solution for them. For that reason, we started a new program called ‘Diverting Families from Shelter to Home’. It 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. Some families need a relatively small amount of support while others need more intensive support over a longer period of time to settle in, and remain permanently housed. 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. The results we are seeing are very promising.
