Change starts here.
Change starts here.
Volunteer housing counsellor Joanne smiles as she leans on her walker outside a mall in New Westminster.
It’s been a long haul, but life is much easier than a few years ago, when everything suddenly spiraled downhill. A bad fall, an angina attack and diabetes forced her to retire from her job as a medical office assistant, and about the same time, her sister passed away.
“It was a bad year,” says Joanne, now 66. She’d been living with her sister for 10 years and after her death, found out just how hard it was to find a place she could afford in the Lower Mainland.
Joanne moved into a basement suite, living on Employment Insurance until it ran out, then moving onto welfare. She put her name on the BC Housing list for subsidized housing, but finally gave up after two years of fruitless waiting. In the meantime, she shared an apartment with another woman, but finally decided she needed a place of her own.
Joanne turned to Century House, which offers counseling for seniors, and to Seniors Services Society, which is funded by United Way of the Lower Mainland. They helped sort out her finances, get her a disability allowance, and gave useful housing advice.
As a result, she now lives in Dunwood Place, a home for seniors living independently, but also offering a support system. “I love it there,” says Joanne.
Joanne has always enjoyed helping people and now wanted to give back to the community. In the fall of 2008, she took the Housing Counsellor Training course, now taught by Lynda Brind-Dickson from the Seniors Services Society.
The nine–week course, also funded by United Way of the Lower Mainland, gives professionals and volunteers a detailed understanding of the needs of local seniors and the services available to them.
She’s now on the society’s executive board, helps out on reception and does a lot of informal counseling. “I can understand what people are going through. It can be hell finding housing,” she says.
Lynda Brind-Dickson, community education resource manager of Seniors Services Society, is with Joanne today at their offices on McBride and Eighth Avenue.
Lynda’s not one to mince words. We’re halfway through the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver and it’s a bright and sunny day, but she sees few reasons to rejoice. She looks around and sees clients that have been abandoned by society. Many of them have led exemplary lives and are now almost destitute.
She says: “We’re not really celebrating the Olympics here because homelessness is still very much an issue. If seniors built these communities then the community should support them now. I think an Olympian effort has to be made to support seniors in a much more tangible way.”
While healthy seniors are served well by recreation departments, age-friendly parks and wheelchair access, three other groups of seniors fall through the cracks – the frail, the mentally challenged and the physically ill.
With baby boomers approaching retirement, it could get worse. “We’re all standing on the beach waiting to see a tsunami. But it’s too late then to decide if we need one life raft or a flotilla.”
She’s critical of the lack of a national housing policy, noting that it’s extremely difficult for seniors in assisted living to transfer between provinces to be closer to family members.
The society constantly sees clients that are homeless, at risk, or ill and struggling to hold on to independence in apartments they’ve lived in for decades. And who can blame them for not wanting to move into assisted living, says Lynda. “Who would want to have a bath only once a week? That’s ridiculous.”
Families who love their aging parents are also often unable to cope, due to the lack of support. They’re even dropping them off at hospitals.
“One poor soul was found sitting on a park bench outside a hospital in the Lower Mainland. ‘My daughter said she would be right back,’ she said. Well, her daughter wasn’t coming back. How heartbreaking is that?”
Shelters aren’t funded for seniors, and seniors on the streets are in serious shape: being preyed upon, beaten up and even raped, Joanne points out.
On a happier note, more young people are getting involved in volunteering, there’s more charitable gifting and estate planning to help seniors’ organizations and non-profit agencies help with funding.
“Thank God for agencies like United Way,” she says.
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