[CAH] Article from the Saturday Herald Featuring Wayne macNaughton

[Darcy Harvey]

Hello members,

Below you will find a link to a great article from Saturday's Herald, featuring Wayne MacNaughton, Chair of Community Action on Homelessness Steering Committee.

http://www.herald.ca/Living/537160.html


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

      



      Wayne MacNaughton stands in front of Hope Cottage in Halifax. Once homeless, MacNaughton depended on places like Hope Cottage for food or shelter in the past, but now chairs a federal steering committee for Community Action on Homelessness (CAOH). (CHRISTIAN LAFORCE / Staff) 
     
Hope for the homeless
Wayne MacNaughton lives in a small Halifax apartment close to the soup kitchens and shelters he used to frequent. Today, the former drifter is actively trying to help solve the problems of the homeles
By LOIS LEGGE Features Writer 

A CHILL hung over the summer night. 

Children's voices echoed in the distance.

Fear and exhaustion seized Wayne MacNaughton as he shivered on the only bed he could find.

For four or five nights in the early 1990s, he tried to sleep on a park bench - a hard mattress offering fitful rest - near enough to neighbourhoods to hear children playing, but a world away from their shelter or joy.

Worries raced through his mind. What if someone attacked him? What if a nearby police officer told him to move along? Were those voices and traffic noises really close or far away?

But worst of all, a brutal realization seeped through the sleepy, surreal haze: "You don't have a home."

There have been many times since - short, stark, unforgettable periods - when this self-described drifter, now an advocate for homeless people, has been without a home.

He has slept in cramped Montreal and Halifax shelters, where men marred by addiction, mental illness or bad luck are in at 8 p.m., out at about 7 a.m., left to find their own way through what MacNaughton calls a world of "living hard."

He has spent his days wandering the streets, looking for something to eat or a warm place to stay; a bench to sit on or a bathroom to use.

In Montreal, underground malls and all-night transit provided a sometime refuge. In Halifax, the Metro Turning Point Shelter or the Salvation Army provided a bed. 

During the day, Halifax soup kitchens like Hope Cottage or local churches served free food. And a bench or a bathroom could be found at Scotia Square Mall, "a precious resource here if you're homeless."

But for people with no permanent address, indignities are always just around the corner. 

MacNaughton remembers a Montreal mall security guard instantly judging him unworthy. 

He's "standing there having a cigarette, he turns to me and he says, 'Where are you going?' 'I'm going through the mall to the station.' 'Well, keep going.' " 

When you're on the street you have to keep going, says MacNaughton, leaning on a cane, slowly passing places from the past, mulling over memories that once hurt but these days also help, when he's recommending how to distribute $1.6 million in federal money to the homeless.

He remembers the constant walking that wore down his body and mind; the slippery roads that made getting to the few open doors a treacherous trek; the sometimes humiliating quest for a bathroom, so crucial when you're sick with the flu.

Today, the 53-year-old Halifax man lives in a cosy little apartment off Gottingen Street; a subsidized dwelling just a short walk away from his old haunts - close enough that he can remember where he has been and close enough to remind him he never wants to go back. 

"Golden," he calls the tiny interior, with its one main room, big enough for a bed, a few chairs and a computer; its small kitchen and bathroom. 

But reminders of the past are everywhere. He still uses a battered backpack, once crammed full of his possessions as he roamed from place to place. The Salvation Army's just down the street. Hope Cottage is a couple of blocks away.

There he goes, "still looking out for everybody," comes a voice from the past on a recent sunny day outside the soup kitchen. 

MacNaughton has just stopped here to have his picture taken, asking a newspaper photographer to protect the privacy of the people coming and going. Neil MacDonald calls over with kind words and a smile.

"He's a great guy . . . he's a marvellous man," says the former actor, whose rare blood condition keeps him on social assistance and going to Hope Cottage for daily meals. 

The two greet each other and reminisce about old times, about hard times - about trying to solve all the world's political problems over conversation, donated food and temporary company.

Today, MacNaughton is actively trying to help solve the problems of homeless people in Halifax, even though he himself lives on social assistance, with disabilities that keep him from working. He's virtually blind in one eye, has limited vision in the other and walks with a cane to help his balance and aid his arthritis.

He holds a position unique in the country: a formerly homeless man chairing a steering committee for a federal government homelessness project.

It's called Community Action on Homelessness, one of about 16 groups or agencies across Canada involved with the government's National Homelessness Initiative. 

They all receive money from Supporting Community Initiative Partnership, used for everything from new housing to shelter repairs and support programs. And the steering committees essentially decide who gets it. 

Claudia Jahn, the Halifax group's community liaison, says the federal government has final approval but has never turned down a steering committee recommendation. 

This year, MacNaughton and his fellow committee members - Jahn, government representatives, shelters and community groups among them - must choose how to distribute $1.6 million in funding. 

As chairman of the committee and through other group activities, MacNaughton also meets with everyone from community groups to government ministers and bureaucrats.

Jahn calls him a "humble" and essential participant in the process. 

Few of the other groups have any formerly homeless people involved at all, she says, let alone as chairman of such a major committee. In some provinces, municipal governments decide who should get the funding.

"This is not an easy task and quite a responsibility. . . . This is really a unique setup," she says.

"He brings first-voice experience to it, which a service provider sometimes forgets. Everybody's so tied up in their day-to-day operation and they think they know what is best for the clients but . . . we know what kind of barriers everybody experiences only thanks to Wayne.

"He says if you offer these programs, for instance, how will that person get there? How do we communicate (with them)? There's no e-mail, there's no phone.

"It's just amazing Everything in spite of (the) disability, his visual impairment and other health issues, and he's really working - working very hard to improve the situation."

MacNaughton describes his position as "a perfect fit." But he struggles with having one foot in two very different worlds.

"When you move out of homelessness, you really don't want to be back in the thick of that environment again," he says. "It can bring you down and depress you after a while. . . . You see (that) other people are nowhere near along where you are and that can be positive sometimes, but a lot of the time it can bring you down, too.

"I'm what would be called a drifter, moving around from place to place to place and that is a kind of, I don't know, psychological condition or whatever you want to call it and you never completely lose that, so if I was to move back to Montreal or Ottawa or Toronto at this point I would probably put myself right back to Square 1.

"Forcing myself to think about what some of that was like is what helps to keep me anchored where I am."

He's trying to anchor others, too, pushing hard for what he calls "no-frills" housing: basic units to get people without addictions or mental or physical problems out of the shelter system. He says there are plenty who qualify. 

"What you'll do if you have that is you'll actually get the people out of the Turning Point who are blocked there right now, not because they have a problem but because they just simply can't find a place that they can afford. . . . That's the only reason they're there; it's not because of mental illness, their addiction or whatever, it's just that they aren't making enough money to be able to afford a place," he says.

"Build enough affordable places and you're going to move those people right away. . . . Then you can work on programs, more detailed programs, more supportive programs that will allow you to help hard-core (homeless)." 

MacNaughton traces his homelessness to a wanderlust that began in childhood with parents who moved from place to place. 

Later, his poor eyesight made things worse.

He was homeless for short periods in his adult life after moving to new places. But most of the time he worked, in jobs such as telemarketing or security. Things changed in 1996, when retinas in both eyes detached. The retina in his left eye detached again a year later, resulting in near-blindness in that eye.

With a history of short-lived jobs and a physical impairment, even temporary work became harder to find. 

When MacNaughton came to Halifax in February 1998, he was virtually penniless and adrift in an unfamiliar city. 

He says that in the days and weeks that followed, he had to find his own way to the city's scattered shelters and services.

And finding shelter and services is even harder for people who aren't of sound mind, he says.

"Those chronic people often need someone to take them by the hand and walk them through the system, and that doesn't exist, pretty much," MacNaughton says. 

"It doesn't really happen, and that's what a lot of homeless people would need in order to help them get out - someone who'll literally take them by the hand and walk them through all the various steps to get them from being homeless to being housed . . . or to being able to function on the street." 

In the meantime, the luckier ones somehow find their way.

On this day, MacDonald and another man wait outside the Brunswick Street United Church clothing bank, which MacNaughton says can be a godsend for homeless people or those on the brink. 

"We meet again," he says, nodding to MacDonald. 

"We're going shopping," his old acquaintance says with a laugh. 

"They're going shopping at the boutique - that's what it's called," MacNaughton says. 

He waves and walks on, heading for home.


( llegge at herald.ca)

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/members_cahhalifax.org/attachments/20061030/6b5d55ba/attachment-0001.html 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: cl101106macnaughton1_Provincial_10-28-06_UE3OEKU.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 15308 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : /pipermail/members_cahhalifax.org/attachments/20061030/6b5d55ba/attachment-0001.jpg