REGINA – Issues of housing and homelessness were front and centre at the fifth annual Reaching Home Homelessness Conference in Regina.
The event on Wednesday was put on by Namerind Housing Corporation, an Indigenous affordable housing provider here in Regina, to help achieve the goal of ending homelessness in Regina and across Canada. The slogan of the conference was: Everyone Deserves a Home.
Robert Byers, the CEO at Namerind Housing in Regina, said the conference was about “bringing together people that work in the homelessness sector.”
“We’re bringing people from the municipal government, the provincial government, the federal government. We’ve got people here from national organizations from across Canada and really it’s about creating awareness. It’s about sharing ideas and talking about stories that we can relate to and ideas that we can share that’s working in other areas and maybe that we really can reduce and eliminate homelessness. “And I shouldn’t say maybe, I mean we will, but we have to do something different. We have to change the way we invest. We have to, I would say we have to develop housing that is specific to the demographic. Meaning some people I think need to be hospitalized, some people need 24-7 care, some people need affordable housing.”
Byers said the issues the conference focused on were wide ranging.
“We’re talking about youth homelessness and prevention because we have to stop the inflow. We’re talking about housing affordability. We’re talking about, one of our presenters is talking about lived experience and showing what happens when people care. You know, you can go from living on the street to being an advocate for homeless people.”
The conference featured a number of featured presenters. The keynote speech came from Dr. Carolyn Whitzman, a housing and social policy researcher who has authored a number of books including Home Truths: Fixing Canada’s Housing Crisis (2024).
Another presenter was Guy Felicella. His focus was on drug policy reform, speaking as someone who turned his life around after years of gang involvement and living on the street.
The conference also heard from Heidi Walter of A Way Home Canada, whose focus was on ending and preventing youth homelessness, and Kim Kakakaway, a Cree and Saulteaux First Nations woman from Treaty Six Territory who is Indigenous Training and Relations Consultant with A Way Home Canada.
Byers said the conference has grown from humble beginnings.
“You can tell when we had our first conference here, we had 60 people, that was five years ago. Here we are now, there’s 300 people registered for today. So we know that creating the awareness is working and I think when you get 300 people from the same community showing up at an event on homelessness, they want to make a difference. These are the people that can make the difference and these are the people that can make the changes.”
With the growing numbers of people attending the conference who are interested in the housing and homelessness issue, Byers said he is optimistic it will make an impact in addressing the homelessness issue.
“Oh, I sure do. I mean, there has been change since we’ve become the community entity. We have the numbers to back that up. So, to say, will there be change? There will be change.”
