One of the many reasons Alberta’s Edmonton Public Library (EPL) was chosen as Gale/LJ Library of the Year for 2014 is its commitment to community services. In particular, EPL’s outreach program to support the city’s homeless population is a necessary initiative in a rapidly growing urban center—Canada’s fifth-largest municipality—where temperatures rarely rise above freezing from November through March. Not only has the program survived the loss of its province-based funding, with the library system itself stepping in to cover costs, but this winter EPL’s outreach will expand to five additional branches on a pilot basis. Last year outreach workers at downtown Edmonton’s Stanley A. Milner Library, the system’s large central branch, had more than 6,000 interactions with at-risk individuals, offering them help with finding medical care, housing referrals, employment counseling, and suicide prevention resources, among other services. The city’s homeless population, however, is scattered, and those who are not near the Milner branch have trouble accessing available services. To address this problem, by the end of 2014 the program is also expected to be in place at the Strathcona, Woodcroft, Sprucewood, Highlands, and Abbottsfield branches. EPL currently has three support outreach workers on staff who will work a full five days per week across all five branches. A part-time clerical assistant and a library assistant work closely with the outreach workers as well.

A LIBRARY REACHES OUT

In 2008, in a groundbreaking move, EPL hired 17 community librarians—one for each of its branches—whose job was to connect with the community outside the building. CEO Linda Cook described them as working to “identify and eliminate barriers to service, and set the direction of library services and policies. They maintain high visibility, growing relationships with agencies, individuals, and organizations in order to plan meaningful, timely responses and evaluate outcomes.” Last year EPL’s community librarians logged in nearly a thousand hours working in conjunction with local services for Aboriginal peoples and pregnant and parenting teens, a Muslim women’s group, the Mill Woods Public Health Centre, and all Edmonton school districts, among others. In 2011, in response to the growing number of people taking shelter in Milner Library, EPL became the first library in Canada to hire an outreach worker. Jared Tkachuk had recently gotten his social work degree and took the job, which was based loosely on the San Francisco Public Library’s homeless outreach initiative, because it sounded interesting, he said. “We were in uncharted territory,” he told LJ. “We didn’t even have an office space.” He spent much of his first year just walking around the building, introducing himself to people—“youth and seniors, newcomers and refugees, the whole gamut”—and letting them know about the program. In the process, he discovered just how complex downtown Edmonton’s homeless issue was, and “how little public and inclusive space was left for people.” Tkachuk realized that many of the city’s homeless came to the library, rather than mainstream social service agencies, exclusively. “I knew coming in there was going to be a need,” he explained, “but I didn’t know how great the need was. And I also didn’t realize how much people depended on the library.” He added, “It wasn’t just a matter of coming because it was warm—it was more than that. It was a sense of safety and belonging.” The outreach program initially partnered with Boyle Street Community Services, a nonprofit inner-city agency that started out as a storefront operation in 1971. Boyle Street assists and advocates for Edmonton’s marginalized population, providing food, shelter, and support and welcoming more than 12,000 people into its drop-in facility every year. Workers at Boyle Street helped with the grant-writing process and mentored the staff at Milner as they got the program off the ground. Although their official partnership ended with the original grant, Tkachuck still considers Boyle Street the program’s closest ally. For the program’s first three years, some $605,000 in funding was covered by the provincial Safe Communities Innovation Fund. When that money ran out in 2014, rather than abandon the program, the library moved in to cover its costs. EPL Deputy CEO Pilar Martinez told LJ, “We felt it was a priority. Absolutely, it would have been preferable for the government to continue this funding. But because we were making headway and having an impact, we felt it was necessary to continue the service model and didn’t want to sacrifice the progress that had been made.” The library was able to free up money by choosing not to refill a vacant senior-level position, and took additional funds from the furniture and equipment budget. Tkachuk said he thinks the current plan is sustainable for at least the next three years, until the budget is reassessed, and feels that EPL is committed to retaining the program. “I think having outreach at the library has become a pretty indispensable service for a lot of people.”

Jared Tkachuk talks to a homeless EPL patron
Photo credits: Edmonton Public Library

A DIFFERENT KIND OF SUCCESS STORY

The city of Edmonton instituted a ten-year plan to end chronic homelessness in 2009. In an update released in April 2014, it was revealed that of more than 2,000 people who had found permanent housing in the past five years, 84 percent had remained in their new homes. The plan called for 1,000 housing units to be built by this point, but with construction on only 446 units complete, Edmonton has realized less than half its goal. The most recent report on Edmonton’s homeless population, from 2012, put the number at 2,174. While this is down from the more than 3,000 homeless counted in 2008, it still leaves shelters overcrowded and unable to serve everyone. The city has done a new count for 2014, and while numbers haven’t increased overall, the city’s population has grown, and homeless youth and families are on the rise—a population less easily served by the shelter system. And the shelters themselves are no substitute for housing. “It can get down to minus 28, 29 Celcius [-20° F],” Martinez said. “They will have places they can go during the night, but often those homeless shelters close at 6 or 7 a.m.” That leaves the library as one of few warm spots where homeless people are welcome during the daylight hours. Tkachuk feels that EPL’s outreach program is “a phenomenal grassroots place to do social work,” and believes that personal connections are one of the most important resources a library has to offer. Martinez echoed the sentiment: “Our role is to be the bridge,” she told LJ, “extending what we already do, providing information to our customers through library services. [Outreach] is just providing information with different expertise.” Tkachuk recalled one man with schizophrenia and substance abuse issues who had been on the streets for some 25 years. He didn’t like crowds and avoided the city’s drop-in centers, but would come to the library, where many of the staff knew him by name. As winter approached, Tkachuk began a concerted effort to house him, which was not simple; at his first housing intake interview the client took offense at one of the questions and walked out, two hours and 55 minutes into a three-hour process. But Tkachuk persisted and eventually found him a small suite just before Christmas 2013. The man spent most of a peaceful year in his apartment, and died there this past fall. Tkachuk credited the flexibility of EPL’s outreach program, and its lack of bureaucracy or quotas, with allowing him to spend the weeks necessary to pursue a single open case. “Success can mean a lot of different things to people,” he explained to LJ, “but sometimes it comes down to ‘at least you didn’t die on the streets.’ I think of him as a success story.”