Saffrey wants policy change to get homeless off streets

The nation’s leading advocate for the homeless said Wednesday he wants to see a shelter-first policy implemented to help guide homeless people to shelters.

President of the Barbados Alliance to End Homelessness (BAEH) Kemar Saffrey made the suggestion as he declared success in the two-month-old transition of the BAEH’s Spry Street office to a 24-hour shelter.

The shelter’s operations have been going smoothly, he told Barbados TODAY, but he argued for a stronger push to help get people off the streets and utilise the shelters and other forms of help at their disposal, particularly given the high numbers of street dwellers in The City.

“I think that there needs to be more [done] to encourage other persons, in law or in policy, to come off the streets,”Saffrey said. “We are still seeing the numbers in the Treasury [Building]. Not everybody is fit for a shelter, I must admit, but there are a lot of them who are fit for the shelters who are not using the shelters.

“So the things that we need to do, in policy and in law, would see those persons coming off the streets and using those shelters first, as a first point. We definitely need to run a shelter-first initiative with the government which would seek to encourage more persons [to] shelter first before [going on] the street.”

Although the BAEH shelter has only been operating on a 24-hour basis for the past two months, the switch has undoubtedly proven to be a success, said Saffrey.

“I can say for the last two months – I would not count some of the Christmas season because, you know how it is, [some] want to be outside – it has been a tremendous success, especially for those who are looking to transform their lives.

That has yielded [much fruit] because that is what they always wanted – to be able to be in the shelter and transition and get things done,” he said.

“We are still going to give it another month or so because, with anything new, you have to iron out any kinks that you see as you go along to make sure that the clients are good.”(SB)