Women's Emergency Homeless Shelter
OUR GOAL: Open by December 2024.
We’re on a mission to address women’s homelessness in Cambridge, Ontario. To that end, we’ve been working over the last two years to establish the first women’s emergency homeless shelter in Cambridge.
In 2024, Grace Bible Church came forward and offered the lower level of their church for us to operate a temporary shelter while IN we continue our search for a permanent location.
Why are we opening a temporary shelter? Because women shouldn’t have to endure another winter with no safe and warm place to go.
OUR MODEL
With our shelter, we aim to meet women and gender diverse individuals where they are at and to have the supports and services in place that they need, when they need them. We believe in providing a supportive environment, with built-in services and supports that help women transition out of homelessness successfully.
Our shelter will be a 20-bed, 24/7 model. It will include services related to personal safety, mental health, physical health, life skills and gender-based violence prevention, cultural and spiritual needs, and transition support with employment, schooling and housing.
Our Community-Focused Approach
In September of 2023, the Region of Waterloo issued a call for proposals through its Fee for Service funding program for services addressing homelessness. YWCA Cambridge responded to this call with a pitch for a 20-bed women’s shelter in Cambridge that is trauma-informed, GBV responsive, and includes wraparound supports. The Region saw the dire need we were bringing attention to and they agreed to fund the operations of our shelter. Not only that, they agreed with us that we cannot go another winter without a place for women to go, and they have partnered with us to establish our temporary shelter location at Grace Bible Church in downtown Galt.
Throughout this whole process of making the case, getting political and public endorsement, securing a temporary location and getting to work on renovating our space, we have prioritized relationship-building. We will not duplicate existing services. Rather, we will partner with organizations already offering services like mental health and addictions counselling, physical health care, and other programs.
While we have operating funding, what we don’t have is capital funding – funds to actually furnish our shelter with items like beds, dressers, appliances, all of it.
So it’s going to take a whole-of-community approach to establish the needed supports for women and gender diverse individuals experiencing homelessness.
Want to help?
Operating funding for YWCA Cambridge’s shelter is provided by the Region of Waterloo
