The Welcome Centre Shelter for Women and Families actively promotes and embraces harm reduction as a strategy to support and achieve more positive housing outcomes for women and families seeking emergency housing support. By fostering a welcoming, nonjudgmental and supportive environment we strive to truly meet clients where they are at and strive to eliminate as many barriers as possible to accessing our services.
Over the last several decades, gender-specific and responsive approaches to understanding and addressing substance use needs through harm reduction have become focal points of research, practice, and policy. However, low-income women accessing emergency shelters, especially mothers and caregivers, continued to be serviced in ways that did not meet their needs and assumed a level of trust that often hadn’t yet had time to form. Historically, the Welcome Centre Shelter for Women & Families has taken a progressive approach to harm reduction for women accessing shelter.
Initially abstinence-based, the agency has grown and evolved to meet the program needs of the women seeking support; more and more, that has included a focus on creating space where ALL of our clients could find acceptance and support, including those who have, are, or plan to use substances while accessing the shelter system. Our harm reduction staff and peer support workers work daily to offer access to education, individual support and safe use supplies upon request. Community partners such as Pozitive Pathways and Windsor Essex County Health Unit continue to help support our program by supplying sexual health supplies, Naloxone and safer use kits. We also actively work to help support any other community partners who are interested in offering harm reduction services.
We provide:
- On-site NSP (Needle/Syringe Programming) for in-house clients until 12am
- Satellite Location, in partnership with Pozitive Pathways
- On-site Naloxone available to staff/volunteers (with appropriate training)
- Harm reduction education is provided to all staff
Any questions about our harm reduction program can be directed to a.adams@welcomecentreshelter.com.
