Homelessness Prevention program in Frontenac County

Jeff Green | Feb 26, 2020

Eight months after Southern Frontenac Community Services (SFCS) pulled out of its agreement with the City of Kingston to provide homelessness prevention services for Frontenac County, a new provider of the service has finally been confirmed.

“It was a regrettable decision that we had to make to stop offering this service.” said SFCS Executive Director David Townsend in announcing the pullout on July 15 of last year.

“We had no real choice because we could not maintain the proper staffing for the program. It is an important service to the community but we were no longer able to provide it. It was also a drain on our resources as an organisation.”

In September, the City of Kingston set out a request for proposal (RFP) for a new provider to provide the service, but no announcement was made about who the successful bidder was.

Through the process, the News learned that at least three organisations responded to the RFP, which stipulated that the service must be provided to residents of South, Central and North Frontenac.

A bid was submitted by Rural Frontenac Community Services, who had been collaborating with Southern Frontenac Community Services to offer the services in Central and North Frontenac. Another bid was submitted by Home Based Housing, a Kingston agency that provides the service in the city and provided interim services to residents of South Frontenac after SFCS stopped offering the service last summer. A third, and ultimately successful proposal, was submitted by the Salvation Army Kingston Citadel Community and Family Services department.

We are attempting to contact both the Kingston Citadel and the Homelessness Prevention Office of the City of Kingston for information about how the program will operate going forward.

The City of Kingston is the consolidated service manager for social programs in Frontenac County. These include: children’s services, daycare services and subsidy, Ontario Works, not-for-profit housing, and homelessness prevention.

The city set out a 10-year homelessness prevention plan for Kingston and Frontenac County in 2014, and the 5-year review of that plan was completed in 2019.

Surveys to determine the number of people in both the city and county who are either homeless, at risk of homelessness, or living in substandard housing, have been completed every second year in April.

The most recent survey, in 2018, determined that there were 61 homeless people in Frontenac County, using the definition of homelessness provided by the Canadian Observatory of Homelessness, which is “those whose accommodation is temporary or lacks security or tenure”.