Hunger strike still on after unsuccessful meeting with city, London advocacy group says – London | Globalnews.ca

A coalition of front-line workers advocating for London, Ont.’s unhoused population says a planned hunger strike will go forward next week after a meeting with city officials ended without a resolution.

The group, #TheForgotten519, gave the city one week to implement three demands aimed at improving conditions for the city’s vulnerable, or offer acceptable alternatives, or one of the members would start a hunger strike on Aug. 2.

In a release Tuesday, the group said a meeting with the mayor and with city staff about their demands ended in disappointment.

“We went into our meeting with the city hoping for serious conversation regarding how to implement these necessary, life-saving changes but we were sorely disappointed,” a statement from the group said.

“The City listened to the direct feedback from well over 100 other frontline workers, and still no resolution. We were told what services were being provided to people on the street. However, we know what services are running. We know what supports are being offered. This is our area of expertise.”

The group’s organizing committee is comprised of Dr. Andrea Sereda, Leticia Mizon of the Ontario Network of People Who Use Drugs (ONPUD), outreach worker Daniel Oudshoorn, and Jenna Rose Sands, the director of SafeSpace London.

The group had demanded that the city:

• Halt the removal of encampments, tents, campsites or squats in parks, along the Thames Valley Parkway, and in empty city lots;
• Transition the role of the city’s Coordinated Informed Response (CIR) Team “from a displacement model, to a team that offers meaningful support … to campers at their campsites,” and;
• Create two indoor spaces providing round-the-clock seven-day support to those deprived of housing and shelter or in need of a safe place to be.

“We know that the demands we have brought forward are not a ‘silver bullet’ or a cure-all for poverty, oppression, apathy, and greed,” the group’s statement reads.

“But the implementation of our demands will make a real, life-giving, and life-saving difference in the lives of those most vulnerable and oppressed Londoners … There was no resolution to today’s meeting, only the offer for another one. In common practice, time and time again, they talk and people die.”

In a previous release, the group estimated that 34 people have died this year among the city’s homeless population, while 74 died in 2021 and 59 in 2020, figures they said were likely undercounts.

According to the city, around 1,850 people are on London’s by-name list, a real-time list of those experiencing homelessness in the community. There are a little over 300 shelter beds in the community, the city says.

Around 325 people in the city are what’s considered to be chronically homeless, meaning they have spent more than 180 cumulative days in a shelter or a place that’s not housing in the last 12 months. Roughly 5,900 people are on a rent-geared-to-income-housing wait list.

In a statement to Global News Monday, the city’s deputy manager for social and health development, Kevin Dickens, said the city was aware of the challenges.

“They’re challenges that I think the entire community has been trying to address for the last couple of years and we’ve seen a lot of new programs, new housing supports introduced over the last couple of years that have had some significant impact,” he said.

“We recognize that homelessness is a very complicated issue, as is the cyclical nature of individuals living with addiction. Recovery is not linear and substance use recovery doesn’t happen overnight.”

He added that one of the key advocacy points from the city to the province has been to increase investment in community-based mental health and addiction supports. The city also continues to advance housing projects at the federal level as well, he said.

— with files from Kate Otterbein

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