Back in 1986 a group of street kids linked up and formed SKIN: Street Kids In Need. They were a dozen or so and determined. We met every week for about three months and they developed a plan. Their plan was to get support from the city of Guelph for an idea that would provide housing and self-help for street kids.
The plan was fairly simple. Each kid had a guaranteed monthly income of close to $500.00 (welfare level) and in some cases a bit more from part-time jobs. They knew they could each put in $325.00 per month towards rent. Four or five joined together would be able to afford to rent a house. Together they’d be able to do a collective kitchen just like a nuclear family.
They called themselves SKIN and they called their plan Boarding House Outreach.
When they were ready they got themselves on the agenda for a City Council meeting and they made their presentation. Four of them spoke to Council and in the follow-up they were featured on CKCO-TV, in the Guelph Mercury, and in the weekly newspaper back then which was called Golden Triangle. They were filled with hope when City Council sent their issue to the United Way to do a study and report back on the possibilities of supported SKIN’s proposal.
The United Way study took some time and resulted in more studies all of which agreed that there was a need but that a properly constituted plan would take a lot of funding and organization in order to have enough professional staffing. After a while the idea just died because the street kids in need weren’t looking for professionalism, they were looking for homes.
Their problem was simple… nobody would rent to them and none of them could afford a place of their own. If one of them did manage to rent a place and received rent money from some of the others then the first one would get cut of welfare because the other monies would be counted as income. They simply needed a change in the welfare rules or someone not on welfare to act as the primary tenant.
About six months after their presentation to city council one of the SKINs looked at me and asked, “When will there be room for us in this city?”
A good question.
So we started an organization called Room For Us. Today our Room For Us program in Guelph and Wellington County operates a dozen houses all of which are organized on the principle mapped out by SKIn back in 1986. Some of the houses are entirely dedicated to tenants who are graduates of the recently defunct “Change Now” program.
When Change Now closed two weeks ago some people met with City Councillors who asked the United Way to do a study of the situation. That study is now underway. The more things change….