London City Hall announced during a ceremony earlier this month that they would be donating $ 4 million to Youth Opportunities Unlimited’s (YOU) affordable housing project Joan’s Place.
This now puts the total amount raised to $ 11 million dollars as the project started construction trailer this month at 329 Richmond St.
Joan’s Place project in the works for almost seven years will provide safe and affordable housing for young Londoners with families and children in need and will also offer mental health and addiction services as well as education and employment programs among other services on offer.
John’s place will be located downtown and right next to Youth Opportunities Unlimited and across from their Youth Action Center, In the downtown area which has seen in a sharp rise in the homeless population in recent years.
The organization behind Joan’s Place, YOU has a vast amount of experience working with vulnerable groups In London, with their Executive Director., Steve Cordus talking about their history in London.
“So we’ve been around for 40 years. And we were created as a not-for-profit organization in 1982. To respond to the challenges that young people face when they first entered the job market, ie, typically the job market looks for people with experience and demonstrable skills, on a resume, and so on, and so for young people that maybe have limited work experience, and certainly on top of that limited education, and so on, it’s hard for them to demonstrate their value in the job market, right?” said Steve describing how YOU helps young people develop their skills and knowledge to better enter the workforce.
YOU’s hope for Joan’s Place is to primarily serve young people with children as You has had experience with housing programs on a smaller scale like when they launched the Children’s Aid child protection organization program to help assist young people that t have grown in foster care, helping them move on from foster care to live independently.
“Joan’s Place has been under development for about seven or eight years now, and Joan’s Place is all about primarily helping young people, particularly young people who have families, so single moms, moms to be couples with children that are experiencing homelessness, we were asked to create a programming mix for that population because right now, there really are no options. So so often young people find that if they have a child or if a child is on the way if they don’t have a safe place to live, they in their child will be separated. Because you can’t if you can’t provide them with the necessities of life and provide a safe place to live. It’s just heartbreaking for people when they lose access to their children because they don’t have a place to live, so Joan’s Place was created in his being created to respond to that very primary immediate need.” said Steve when talking more about Joan’s place.
With London’s recent Mayoral election, of of the hottest-button issues discussed among candidates was a distinct lack of housing that organizations like YOU are hoping to help.
“I think we all see evidence of that with encampments that are taking place and growing all around the city, and virtually every neighbourhood has encampments. I think there are over 300 encampments within the City of London right now. So youth comprise 26% of people that experience homelessness at any one time. And we see it as a particular opportunity, a challenge and opportunity, that if we can help young people find housing, we can help prevent them from being repetitively and chronically unhoused. And as much as it’s heartbreaking for anybody to experience homelessness, a young person, if they’re experiencing homelessness, and that’s a time when their world should be opening up. We want to make sure for YOU, that we’re there with them” said Steve.
“We want to make sure for YOU, that we’re there with them with that first experience around homelessness, whether we offer the housing ourselves, or we have housing workers that connect people through other affordable housing in the city, that we deal with that very immediate very pressing safety issue,” Steve continued when talking about the need for affordable housing in London, especially with winter already here and the issue of homelessness containing to grow.
If you’ve driven by Richmond and York lately, you’ll have seen that demolition is underway at the future site of Joan’s Place, and we couldn’t be more excited! Thanks to the ongoing support of so many Londoners, we’re one step closer to ending youth homelessness in our city. pic.twitter.com/emtFNnDfph
— Youth Opportunities Unlimited (YOU) (@YOU_London) November 4, 2022
