Sean LeBlanc, “Hope Eternal”. Chapter 19 (p.96-102) in Inclusion Working Group, Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, Homelessness Is Only One Piece Of My Puzzle: Implications for Policy and Practice, 2015.
This entire edited collection is relevant to understanding the daily lives of individuals who are experiencing homelessness, but the chapter by Sean LeBlanc gives us particular insight about Lowertown. Sean, featured recently in a Shepherd’s of Good Hope newsletter, now has a home in our community. His message in the newsletter, as in the book, is “Don’t give up on the people who are homeless.”
Sean currently works as an advocate for people living with addiction and trauma. After he started a group called the Drug Users Advocacy League, or DUAL for short, he found a purpose and a path to recovery. Along the way, he became a co-investigator in 2013 with the community cohort study called PROUD (which stands for Participatory Research in Ottawa Understanding Drugs).
One thing is clear from his story in the book. Shelters are not solutions to homelessness or places to deal with addiction or mental health. He writes that everything from the food to the lack of privacy to the illnesses to the violence means that: “There is no such thing as healthy living at a shelter.”
After surviving multiple traumas and being homeless for over seven years, Sean now has a place to call home, as he says, a place to hope, a place to feel safe. It is also a place from which he can participate in the wider life of the community. His personal story and the others in the book reveal just part of the puzzle of homelessness. But in this time of crisis, the insights about ways to move people off the streets and out of shelters and into safe and affordable homes give us a worthwhile read.