The Kamloops Alliance Church (Photo via Google Maps)
The Mustard Seed says they are working to address safety and security concerns identified by the community, ahead of opening as an extreme weather shelter as early as Wednesday.
After holding various stakeholder meetings, Kelly Thomson says they have decided to have security personnel monitoring the streets throughout the overnight hours, outside the Alliance Church while the shelter is operational.
“We are going to have a team of two people with very nice flashlights, they will light up an area, and we are going to walk that whole area, as well as the inside streets,” he said. “They intend to just watch for people, either bringing them in so that they get out of the cold or for those that don’t want to be there we are going to try to get them to move someplace else, maybe we have room in our shelters someplace else, and we are going to try and do that.”
He says the goal, is to keep both the vulnerable population, shelter users, and the community safe.
Route around Alliance Church staff will monitor while extreme weather shelter is operational. (Supplied)
“What we want to do is work through our shelter guests, we want to work with our residents, and we want to work with businesses in the area to do a good job of helping.”
Thomson says the decision to implement additional security outside the shelter comes following stakeholder engagement sessions with nearby residents, business owners in the area, and Alliance Church members and groups that use the church.
“We know that there are a lot of stakeholders in the area, there are the residents that live in the area, to be honest with a lot of the things that have happened in the area, we figured that would be a very negative perspective, and it went better than we thought. We heard some interesting negative stuff, but it’s things that we need to know. We need to hear those things.”
In an update to Council, he said they delivered 100 letters to residents within a 10-minute radius of the emergency shelter and went to 30 nearby businesses within a two-to-three-block radius of the Alliance Church.
“We (Pastor Chris and I) were able to talk to 24 of those businesses; most of those businesses were on board with what we are trying to do,” Thomson said.
“The letter we put together outlined what we are about to do, it gave them a QR code to an online survey, and it was only about four or five questions, to help us understand what they are thinking, and we did three open houses that he held in the Alliance Church.”
The Alliance Church extreme weather shelter will open from 10 p.m. to 7:30 a.m. when the temperature drops to -10 C or below and/or there is an accumulation of 5 cm of snow on the ground.
