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Aids Saskatoon opened the doors to part of the city’s new safe consumption site on Monday.
The safe consumption site won’t be open until sometime in the new year but the drop-in centre of the new 20th street location is now available to the public.
The executive director of Aids Saskatoon, Jason Mercredi, says the site offers much more than just a safe space for addicts to use their drugs.
“So somebody comes in, they do a full intake with our staff, they take down any services they are needing whether it is justice, social supports, income assistance, family supports but also what type of drugs they are planning to use and how they are planning to use them,” he said.
“Our swing space is open to other community partners to provide mental health supports, to provide medical supports, treatment options and those types of things. We want to make sure we are a conduit to other services. We don’t want people to be solely reliant on Aids Saskatoon.”
One thing that excites Mercredi is their chance to offer employment opportunities to people in the Pleasant Hill community.
“With the support worker staff we are looking to employ people from Pleasant Hill, especially those who used to use drugs. Peers are shown to be the best able to engage folks down their path to recovery and we want to be good employers in the community,” said Mercredi.
“There’s a lot of agencies that work in the community but not a lot that employ from the community and we want to be modelling that we are good employers for the community.”
The drop in centre of the site is a place where locals in the community can get out of the cold for a bit and hang out. And while they are there the staff are going to engage them on any social supports they might need.
“It’s a space for people to come hang out and what that does is it gives us an opportunity to engage them on whatever social supports they need whether it’s housing, family support, income assistance or transportation to and from appointments. And just trying to create an environment that they feel is their own allows that ownership of the space so that they are less likely to cause issues as we go forward,” said Mercredi.
“We also have a no banning policy which allows us to continually engage these folks because a lot of times the most troublesome people are banned from all the other services which is why they are flailing so hard in the community. So while they are here we want them to be able to be successful.”
The safe injection side of the site doesn’t have a set opening date as of yet but will be up and running sometime in the new year. This site will include seven stalls for people to use their drugs and the second safe smoking room in Canada.
All will be supervised by the site’s EMT’s.
