Brenda Wallace, only a few days into her 60th year, has an idea on how to fix homelessness once and for all. Land, tiny houses, teamwork. “One house might want to grow vegetables, another house might be meat, chicken, and then they trade it up. It’s the only way it’s going to work,” she said.

It’s 11 a.m. on a Tuesday in early October and Wallace is talking to the Calgary Journal in the dining area of the Central Outreach Hub in downtown. About 15 fold-out tables are set up throughout the room, each with about two or three people. The Hub opened at 10:30, a line had formed down to the end of the block and around the corner to the front of Central United Church. The historic sandstone building faces 7th Avenue SW and an LRT Station across the street.

Wallace made the trip from her home in Inglewood that morning to meet up with a friend and have some food. “I like to socialize with people,” she said. Her friend, a woman with short but meticulously styled hair, said that she didn’t have any luck this morning finding clothes at the pop-up store, located in an adjacent room in the church basement. Wallace and her friend were two of the roughly 200 people that organizers were expecting to visit during the two-hour window that the program operated that day.

Did you miss our pop-up event? Click here to learn more.

Our Nov. 20, 2025 pop-up event featured a community meal, clothing giveaway, live music and a relaxed place to hang out for a few hours. We gave away roughly 50 winter coats and the same number of toques, mitts and socks.

As part of the event, which was held at the BLOX Arts Centre, our journalist-in-residence, Doug Horner moderated a panel of community leaders who discussed the role of day spaces in serving the city’s homeless population.

• Alice Lam – Good Neighbour
• Chris Bilodeau – Journey Church
• Brad Pert – Central Outreach Hub
• Jessica Cope Williams – Calgary Homeless Foundation
• Jon Molyneux – Concorde Group

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Homelessness and public safety event discusses need for more day spaces in Calgary

by Riley Fonger November 20, 2025December 1, 2025

Places like the Hub are few and far between in Calgary. It’s not, as opposed to Wallace’s idea for a tiny home village, a solution for homelessness. But rather it’s a gathering place and a refuge, a spot where anyone can walk in off the street, have a meal and a coffee, chat with friends, stock up on essentials, like a new coat or water bottle, meet with a nurse—or just get off their feet for an hour or two. Patrons also have access to social service agencies that help to access housing, income support and mental health and addiction treatment.

Providing a meal, or even a place to rest, for people in need is by no means a novel idea. But not many of these resources, outside of the emergency shelter system, exist in Calgary. The day space at Central United is low barrier. People can come as they are and don’t need to check in, or check their stuff, at the door. It’s peer-led. Many of the volunteers and outreach workers have experienced homelessness and addiction. The space is a response to the rising cost of living and the fact that more and more Calgarians struggle to make ends meet. A survey by Statistics Canada from 2023 reported that 32 per cent of the city’s population, or about 500,000 people, lived in food insecure households.

Anyone who wants to find and connect with a community, whether they’re housed or not, are welcome at the Hub. “We like to call it a third space. Basically a place outside of your home, if you have a home, and outside of your work, if you have a workplace, to hang out that is free of charge,” said Alice Lam, one of the founders of Good Neighbour, the non-profit that runs the clothing store.

Both the City of Calgary and the Calgary Police Service have identified creating new day spaces as a way to improve public safety, especially downtown. It’s a simple, but powerful idea. It’s not humane, or practical, to chase people out of parks, alleyways, malls, businesses and transit stations without offering any alternatives, any places where they’re welcome. “We know a lot of the people out on the street by name, they know us by name. They just feel very safe here. They wait outside all morning. They don’t have to make any appointments for the services we have. They just walk in when they need something,” said Brad Pert, the day space coordinator for the Central Outreach Hub.

The program at Central United was set in motion a couple years ago when volunteers with the church began offering a mid-day meal on Sundays. Then in late summer of 2024, the once-a-week meal expanded to twice a week when a program called Reconnects, a kind of networking event for social service agencies and their clients, relocated to the church basement to host their weekly program on Tuesday mornings. Good Neighbour joined the team in October of 2024. They expanded the Hub’s operation to include two hours on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. People can take up to 10 clothing items each per day and the Hub distributes about 10,000 items a week. The kitchen serves between two and three tons of food a week.

A core group of 10 to 15 volunteers do the heavy lifting at the Hub, but the goal is to access funding so they can expand their hours and hire staff. “A lot of people are doing this on a volunteer basis full time, so we don’t really have additional sources of income to support ourselves, but it’s kind of a labour of love,” Pert said. He estimated they needed about half a million dollars to increase services and make the
space sustainable.

Pert has been trying to find corporate sponsors and working on grants with the Calgary Homeless Foundation, the City of Calgary and the Calgary Foundation. He sees the success of the space, the growth in the number of people arriving each day, as a proof of concept. It’s a blueprint that other faith-based organizations or community associations could follow, groups with access to a building that has a kitchen and bathrooms and that is often vacant most of the week.

Mark Garner, the executive director of the Calgary Downtown Association, an organization representing more than 3,000 businesses, has a view of Central United from his office on the 14th floor of the Edison building, a block south from the church. “You can see what it looks like during the lineup prior to opening, and you can see what happens after individuals use the service and where they end up on street or in back alleys,” Garner said. “We have more issues in our alley now because of it. We have cleanliness issues. So then we’re picking up the additional burden and the expense that are caused by those good services being deployed.”

Garner recognized that Central Outreach is a valuable resource, but he’s worried there’s too much pressure on downtown already. “We believe in a very distributed model,” he said. His vision is to create lower capacity facilities for vulnerable Calgarians that are spread more evenly across the city.

The downtown has yet to recover from the reinforcing headwinds of the crash in oil prices in 2015 and then the pandemic. Vacancy rates for office space in the core still hover around 30 per cent. Garner described how they used to see six million people walk Stephen Avenue, a pedestrian mall and the main commercial street downtown, on an annual basis. Last count, it was about a million people short of that mark.

Garner sees downtown as the postcard for Calgary. Businesses in the area depend on what he called an experience economy. The goal is to draw people from across the city, many of whom have retail and other amenities much closer to home. Central United is a block off Stephen Avenue. People visiting downtown, whether they’re tourists or a family from the burbs, often get off the train at the 1st Street SW Station and walk past the church on their way to the pedestrian mall. “They’re not coming back again because they don’t have those issues in their neighbourhood,” Garner said. “You need to have your best foot forward dealing with those perception-of-safety issues.”

The Central Outreach Hub has lost out on grants to organizations that operate outside of downtown, and Pert is aware of the impact that they have on the area. “This is a prime location for the population we serve, but then again it’s also a prime location for business and transit and pedestrians,” he said. Not only that but they run their program during the lunch hour, a peak time for street traffic. “We’d love to be in a position where we can let these people in and be safe and be at peace all day long, but we can only open our doors for a couple hours a day.”

The Hub has grown organically over the past couple of years because of the demand in the area for this kind of resource. “We’re still seeing the need in the core of downtown Calgary, and we’ve really built a reputation as a safe and reliable place people can come,” Pert said.

The Calgary Police Service made a big push this past winter to try and improve safety, and how safe people feel, in the downtown. “We wanted to see if we could shift the dial,” said Scott Boyd, superintendent with the CPS. Many Calgarians, as with cities across Canada and the United States, have become increasingly concerned about social disorder, encampments and public drug use. The Calgary Foundation’s quality of life report in 2025 found that 73 per cent of Calgarians were concerned about safety in the city. The same proportion of people reported not feeling safe downtown after dark.

Operation CERTainty brought nine interdisciplinary teams into the downtown for three months, from mid-February to mid-April. These highly visible patrols included police, bylaw and transit officers. Boyd said the statistics, in terms of the number of arrests, warrants, charges and referrals to social agencies, exceeded their expectations. But when the police surveyed the businesses about the impact of the concentrated effort, 82 per cent reported that their overall perception of safety in the core was unchanged. “Persistent issues with open drug use, social disorder, and homelessness were frequently cited as reasons for unchanged or worsened perceptions of safety,” reads a report on the project to the Calgary Police Commission in June.

The top calls for service downtown were for unwanted guests, disturbances or suspicious persons. “There’s criminal behaviour, there’s bylaw behaviour and then there’s just behaviour that makes people feel uncomfortable,” Boyd said. Officers would arrive on scene for this type of call, but then find there was not much for them to do. They would ask people to vacate the area. “And they say, well, ‘where would you like us to go, officer? I’m just looking for a place that I can feel safe. I’m looking for a place that’s warm,'” said Boyd.

One of the mitigation strategies outlined in the report to the Police Commission highlighted the potential of day spaces. “We’ve got to continue leaning in and looking for new ways to help make that positive change. And day spaces, we think, are going to play a big part of that,” Boyd said.

Garner, from the Calgary Downtown Association, and Boyd were part of the Downtown Safety Leadership Table, an intensive research project led by the City of Calgary that engaged with 45 community groups and social service agencies, including people with lived experience of homelessness. The results were released in March of 2024 with 28 recommendations, including one to create new day spaces, on how to improve safety in the downtown.

The report outlined how some people are not comfortable going to the city’s emergency shelters, which are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. “Many people who require shelter services are hesitant to access shelters because of concerns for personal safety,” it reads. Another report by Vibrant Communities Calgary about safety on transit included perspectives from people who said they avoided shelters because they were scared of getting robbed or assaulted.

The shelter system in Calgary, the Downtown Safety Table report concluded, has been finding it increasingly difficult to respond to the overlapping challenges of a lack of housing, affordability and the opioid crisis. Staff and resources are stretched thin. “The complexity, severity, and variety of challenges faced by front-line agencies have fundamentally changed since the pandemic.”

There is an existing patchwork of day spaces in Calgary outside of the shelter system. Woods Homes runs a drop-in space in Inglewood for people 29 and younger and follow a philosophy of “radical hospitality”—everyone is welcome as long as they’re respectful. The Women’s Centre in Bridgeland sees upwards of 1,400 visits a week. Their facility has computers, washrooms, essential supplies and even a toy shelf for birthdays. “When you can just drop into an environment and come as you are, it already sends that flag of you are accepted here and you belong here and you’re welcome here,” said Lana Bentley, the executive director of the Women’s Centre.

The city’s public libraries, like those across Canada and the US, have seen an increase in usage by vulnerable populations since the pandemic. The Alex and the Mustard Seed have spaces that provide meals, basic needs and a place for people to stop and recharge. Sikh temples in Calgary, which are called gurdwaras, offer a free, hot vegetarian meal to anyone who visits. The Dashmesh Cultural Centre, the largest gurdwara in the city, serves the langar meal, the Sikh term for this cultural practice, 12 hours a day, seven days a week.

The Aboriginal Friendship Centre on 16th Avenue NW was one of five locations last winter that took part in the Calgary Homeless Foundation’s Extreme Weather Response program. The initiative started in 2022 and provides a refuge for up to 400 people from inclement weather, whether that’s extreme cold, heat or wildfire smoke.

The City of Calgary has committed $1.1 million for a two-year pilot project to support the operation of two new day spaces in the city, one in the Beltline at the Mustard Seed and the other at Journey Church in the northwest suburb of Rocky Ridge. The facility at the Mustard Seed is being renovated to expand capacity and add new amenities like showers and laundry. “It is something that we are investing in because we are really focused on safety as a priority, and we want to continue moving the needle,” said Kay Choi, who leads the city’s strategy on safety.

Choi said the city is evaluating how the new spaces are working, how many people use them and how many people get referred to services. “If we see some of those measures are improving because of these day spaces, we will then be able to expand for our next budget cycle, more of these day spaces, smaller ones throughout the city to create a network,” she said. The target is to create another three for a total of five. The additional facilities could open as soon as early 2026, depending on if the new city council supports the project and agrees to more funding.

Public safety was at the forefront of the recent municipal election. Most candidates included the issue in their platforms, but it was difficult to differentiate one from the other. Most suggested a similar strategy, a mix of increased enforcement alongside funding for community supports. Jeromy Farkas, Calgary’s new mayor, didn’t mention day spaces specifically in his policy brief on public safety but he committed to supporting all 28 recommendations from the Downtown Safety Leadership Table report.

Most people seemed to follow a similar path through the basement of Central United Church on that Tuesday morning in early October. They descended the flight of stairs at the entrance off 1st Street and then took a right turn into the clothing store run by Good Neighbour. Volunteers had to periodically duck into back rooms to pull out green garbage bags full of donated clothes to replenish the racks. Then it was past the person at the makeshift till who bags the clothes and across the room to the table stocked with hygiene supplies.

Volunteers with AAWEAR restocked the toothbrushes, little shampoo bottles, combs, deodorant, heat pads, naloxone kits, water bottles and travel mugs as people picked them up off the table. A small whiteboard listed the “Harm Reduction Menu” in colourful felt pens. These items, available on request, included a variety of pipes and a sharps container for needles. Washrooms were past the table and down a hallway. The nurse’s station was on the other side of the room. She had a fold out cushioned table for people to lie on that was tucked behind an array of three-panel screens and bulletin boards on wheels. A large pad of paper by the entrance to her booth advertised “Health checks,” “Wound care,” and “Foot care.”

Through the door next to the nurse’s station and to the right brought you to the dining room, where people lined up as volunteers plated the food. The meal that day was roasted turkey and steamed rice with peppers and tomato. It was warm and hearty. Apple-pie bites for dessert.

Kevin Parkes, a red seal chef, was one of the volunteers in the kitchen. He worked for years at restaurants at the Banff Springs Hotel, but had to stop because of health issues. He attended narcotics anonymous meetings at Central United and learned they were looking for help making food for the Hub. “I like meeting the people. I’ve been in the struggle,” Parkes said. It took him over an hour on transit to get to the church that morning from his house in Marlborough.

The people in the dining area ranged in age from late teens to mid 60s. Most carried at least one backpack and a number of other duffle or cloth grocery bags. There was space for people to sit down and spread out. They leaned back in their chairs after eating. Some fell asleep. The cylindrical pillars that supported the tall ceilings in the basement were tightly wrapped with thick white rope. The design element provided a nautical flair to the network of subterranean rooms and fluorescent lighting. The coils of rope added to the feeling of a safe harbour, a much-needed port in an ongoing storm.

Maggie Helwig is a writer and priest at a church in an inner-city neighbourhood in Toronto. She wrote a book called Encampment about her experience working with the people living in tents on the small lawn in front of her church. She writes about how people who are housed underestimate the magnitude of the chaos that comes with living on the street. “We think, maybe, that homelessness is some kind of stable state, like being housed except without housing. Without really considering it, most people imagine that people who are homeless live in, if not one place, at least in one condition, that their days are in some ways predictable. But homelessness is, more than anything else, a life of constant displacement.”

Tamara Llewellyn, the program director for AAWEAR and a volunteer with the Central Outreach Hub, spent four years, from 2017 to 2021, homeless in Calgary. Many of the volunteers and outreach workers at the day space have their own stories about homelessness and addiction. “Getting off the street is so hard,” she said. “People think you just need to quit the drugs and get a job.”

She described how the nature of homelessness makes it difficult to access the services you need to escape homelessness. It was next to impossible to keep track of appointments. Maybe she would find herself on the other side of the city with no means to get a ride, or lose track of the day of the week. “You don’t have ID. You don’t have a phone. You get up and the first thing you’re looking for is food, money. Got all your stuff to lug around,” she said.

That’s why the model at Central Outreach Hub is so effective. Everything you need is right there, and you don’t need to know right away what you need that day. “Maybe get something to eat and that jogs your brain,” she said. Llewellyn credits a tenacious outreach worker at CUPS with getting her a spot at the Sunrise Healing Lodge, the first step on her path recovery.

The Hub has earned a reputation among social service agencies as an effective place to help vulnerable Calgarians. “We do street outreach, connecting to relations, providing resource navigation, basic needs. Sometimes it’s treatment applications. We do housing applications, income support, try and get people to detox if that’s what they want,” said Glen Lavallee, who works with Walking the Wolf Trail, an outreach program run by Siksika Family Services. He is one of the regulars at the Reconnects program on Tuesday mornings, which includes staff from AAWEAR, Safelink Alberta, Alpha House, The Alex Street Outreach Team, Safeworks, CUPS, and the Tsuut’ina Nation. The Hub is also home to a monthly Indigenous wellness day that includes drumming, smudging and a chance to connect with elders.

On the rare instance when an altercation has flared up between people, the community has addressed the incident without the police. There are no security guards. Lavallee explained how these kinds of situations are opportunities to demonstrate respect. You earn someone’s trust by helping them work through difficult emotions. “I’m just walking alongside you,” Lavallee said, summing up the philosophy at the Hub.

Helwig’s book unpacks how the people living in the encampment at her church were struggling to meet their basic needs and find a sense of belonging. She writes about how the fear that many of us instinctively feel about people on the street, or people using drugs, is embedded in aspects of modern culture. We prefer not to encounter people in poverty and addiction because we don’t want to acknowledge that possibility for ourselves. “Beyond what we are taught about drugs, though, beyond what we are taught about psychosis, we are taught, most deeply, and most consistently, not to be fragile. Not to be weak, or needy, or breakable. We are taught to despise fragility. To shun the people who embody it: the very old, the very young, the disabled.”

There is a debate about origin stories in the northwest suburbs of Rocky Ridge and Royal Oak. Some community members argue that the day space at Journey Church is a magnet for social disorder, that it’s attracting people experiencing homelessness and addiction to what was once a peaceful neighbourhood in the far northwest. Shutting down the space, this argument goes, solves the problem—at least in one pocket of Calgary. But the congregation tells a different story. People in need were already on their doorstep. They just decided to let them in.

Criticism of the space intensified after a women in her mid 60s was injured after falling off her bike in August of 2024. She said that an intoxicated man jumped out of the bushes next to the path way along Rocky Ridge Road NW and then tried to steal her bike. The church hosted a tense town hall with 200 residents from the community about a month after the incident. This past summer, a group of 10 or so people staged a protest for a couple of weeks outside the church.

Jess DiSabatino, the lead pastor of the 1,500-member church, is sympathetic to the concerns of their neighbours in northwest Calgary. Her parents live in Royal Oak. She understands that a resource centre for the homeless is incongruent with the mainstream vision of a peaceful suburb. “We’re doing our best to make sure that some of the concerns, the real concerns that people have, are being addressed,” she said.

The church runs tours of the space, which is in the front foyer of the 30,000 sq. ft. building, every month and hosts a meeting every quarter to keep a dialogue going with the community. They hired a safety attendant who monitors the area around the church for a couple of hours after the day space closes. It’s open Monday to Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The security person makes sure everyone using the space, usually between 40 to 50 people a day, has somewhere to stay for the night and can get to wherever they need to go.

The pastor started working at the church in 2019 was surprised by the number of homeless who would come to her door. They would ask for water or to use the washroom. The tents started to appear during the pandemic. She learned that the Tuscany LRT Station was nicknamed Paradise. People took the train to the end of the line going west to get a reprieve from downtown. DiSabatino contacted the Calgary Homeless Foundation and they asked her to start tracking how many people were arriving at the church and asking for help.

The Homeless Foundation coordinated the launch of a six-month pilot project at Journey Church to host a warming centre during the winter of 2022 as part of their Extreme Weather Response program. It transitioned into a year-round day space this past April. The Distress Centre provides social workers and resource navigators to staff the space, which has mats for people to sleep on, a television and essential supplies. Volunteers make oatmeal, soup and coffee. “It was such fun. It just felt like such a fun project, and it was fun for the people in our congregation,” DiSabatino said. “I mean, just yesterday a dad was calling to see if we knew his son, and we actually did, and were able to connect them.”

The business community near the church is supportive. People taking the train to escape downtown often ended up in the restaurants and coffee shops in the commercial district next to the Crowfoot LRT station. The church let these business know that they could refer people to the day space. They’ve reciprocated by donating food and coffee.  

One reason the warming centre transitioned into a year-round space, DiSabatino explained, was because of how effective it’s been for connecting people to housing and other supports. “I think when you feel respected, then you’re open to getting help because it feels like people see you and can help you,” she said. Volunteers often bring their families along for a shift. “People bring their toddlers, and the toddlers have made muffins, and then the toddlers can hand them out to people, and there’s something beautiful in that. It’s very humanizing.”

The Distress Centre has four staff on site, a team lead, two system navigators and a housing strategist, full time, five days a week. The agency has partnered with other resources to provide additional supports. Community paramedics are there three days week, providing health checks and wound care. They can refer people to a physician who can write medical orders, like a prescription for opiate agonist therapy. Many people who are homeless have had adverse experiences with the healthcare system and avoid hospitals. “I think that having the paramedics really, really addresses that kind of gap,” said Jacob Schlinker, manager of the coordinated entry program for the Distress Centre.

Social service agencies in Calgary all reference the same master list of everyone in the city who needs a place to live. “Some people are on that list for multiple years, and some people are on that list and they’re housed within three weeks,” Schlinker said. Wait time depends on the level of need. People who have completed the initial assessment, called the NSQ, or needs and services questionnaire, have to check in regularly, ideally once a month, to maintain their spot on the list. “The level of engagement and ability to make that follow-up connection goes into how long someone would wait,” Schlinker said.

Low-barrier day spaces, like the ones at Journey Church and Central United, are proving effective for helping people connect and then stay in touch with the resources they need to get off the street. The big catch, however, is on the supply side of the equation. “There really is a need across the board for more market housing, as well as place-based supportive housing,” Schlinker said. Not only that, but more and more Calgarians are finding themselves in increasingly precarious circumstances. “I think more people are on that cusp of living with an income that isn’t sustainable. And I think, truly, there are so many people who are just one or two life events away from becoming homeless.”

The nurse was one of the last people to leave the basement of Central United on that Tuesday in early October. Jo Bertamini-Gawdun is an LPN with a specialty in foot and wound care, and typically sees five patients during her shift on Tuesday mornings. Each appointment lasts half an hour. She volunteers her time at the Hub, but has a paid position to work out of Journey Church on Thursdays. “Feet are very responsive and they generally respond to pressure and friction. And so when you have people who are on their feet all day in ill-fitting shoes, you end up with a lot of complications, a lot of really heavy callousing—bunions, ingrown toenails, all sorts of compaction issues,” she said.

Bertamini-Gawdun saw a couple of her regulars that morning, one for maintenance on some ingrown toe nails and another for corns. She can improve these kinds of conditions, but they often need surgery to fix. “I need a subsidized podiatrist, but I can’t find one in Calgary,” she said. “You end up with people who are just caught in the cycle of painful feet.”

A new patient had signed up for an appointment that morning. The nurse is often the first point of contact with the healthcare system in a long time, and starts the initial meeting with a broad questionnaire. The man that day was scared of doctors, but had heard that he could trust the nurse at Central United. “It’s really satisfying when you get new people who are like, ‘yeah, I’ve heard of you, and I need help.'”

Given the nature of the work—paying careful attention to someone’s feet—people let their guard down and share their stories. “Story time is heart wrenching, but it’s very humanizing. You can’t listen to somebody’s story and then look at them with judgment. There’s zero chance that can happen.”