Sandra Best (HBSW'13) Helps the Homeless

“Homelessness doesn’t discriminate,” Sandra Best says. “It can happen to anyone of any age and any background.” Sandra is the operations manager of the David Busby Centre, which aims to reduce the impact of homelessness in the Barrie, Ontario, area.

“There’s a common misconception that homelessness stems from an individual’s choices,” she adds. “But nobody lines up on career day and says, ‘One day, I really want to be homeless.’”

Sandra attended the Lakehead Orillia campus and graduated in 2013 in the inaugural class of the Honours Bachelor of Social Work program. As part of her studies, she did a placement at the David Busby Centre and was impressed by their commitment. In 2015, she began working at the Centre and in April 2020, Sandra was promoted to operations manager.

In this role, Sandra is responsible for hiring and training staff, helping them meet their goals, procuring supplies, and reporting back to funders.

The Centre provides crucial services to the community. Their outreach van is on the road seven days a week delivering survival supplies to people living rough. This encompasses meals, hygiene supplies, survival gear, and transportation. The van also has a needle exchange program and offers social services and health care referrals.  

Pictured right: The David Busby Centre's outreach van provides critical support to people experiencing homelessness.

“Simcoe County has a really serious housing problem,” Sandra says. “Rent is astronomical compared to what people earn – we’re the fourth most expensive city in Canada.”

This situation is compounded by the opiate crisis. “Vulnerable people are more prone to addiction because they don’t have sufficient access to treatment for medical and mental health issues, so they turn to addiction instead,” she says.

COVID-19 has worsened these challenges. “Health and legal services aren’t functioning at the same level and people are losing jobs and losing the ability to afford their homes.” The arrival of winter, with its life-threatening cold weather, will make surviving on the streets even more precarious.

“Normally, one of our main functions is as a drop-in centre,” Sandra says, “but we haven’t been able to do this during COVID-19 because of social distancing requirements.”

Before the pandemic, the Centre also provided emergency overflow shelter. “People signed up each night to sleep in cots we had set up in a large room,” she explains. “That went out the window too with COVID.”

The entire team at the Centre rallied together to cope with these unprecedented circumstances and completely changed the way it operated. In March 2020, they partnered with the Elizabeth Fry Society and the County of Simcoe to lease a hotel.

“We looked at options for making it possible for people experiencing homelessness to isolate and a hotel/motel model was the best solution. Now, there are only two people to a room and they have access bathrooms that aren’t high traffic.”

Another major change was the extension of the period that the Centre provides shelter. Typically, group lodging is available from November to April, but the Centre is now providing lodging throughout the year in response to COVID-19.

Shown above: People living on the street in the Barrie area rely on the David Busby Centre’s overnight emergency group lodgings offered from November to April, but when this became impossible because of COVID-19, the Centre came up with an ingenious alternative.

The pandemic and her time at the David Busby Centre has taught Sandra many things.

“The homeless are the most generous people I’ve ever met, because they know what it’s like to have nothing. I’ve also learned that homelessness doesn’t have to exist – it’s the by-product of a broken system that we need to work together to fix, because it’s not the people who are broken.”