NSUN Summer Closure

NSUN is taking a break from regular meetings for the summer.

We held our last formal meeting on May 31 and will return in September. Stay tuned to learn when meetings will restart and drop us a line through our contact form or by emailing neighbourhoodsun@gmail.com if you’d like to be notified when we restart.

Our decision to shut down for the summer was inspired by NSUN member and The Backpack Project founder, Niki Ottosen, who does so every summer for her organization. We haven’t been going nearly as long as Niki, but since our founding in October 2020, we have met for hundreds of hours. We met online weekly until June 2021, and bi-weekly from then on.

In 2023, we started gathering data a more formally and so we can share that from January to May 2023:

• We served a total of 327 breakfast sandwiches, along with steaming cups of coffee, in the final three months of our breakfast program (January 136, February 107, and March 84).
• NSUN members participated in about 225 hours of meetings over that time period, including 104 hours for NSUN meetings, 90 hours for The Shift project planning meetings, and 25 hours for meetings with other organizations, such as the Point in Time homeless count mapping committee and the System Transformation Working Group (comprised of representatives from BC Housing, various service providers and organizations like The Alliance – formerly the Greater Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness).
• Collected a total of 154 submissions – both the long housing submission and the shorter encampments submission – for the Office of the Federal Housing Advocate (see post on The Shift Project).

This list doesn’t capture the hours spent in the parks or all the behind the scenes efforts when a call goes out for tents, sleeping bags or other items that someone in a park needs. These immediate needs are often because bylaw of enforcement actions that result in people’s belongings being impounded or thrown out.

The constant harassment by City of Victoria bylaw officers enforcing a punitive 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. camping bylaw is helping no one. It is expensive, frequently arbitrary, has no accountability (bylaw officers do not itemize what they are taking thus the person having their things impounded has no evidence as to what was taken), harmful, and creates a mountain of material that goes to the landfill in a city that is trying to become ‘zero waste’.

NSUN members also spend time helping unhoused neighbours try to get ID or confirming they are still on the BC Housing list and other tasks that by rights should be handled by government agencies or are, in the case of the maintenance of the BC Housing list, simply pointless bureaucracy.

NSUN members will continue to do many of these tasks during the summer closure as it’s just formal meetings that are being put on hold. We’re also hoping to have some fun over the summer too and are planning to celebrate some birthdays in Stadacona Park.

In the fall, we’ll resume our bi-weekly meeting and continue pressing the city to make sure that they have plans for the winter’s extreme weather response before it gets cold and asking what they plan to do as an alternative to the daily bylaw sweeps if they refuse to amend the camping bylaw to allow people to leave their tents up all day.

And we will always reiterate the message that housing is a human right, that unhoused people are rights-holders, and the constant and inhumane violations of their human rights must stop.