FOR the last three years straight, Edel House, a shelter for homeless women and children, has been at capacity.
The essential service is extremely stretched, according to manager of the shelter, Colette Foster.
“In Edel House, we provide emergency accommodation for women and children and, on any given night, we have 18 single women here and 10 families. At the moment we have 21 children in ten families staying here,” she explained.
Colette Foster, Manager at Edel House.
“Our shelter has been full every night for about the last three years.”
Despite this alarming fact, there is actually quite a high turnover in Edel House, which is operated by Good Shepherd Cork. The average stay for a woman or family is just three weeks.
The problem, in large part, is that the rate at which people are becoming homeless these days is almost unmanageable.
“We are the first port of call for when a family has nowhere to stay. Either home or the place where they’re staying isn’t an option for them to stay there anymore. It could be because of family conflict or relationship breakdown or issues with the landlord,” said Colette.
“Once families and single women come here we provide them with the support to help them exit from homelessness. The main service that people get from us here in Edel House is a bed and a safe place to sleep and then after that everyone is allocated a key worker and their own individual care plan is developed to see what they need to do to exit homeless services as quickly as possible and in as supportive a way as possible.”
While they may currently be at capacity, Colette assured us that Edel House will never turn someone away.
“We’d regularly get phone calls from families and single people who we don’t have any beds for. What we do in that case is we talk to them about what their options are,” she said.
“It’s rare, though it does happen, but if a woman or a woman with a family comes here out of hours and we don’t have a bed then we’d give them the phone to ring somebody and arrange a safe place to stay… or we’d organise a taxi for them to go to a family member where they will be safe… or we have on occasion paid for B&Bs for people so that they are safe for that night.”
While Edel House’s stats show occupants generally only stay for three weeks, some women and children have been there a lot longer.
“There is one woman who is here a year and we have had a few families who have been here for more than six months. I suppose the bigger the family the more difficult it is to find somewhere to go after Edel House.”
So far this year, Edel House has admitted 182 women and 59 children.
“The year has been busy but we have to try and keep our own hopes up, and keep up the hopes of those in Edel House. If the staff lose hope or if the women lose hope, then we’re all in trouble,” said Colette.
“It’s like a needle in a haystack looking for a home, but you just have to keep looking. Everyone leaves Edel House some day.”
Colette said the housing and homelessness crisis has definitely intensified in the last three years. While historically the shelter would have helped a lot of people with alcohol and addiction problems, or those with a background of institutional living, nowadays it is women and children from all walks of life.
“We’ve had women in here who have come from all types of social backgrounds.
“There was a time where women who stayed in Edel House would have been used to institutional living of some shape or form. They might have been in care, they might have been in prison, they might have been in treatment, whereas the women who are coming here now they have no experience of that. We’ve had to adapt and change to that,” said Colette.
“Sometimes there are issues where people haven’t been able to maintain a tenancy and sometimes when such things go wrong they don’t have the family support to fall back on. In a lot of the cases we see here there’s no family home.”
Colette explains that immigrants and refugees can be particularly vulnerable to homelessness.
Should any issue arise with a tenancy, for example, and they are unable to source alternative accommodation right away due to the housing crisis, they are often left with no place to go because they have no family home in Ireland to fall back on.
Personally, Colette said her job, and the job of other staff members at Edel House, can be very challenging. It is tough to see people at their most vulnerable, especially when options for moving on are limited thanks to the lack of housing and affordable housing in Cork and across the country.
“Edel House can be a very positive place as well. While it is difficult to watch people at their most vulnerable, you do know that you are providing that most basic need of shelter and safety and you can’t put a price on that. It’s tough but it’s also very rewarding.”
On a positive note, Edel House has celebrated a number of new successes this year.
“We are running a youth club now which really took off over the summer. There would be between 17 and 22 children here every Tuesday night for it. We have seen that sometimes children who are experiencing homelessness have a lot of pressure in their life and in school and different social situations. But in the youth club it’s all children who are experiencing homelessness so there’s no pressure on them to try and conceal that from anybody,” said Colette.
“We’ve also started supporting the families in the B&Bs because we noticed that when families came to Edel House from B&Bs they wouldn’t have any of the paperwork done or have any of their support needs met. Now we have someone who links in with everyone staying in B&Bs and that has been really positive.”
Looking forward to the New Year, Colette is hopeful that plans to extend and refurbish the shelter will go ahead.
“We have been granted the funding for the extension and refurbishment for Edel House. We’ve gone to planning permission but it has been appealed to An Bord Pleanála so we’ll know by March whether we can go ahead with that and that will give every single woman her own room and bathroom. At the moment we have two or three women sharing in a room,” she said.
“In the new building, all the families will have separate bedrooms within their unit. At the moment they sleep, eat, everything, in the one little space. So that’s what we’re really hoping for in 2017 and, of course, we’re hoping that we will actually be able to provide emergency accommodation.
“At the moment we’re full so, more often than not, there’s no emergency bed available right there and then.
“We will never leave women and children without a safe place to be, but I’m hoping in 2017 that we’ll have rooms empty so when there’s an emergency situation we will be able to offer them a bed.”
Edel House is run by Good Shepherd Cork which is a registered charity that works with women and children who are homeless, or at risk of homelessness.
It provides a continuum of care from emergency accommodation to long term supported housing, support and advocacy, and education and development.
For more information about Edel House, call 021-4274240 and for Education and Development call 021-4397314.
Donations and fundraising are essential to Edel’s House ability to provide these services. If you would like to support them, you can donate online at www.goodshepherdcork.ie. /make-a-donation.
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