BY KAJIN GOH
On Sept.19, the Chuan Society made a delegation to the Local Community Commission (LCC) to propose a warming space and community space at the decommissioned Phoenix School, at a meeting covered in last week’s Driftwood (“Vacant school site proves popular”).
This ball started rolling after an informal meeting some weeks before to discuss possible uses of the Phoenix School site with two of our LCC members. We were made aware that the CRD’s lease would not begin until January of next year, and there would be a public bid for applications at that time, but with the recognition that winter does not pause til the new year, the suggestion of a potential provisional arrangement was brought up to meet the needs of our community members.
We appreciate that this discussion marks an evolution since some of our members helped run a warming space in the winter of 2021-22, a process that saw us displaced to nine locations while attempting to negotiate with the CRD over establishing a presence on park land. While dealing with multiple enforced evictions was a trying and expensive process, some of our most marginalized community members were able to endure winter with a little more warmth, access to supports and a sense of agency and self-determination.
As this was a grassroots project at the time, we were not able to effect a meeting with our locally elected director, Gary Holman, without being represented as an organization, and instead did our best to work out a solution with staff, a difficult process which, despite our best efforts, failed to yield any results. What the warming space did achieve was call attention to the needs of our community, and put those needs on the map with our local organizations and some members of our government. The implementation of the LCC since then has at least introduced a mechanism by which it seems more hopeful that with public engagement and a willingness towards making a difference — together — that fewer people would unnecessarily be left out in the cold.
As mentioned at the delegation, this is our third pitch in the form of a formal proposal to the CRD — the first was requested by (off-island) CRD senior manager Steven Carey at the time of the warming space but was never responded to after submission; the other followed an interagency winter coordination meeting organized by the Salt Spring Health Advancement Network and Restorative Justice, which saw members of the CRD, Community Services, Umbrella and other non-profits come together to propose solutions for the winter. It marked the beginning of our meeting with LCC members to work on yet another solution which, for a number of reasons, failed again to materialize.
Instead, we’ve gone through two winters of ruminating on how it’s too bad that some folks will have to be left out in the cold again . . . better try next year! Meanwhile, almost every local government or municipality in our bioregion has recognized the impacts of climate change intensified by a marked increase in precarious living circumstances (especially since Covid), and have made the funding and operating of warming spaces a priority over the winter period. So it is in this context that we are again approaching the CRD with an appeal to get in step with what the rest of B.C. is already doing.
To be clear, the Chuan Society’s interest in the Phoenix School site precedes this recent conversation about running a potential warming space, and is of a related but different nature. In July we submitted an expression of interest to lease the site when a call for applications went out from SD64; the school board’s decision was to lease the school to the CRD, and since then we have kept our ears open to see what the plans are for this “valuable community asset.” Our proposed vision was for a coalition of community organizations to activate the site as a much-needed community hub, a combination of neighbourhood house, cultural and learning centre based on the practice of the commons — a space held in the public trust and with a mandate to lower access barriers and build collective equity for our community.
In addition, we felt this had the potential to create a point of contact and relationship-building for the existing neighbourhood with the future residents of the social housing development at 161 Drake Rd., as well as the residents of the nearby Salt Spring Commons housing project.
It is often remarked upon that Salt Spring — for all its qualities and population size — for some reason does not have any community centre of this kind, and new opportunities for opening up community spaces have become all too rare or priced out of range. With a limited three-minute delegation, we opted at this last meeting to re-emphasize the need to come to a workable solution for our community’s winter needs through a warming space, while submitting a multipage proposal which recommends this community space as an equally important need for the wider community.
While we appreciate and indeed support a transparent, public call for submissions and review for the long-term use of Phoenix School, there is an interim period of approaching winter during which we hope our officials can make arrangements for this space to be released to the community. For those with inadequate shelter options, such actions could be immediately life-changing and improving.
Perhaps, in light of the CRD decision-making apparatus, our proposal may have “been brought both too early and too late” — my question is, after years of nudging that handle at the gate, when is the right time? And, my question to our officials and friends with decision-making power over land use is: if not now, then when?
The writer is chair of the Chuan Society.
