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By John McDonald
It’s lunchtime at the Kelowna Drop In and Information Centre and the place is buzzing. The tables are full and there’s a line-up outside the door, waiting their turn.
If this was commercial restaurant, it would be doing great.
As a front-line resource for Kelowna’s homeless and marginalized, it’s doing even better, and a large part of that is due to the force of personality of its executive director Selena Stearns.
Given the nature of the centre’s customers, many with drug and alcohol addictions, mental illness or both, running a restaurant would probably be much easier.
But in talking with Stearns about the centre and its clients, one gets the sense she wouldn’t have it any other way.
“We try to guide them, connect them, support them, encourage them to becoming clean and healthy and self-sufficient,” says Stearns. “I’m proud of what we’ve managed to accomplish here over the years.”
Stearns and her staff – some paid, but mostly volunteer – do this first by bringing them in for hot meals and maybe a shower, and then by trying to connect them with other services – employment, addiction treatment, counselling and education.
If it sounds easy, it ‘aint, with most clients going through a series of false starts and setbacks before either making it or not, and it takes a special kind of person to deal with that on a daily basis.
A quick survey of the lunchtime crowd on Leon Avenue reveals varied opinions of Stearns, ranging from “sweetheart” to “bitch.”
She laughs it off. “The ones who call me bitch, have probably broken the rules at some point,” says Stearns. “You have to create a sense of stability if you’re going to help someone, so you have to have rules and you have to enforce them.”
Her seemingly boundless empathy for her clients seems rooted in her own rootless childhood, starting in Edmonton and carrying on “where ever mom landed her Gypsy feet,” as Stearns puts it.
She ended up on the street herself, in and out of foster care as a teenager, trying to get away from her abusive mother and wound up in another abusive relationship with a man.
“When you’re abused all your life as a child, that’s the love that seems more comfortable,” Stearns says.
She wound up in Kelowna because she had family here, seeming to shrug off her dysfunctional past.
At one point Stearns operated a construction company, then worked in employment consulting, before landing a job at the centre in 2000.
“I threw my hat in the ring for a Kelowna Poverty Task Force job through the HRDC,” she recalls. “The ad asked ‘if you are familiar with poverty and understand how it impacts life.’ Well that was me.”
She took over as executive director in 2005 and immediately set about upgrading the place, with better flooring and lighting, trying to make it as comfortable as possible for people whose lives are anything but.
That also includes making it safe for both clients and staff and earning her ‘tough outside, soft inside’ reputation.
“A lot of the RCMP in the downtown enforcement unit will tell you [street people] are more scared of me than they are of them,” laughs Stearns.
Still, she can’t do it all on her own and she admits to developing a relationship of sorts with the Kelowna RCMP, albeit one she doesn’t use often.
“We don’t call unless we really need them,” Stearns adds.
Instead, she relies on the clients themselves to police bad behaviour, at least within the confines of the centre. “They will step up if somebody gets way out of line.”
What Stearns doesn’t understand is the attitude and perceptions of many of Kelowna’s citizens as to what the centre does and the clients it serves.
“People hold up their noses as they go by. There’s this perception that the homeless are tight little group. In truth, it is the loneliest environment for most of them,” marvels Stearns. “These people didn’t grow up to be homeless addicts. They had mothers and fathers. They have hopes and dreams. We’ve got some amazing talented people, who through circumstances, hit rock bottom. How do you teach someone to stand up when their whole world has fallen down?”
That misunderstanding, says Stearns, manifests itself in ugly behaviour.
“We’ve had people drive by and shoot with pellet guns. Can you imagine what that does to some of the old veterans who went through the war?” she says. “I’ve held clients who’ve been stabbed, held girls who’ve thrown out of moving cars after being raped and sodomized. Who would want to be straight in a world like that?”
For all the centre is, Stearns says what it isn’t is just as important.
“We are not 24/7 and we need to be,” she says. “There is no safe place for people to go and these streets are very different at night.”
As part of the perpetual drive to move the centre forward, the non-profit Kelowna Drop In and Information Centre Society is hosting the inaugural Hearts in Hand Gala on Dec. 11 at the Grand Okanagan Ballroom.
While ostensibly a fundraiser, Stearns isn’t hoping for much beyond raising a few thousand dollars after expenses and some sorely-needed awareness.
For more information and tickets, call the centre at 250-763-3311.
Kelowna Drop In Centre By the Numbers
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Just to honor past directors….I started at the Centre in 2000, taking over as director in 2005.
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