Prince Albert’s Community Safety and Well-Being (CSWB) manager Anna Dinsdale says the city is moving from simply “keeping the lights on” for crisis services toward a longer-term strategy to keep residents from cycling through shelters, police cells, and emergency rooms.
In an interview with the Daily Herald, Dinsdale said her team has spent much of the past two years filling critical gaps, like finding a location for the city’s new emergency shelter and building a complex needs stabilization facility, and is now turning its attention to prevention, housing access, and data collection.
“The goal is to make sure people aren’t just cycling through crisis services,” Dinsdale said. “We need solutions that keep them stable in the long term.”
Dinsdale said her office is finalizing baseline data on everything from fires to shelter use to measure whether programs are working. She said early analysis shows a statistically significant drop in alcohol-related calls to Mobile Crisis, a trend she believes is linked to the city’s alcohol bylaw, though full results will be presented to the council later this fall.
Beyond the shelter
Dinsdale said her team’s next priorities include increasing access to transitional and supportive housing, closing gaps in single-unit dwellings, and addressing transportation issues that prevent residents from accessing services.
“An emergency shelter is only one piece,” she said. “We have to look at what supports are needed before, during, and after someone uses that shelter.”
She added that the housing needs assessment recently completed by the city identified a shortage of smaller, affordable units and a lack of safe, inhabitable housing stock overall.
Dinsdale said the city is developing indicators to measure whether “upstream interventions, like cultural and ceremonial spaces for youth, are making an impact, even if those benefits may not be visible for several years.
“We really need to make sure we have good qualitative indicators and quantitative indicators, and that we combine both of those to understand what collective impact looks like for our community,” she said.
Building consensus
Dinsdale said consensus-building is a slow but necessary process that has already helped secure agreement on the complex needs facility.
Most people agree we need an emergency shelter,” she said. “The disagreement is often about how big it should be or where it should be located.”
She said finding common ground helps narrow requests to provincial and federal governments, making them more likely to succeed.
Dinsdale encouraged residents to join the city’s Community Solutions Forum, held online every two months, and to stay informed through the CSWB website.
She also urged residents to think critically about information circulating on social media, participate in public consultations, and look for practical ways to support their neighbours.
If it’s feasible to pick up some garbage or have a conversation with a neighbour about a barking dog, that helps hugely,” Dinsdale said. “Let’s start being good neighbours.”
City council will hold a public hearing on Monday, October 6, to decide whether to approve contract zoning for the proposed 45-bed shelter at 650 Exhibition Drive.
