May already, hey!? April just seemed to fly by after the long month of March. 

One of the positives we have seen through this month of pandemic is that it has given us time to really focus on our partnership with the Housing First program and implement some changes to better serve our clients. We are grateful for the opportunity to continue to serve our most vulnerable population and we are grateful to our community for the constant support and flow of donations we are seeing to help us do this. 

In the month of April, Find is so proud to announce that we were able to furnished 114 homes with your donations and helped a total of 175 people (125 Adults and 50 Children) move out of homelessness. 

Our team is working hard with our Housing team partners to continue to house as many people as we can in the current climate. Although things are not as routine as they once were, we have taken all measures to continue to provide a heightened level of service to our most vulnerable friends and help make their new space safe, comfortable and make it a home. 

It really does take a community to end homelessness and we are so proud of the community we have here in Edmonton! Thank you for making ending homelessness a priority in our city. 

We want to end this update with the Cree word "Wâhkôhtowin". Our good friend Jesse Thistle, author of the Indigenous Definition of Homelessness and From The Ashes, talked about it this week and we just loved the message so much. 

Wâhkôhtowin is an ancient Nehiyaw (Cree) and Michif (Métis) worldview that frames everything as a giant web of kinship.

Thistle states: "I like to think of wâhkôhtowin as “love thy neighbour” on steroids. Jesus never specified that your neighbours were limited to people: perhaps he was also including birds, water, rocks, turtles, the planet. If that’s the case, we’ve been doing it wrong for 2,000 years. In this current calamity, where we’re all separated by masks, sanitation wipes, computer screens and plexiglass barriers, I believe the connected web of wâhkôhtowin has the power to improve things—let’s be the neighbours we all want, the neighbours we all need."

Hiy, hiy!

Pictured: Jesse. Furniture Bank Team member and Ian, Processing Team member