The news of the upcoming closure of the Maison de Sophia, in the Laurentians, amazes me. That our Prime Minister François Legault adds to this by brandishing the scarecrow of failures in the accountability of the organization to justify the non-renewal of its funding revolts me! And I weigh my words…
I worked in community settings for a dozen years. I’ve seen community organizations go to war over a few thousand dollars– peanuts ! — because it was necessary to “create projects”, justify its “social relevance” and demonstrate its “radiance” in the eyes of donors. The perverse effects of accountability have been denounced for more than twenty years by groups of regional autonomous community organizations and by the Quebec Network of Autonomous Community Action (RQ-ACA).
What does the premier know about self-help community work? I will not venture to make a detailed analogy with the file of the third link in Quebec. Nevertheless, the political tactics deployed in the management of these files seem to me similar. Ignoring experiential knowledge in favor of egocentric knowledge, discussing in a vacuum and decontextualizing the problems in order to exploit them, even deny them, seems to be the trademark of this government.
Does Mr. Legault know that to gain the trust of people whose life paths have been marked by violence and precariousness, it takes months, sometimes years of support and active presence? Does he know that many of these people have suffered, in the past, from interruptions of services which make them extremely suspicious of institutional aid, which complicates their recovery?
Offering stability, a living environment, to these people is THE condition to be put in place so that, secondly, a long-term collaborative approach can be initiated with them, which the Maison de Sophia has been doing for almost 15 years. In the jargon of the trade, we call this “landing”. To do this, it takes time, far from the brief therapies and the magic power of mindfulness that some integrated health and social services centers (CISSS) promote. And in terms of resilience, these people especially have no lessons to learn from the National Institute of Public Health of Quebec (INSPQ)!
Another reality: vulnerable people must increasingly adapt their discourse to specific service offers, due to the lack of accessible, local first-line support that takes into account the person as a whole. Will Annie, Nathalie, Jessica, Noémie and Lou-Ann have to return to the streets to be welcomed into the new house in Saint-Jérôme which, at the start, will certainly need time to reach full operation? However, the Maison de Sophia is a resource appreciated and recognized by its users, palliative to a restrictive and clientelist eligibility found in other organizations on the territory, and which intervenes to prevent relapses into homelessness.
The shelter therefore seems to be bearing the brunt of new directions in terms of financing autonomous community organizations, and this, in the face of a worrying increase in requests, a clear indication of the erosion of the social safety net and the renunciation of the State to s to structurally attack the social problems experienced by a growing number of people. It is to be wondered if the fact that the Maison de Sophia acts on the social determinants of health — in particular through its supportive, militant and concrete position in the face of the housing crisis, an acute problem that the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, Andrée Laforest, still denied until very recently — is not the real reason for the withdrawal of its financing.
In a competitive framework well demonstrated by the editorialist of the To have to Marie-Andrée Chouinard, the organization was probably unable to benefit from concerted lobbying action around a social issue targeted by our populist ministers. My reading is as follows: because the workers were able to adapt their actions to the needs expressed by the women and adopt an ethic of the heart, the organization no longer met the criteria imposed by recent ministerial programs. In other words, the organization was too… autonomous!