Harvest House gets $30K from city for cleanup program

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Moncton city council this week approved a funding request of $30,000 from Harvest House Atlantic to clean up trash and repair property damage in the neighbourhood around its homeless shelter on High Street.

Marc Belliveau, executive director of Harvest House Atlantic, said the project has been in the works for a couple of years and council’s approval will allow it to move forward. The program was first pitched in 2021 and called “Harvest House Gives Back,” but didn’t proceed because of restrictions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We want this new program to go a step further by going to residential properties and help them out as well, because they are frustrated,” Belliveau said after making a presentation to council Monday.

He said $3,000 will be used to hire a part-time manager and $27,000 to put it in motion. It is a follow-up to a similar project by Downtown Moncton Centre-Ville Inc., also funded by the city, which hired people out of rehabilitation programs to patrol the downtown core with cleaning carts. The city also has a team of community officers who are responsible for looking for meses, along with a contracted professionals with equipment who can be called in to deal with big messes, like those found at abandoned homeless encampments.

Harvest House Atlantic says it supports 214 people at the High Street shelter each night, along with 100 more people during the day. Harvest House has 12 properties in a four-block radius, provides 600 meals a day, addiction recovery for 34 people and housing support for more than 60.

The Harvest House Atlantic shelter is in the same area the Humanity Project, the Bridge to Home Hub operated by the John Howard Society, and Ensemble Moncton, which provides services to the homeless and drug users. The Humanity Project recently constructed 21 “bunkhouses” at its farm outside Moncton as a way to get people off the streets and into temporary housing. That project received over $300,000 in funding from the city.

“Community, property damage continues to occur, loitering on properties is a daily occurrence
and resident frustrations are on the rise,” Harvest House said in its presentation to city council Monday.

It is common to see people sleeping or camping in doorways and empty lots, along with piles of trash, discarded clothing and shopping carts filled with a wide variety of items. Belliveau said 55 people died on the streets last year as a result of drug overdoses or other causes, and several more have died this year. He said one of the side-effects of drug addiction is the tendency to collect objects and clothing and then discard them.

“The trash is one thing, but there is also property damage,” Belliveau said. The project proposes to do odd jobs like sealing driveways, repairing damage to sheds and fences, helping to shovel snow, painting and general cleanup of properties. Belliveau said the organization would develop a needs assessment and keep track of all funds as they are used.

“We have a lot of community agencies and businesses who want to be involved in this, so we want to leverage our community and our vendors to get the best price, how many people can we get to help and how much work can we do in a short period of time,” Belliveau said.