ANCHOR program will now offer 9-1-1 alternative in east Ottawa

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“I am a person of colour myself. Knowing that there was a program like ANCHOR, with an alternative to policing, where they used community-based care to attend to these types of calls? I wanted to be a part of it. I wanted to be a part of serving my community for people who look like me,” she said.

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The program is also a response to other high-profile advocacy that resulted from the death of George Floyd in the United States, Cox said.

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Floyd was a 46-year-old Black man who was murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in 2020. Chauvin was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to more than 20 years in prison.

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“It really sparked this global movement around alternatives to policing and Black Lives Matter. So, in Ottawa in 2020, there was a motion at the Ottawa Police Services Board to develop the Ottawa Guiding Council on Mental Health and Addictions,” Cox said.

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Liz Wigfull is the director of that guiding council, which was established shortly after, in 2021.

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She said the ANCHOR program emerged, in part, from a 2022 research report she worked on that produced several recommendations for the city.

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“One of these was to develop a pilot project for a mobile crisis team run by peers in Ottawa,” Wigfull said.

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The program got calls immediately, Cox said. “We thought maybe there’d be more of a slow build-up, but the community was very eager for this. As soon as we publicized it, people started calling.”

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Liz Wigfull is the director of the Ottawa Guiding Council for Mental Health and Addiction. It was her research that suggested Ottawa develop its recently expanded ANCHOR program. Wigfull says that with the program’s recent expansion into Sandy Hill and the closure of its safe-consumption site, she’s expecting a lot more calls from the area. Photo by Jean Levac /Postmedia

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Why the program is expanding east

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Wigfull said that when she, Cox, other members of the guiding council and the City of Ottawa later considered where to expand the program, they considered numerous factors.

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“We looked at where Black and racialized populations in Ottawa live. We also looked at emergency room visits.”

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Alleviating resources, like those at Ottawa’s hospitals, is another key component of ANCHOR.

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John Hoyles, the executive director at Community Navigation of Eastern Ontario/211 East, oversees ANCHOR’s dispatch team.

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He said the program’s 21 “navigators,” who take around 200 to 400 calls daily, are able to take care of about half of them without dispatching a team member.

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“We also maintain a database of over 9,000 records of services in Eastern Ontario, and, when a person calls the ANCHOR number, it’s those 9,000 records that we look through to find solutions for them,” he said, adding that, because ANCHOR is an accredited organization, 85 per cent of its records must be updated annually.

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If people call and they’re starting to go in a downward spiral, especially if they’re vulnerable people, if we can get them help sooner, that means that they’re not going to go lower, Hoyles said.

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What comes next

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Though Cox and Wigfull both say it’s too early to gauge the success of ANCHOR’s expansion, they’re both preparing for the summer ahead.

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Wigfull says she expects ANCHOR will receive more calls this summer after their Sandy Hill expansion and the June 12 closure of Ottawa’s final two safe-consumption sites — at the Shepherds of Good Hope and the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre.

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“It’s definitely going to impact it. Because people don’t have anywhere to go now, they’ll be using (drugs) on the street,” Wigfull said.

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Souare says that, while ANCHOR can alleviate people in distress, the lack of resources the city has to support those with addictions will continue to show up in the kinds of calls the program receives.

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“The core needs for housing, for food security, for safe consumption … all of that doesn’t go away, and ANCHOR just becomes an additional piece to that response, trying to navigate these different systemic failures. But we also can’t solve them. We can just show up in that present moment to hopefully take away from some of the potential harms and the pain of living through those things.”

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