As a City Council, ensuring that adequate services are available to address addiction and homelessness in our community is a priority we feel strongly about. However, despite our best efforts and continuous advocacy work with provincial agencies that hold the mandate for this work, it can sometimes feel like little progress is being made. While this frustrates us, it also motivates us to seek out new ways to examine these problems in the hope that new, effective approaches can be found.
Today, the City of Abbotsford is presenting a series of videos highlighting the systemic challenges involved for people who need to access substance use services — particularly for individuals experiencing homelessness — told through the lived experiences of service providers.
The videos are part of the Abbotsford Journey Mapping Project, a research initiative led by the City in partnership with UBC’s Centre for Advancing Health Outcomes and partially funded by a SparcBC Homelessness Community Action Grant. It documents the experiences of frontline workers and identifies barriers that prevent people experiencing homelessness in Abbotsford from getting the supports and treatment they need.
The research was conducted from 2023 to 2024 and included interviews and focus groups with 49 participants across 25 agencies. Last September a delegation from the Centre for Advancing Health Outcomes presented the findings of the report to Council. Click here to read the full report, and here to read the Summary of Findings.
The research uncovered persistent, compounding barriers like inaccessible treatment, disconnected services and broken trust. The final report identified five themes: disproportionate supply and demand, the detriment of delays, drug toxicity, the absence of stabilization, and the critical role of human relationships.
The video series brings the report to life by having outreach workers, first responders, and community leaders share their stories, struggles and insights on-camera and in their own words. There are also interviews with Abbotsford Fire Rescue Service Chief Peterson, Abbotsford Police Department Chief Watson and Mayor Siemens.
The videos cover substance use and service gaps; the “vortex effect” that sees clients caught in a cycle of referrals, delays and inaccessible care; the importance of stability and housing; the “bottleneck” of resource scarcity that prevents clients from accessing timely services; and the impact of a fractured substance use system on the wider community. View the videos, plus a full-length 19-minute documentary, at abbotsford.ca/journeymapping.
Addiction and homelessness are complex issues that require the cooperation and coordination of multiple agencies at multiple levels. Our hope is that by conducting Abbotsford-specific research through the Journey Mapping Project the City and our partners can better understand and approach these challenges at the municipal level, while using concrete local data to advocate for meaningful change in our discussions with senior levels of government.
Abbotsford City Council