Montreal welcomes new transitional housing project for Indigenous community

La Maison Annagiarvik, a new transitional housing project for Montreal’s Indigenous community, will begin accepting residents on July 1. 

The Sainte-Famille Street locale will provide a home to 14 people who are exiting detox and looking to get back on their feet. The service will be operational for up to five years — the duration of the building lease.  

“Ideally we’re looking to expand that to bring it longer,” says Matthew Biddle, housing manager of the residence.

“What we found with our experience in our other housing programs and our shelter is it’s really hard to address your addictions when living on the street.

“Once they’ve started the process of addressing their addictions and going to therapy and doing all that really hard work internally, they know that they have a safe place to come to afterwards.”

Spearheaded by the non-profit Projets Autochtones du Québec (PAQ), residents will have individual rooms complemented by an array of common spaces.

“A big emphasis for us is to be able to have space for the community to get together,” Biddle told CityNews.

“We’ll have intervention staff. We have case workers on site, but a lot of the healing and a lot of the support actually comes from the community itself.”

In addition to an on-site case worker available 35 hours per week, residents will also have access to culturally adapted resources.

“We have elders in the community that we commonly work with at our other sites as well that we’ll be bringing here. We hope to have a whole bunch of other therapy groups and AA meetings hosted here at the house, in addition to other cultural activities that sort of bring people back to their roots and back to the cultural sense of their community where they come from,” said Biddle.

“Some have never known that aspect of their lives. Some have lost along the way. So giving them the opportunity to reconnect with that is a big part of the healing journey for a lot of them.”

The housing manager says for those interested in joining La Maison Annagiarvik, “it’s just a matter of reaching out to myself or to my coordinator.”

“There is a bit of bureaucracy involved, filling out forms and doing your taxes and getting into a treatment centre. But with intervention staff, we’re there to sort of support them along the way.”

To contact La Maison Annagiarvik, you can email Matthew.Biddle@paqc.org or the residence coordinator at thomas.addison@paqc.org