The Prince George group Together We Stand has won the Affordable Housing Champion Award from the BC Non-profit Housing Association.
The group was started by Gerry Healy on Facebook in 2019 and works to advocate for the unhoused population in the city and has since grown to 1,600 members.
Together We Stand members Amelia Merrick and Mary Schultz were in attendance at the association's conference in Vancouver to accept the award.
The conference brings together housing providers from across the province to talk about relevant issues and look at housing solutions.
Established in 2016, the Affordable Housing Champion Award recognizes an individual or organization that has made a transformative contribution to affordable housing.
“Together We Stand won the Affordable Housing Champion Award this year, which was so unexpected, so special,” said Merrick. “I think that it was because of our collective action to make change in the city with the community coming together to speak up against injustice.”
Members of Together We Stand were involved in the court cases between the City of Prince George and the encampment on Lower Patricia Blvd known as Moccasin Flats.
The court ultimately ruled that there is not enough housing or shelter space accessible to all homeless people available in Prince George and that the encampment was permitted to stay until the city could prove otherwise.
“There have been 23 court cases against homelessness in the last 20 years and only in three of those court cases did the homeless proponents win and two of those three were us in Prince George,” said Merrick, citing a recent UBC Allard School of Law report.
She said the reason the unhoused in Prince George won the case was because they not only had lawyers like Darlene Kavka and Melanie Begalka but a team of community advocates and researchers who helped to bridge the gap between unhoused persons and professionals.
“It was all of us working together in order to get the evidence that was needed in court.”
Shultz has been a member of Together We Stand since it started in 2019 and says this award is an acknowledgement that the advocacy and outreach they’ve been doing is all worth it and important.
“We're making it apparent to the rest of the world, and to the rest of Canada about the housing crisis and they're really happy that our voice has started a big movement, and it opened the doors for other people to speak,” said Shultz.
“I want to see it become the biggest movement there is and I want it to be when people need help, or needed connection to something, our group is going to be the one that they look for. We’ll be the bridge for everything we can.”
Merrick noted that Together We Stand doesn’t have a leadership team or funding or organizational structure.
“We're just a bunch of people who work together,” she said. “We're going to keep moving forward because we see human rights, and we see humans at the centre of it.”
