Oasis Program

It has been an active year for the Oasis Program, as the services continued to navigate the provision of care during the health crisis of COVID-19 amidst the community’s growing opioid toxicity. Adding to this, in last August, the program underwent construction as well as a shift in leadership. The Program’s long-time Director, Rob Boyd, left the Centre in October to pursue the Executive Director role at Inner City Health, and a new Director, Wendy Stewart, started with us in late February. Despite these obstacles, our amazing staff continued to ‘dig deep’ and to show up in meaningful ways for the complex people with whom we work, continuing to grow the number of contacts and connections, including a recent partnership with Wabano –for an Indigenous group on Fridays in our Drop-In space.

As the rest of us talk about recovering from the pandemic and look forward to going back to the ‘way things were’, it became clear from the community – neighbours, business owners and local service providers – that there is growing unrest with the impacts on the neighbourhood in relation to the lack of affordable housing to those who live in poverty, and/or those who rely on the unregulated drug supply to ease their every day pain as they continue to live outside mainstream society. In response, the Centre partnered with the City of Ottawa to host a series of community consultations between February and April 2023. The intent was to encourage and create collaborative new ways to keep our community safe and healthy for everyone and, moving forward, to determine what our specific role will be in this.

Over the last two years, we have seen that our world can change dramatically to help reduce harm to society. The team at Oasis has come out of this stronger and focused from the lessons learned from the pandemic, as we are actively working to find solutions to mitigate the effects of those who cannot secure housing, and who are affected by the toxic drug supply.