Sudbury Action Centre for Youth's closure leaves big gap in services, says executive director

It will be difficult to fill the gap left by the closure of the Sudbury Action Centre for Youth (SACY), says the organization's last executive director.

SACY closed its doors permanently on March 18 due to insolvency and the inability to pay staff any longer.

The organization provided different harm reduction and housing services to vulnerable people in the community, including a low-barrier youth shelter and peer support for trans youth.

Terry Burden was SACY's interim executive director.

Years before she worked there, Burden said SACY helped her during a difficult time in her life.

"I was a teen parent and was going through a breakup," she said. "One of the things that I did was connect myself with a parenting program."

That program connected her with other young parents. 

"And during [my] intake they realized that my housing was unstable enough that I would very rapidly be qualifying for homelessness," Burden said.

Staff at SACY connected her to their housing services and found her a safe place to live. That helped her get back on her feet.

"All of a sudden all that stress went away because I had the housing I needed," she said.

When she was 34, Burden started working at SACY, and helped other people turn their lives around.

She said some of her favourite memories are of actions that may appear small to most people, but had a big impact on people in crisis.

"A long-term client of mine had not ever been able to get any of his family Christmas presents because he would always accidentally spend the money," she said.

She went Christmas shopping with that client and helped him deliver the presents to his family.

"Up until this year he didn't have that guilt anymore. That was gone," Burden said. 

"Now he potentially doesn't have anyone to do that next year."

It took her five years to track down another client's birth certificate.

"And when that birth certificate came in, we realized they didn't actually know what their legal name was because they've been adopted so many times early on," Burden said.

Every single person that's walked through those doors has just practically killed themselves with the effort it takes to reach people who others consider unreachable.- Terry Burden

While other organizations in Sudbury support vulnerable people, Burden said SACY was known for accepting the people everyone else rejected.

Many of the people who stayed at its shelter, for example, were kicked out of other shelters due to their behaviour.

Burden said it will probably take a new organization to fill the gap left by SACY's closure.

"I don't think there are any other agencies in the city that are going to be able to reach people the way my team has reached in the past," she said.

"Every single person that's walked through those doors has just practically killed themselves with the effort it takes to reach people who others consider unreachable."

Filling the gap

Since SACY announced its insolvency, the city has held meetings with like-minded organizations to fill those gaps.

On Monday, the city said the New Hope Outreach group would run an overnight warming centre for up to 10 young people, between the ages of 16 and 25, at the Samaritan Centre in downtown Sudbury.

"Right now we've agreed with them to have this continue until April 30, which allows the rest of us some time to really look at other possibilities for this type of continued service," said Gail Spencer, the city's manager of housing stability and homelessness.

Spencer said the warming centre at the Samaritan Centre won't fully replace what SACY had in place because it doesn't have any beds.

"But there are chairs that people could kind of, you know, lay back in and have a little snooze," she said. "It's at least a safe, warm place."

The city provided SACY $300,000 annually to run its shelter and another $96,000 per year for a needle pickup program, where people would collect and safely dispose of discarded needles around the city.

Spencer said no decisions have been made yet on how that money will be allocated, now that SACY no longer exists.

"We'll be working with our purchasing bylaws to determine how that's going to work out."