Refuge named after Tina Fontaine gets nearly $1M in funding to help Winnipeg youth
Most of the money will be used for health-care services at Tina's Safe Haven
A decade after Tina Fontaine's death, her life and legacy are being remembered by those looking to support at-risk youth, hoping to prevent the death and disappearance of Indigenous women.
Tina's Safe Haven, a drop-in-centre for at-risk youth in Winnipeg, is receiving $986,000 in provincial and federal funding to support ongoing operating costs and bolster existing programming. The centre, operating in Selkirk Avenue, will now offer on-site public health services for at-risk youth.
Shanlee Scott, executive director of Ndinawemaaganag Endaawaad, which runs the centre, said most of the money will go toward health care and that a partnership with Aboriginal Health and Wellness will provide care to young people at Tina's Safe Haven. It will include a doctor, nurse and a mental wellness therapist, she said.
"[It's] immeasurable really," Scott said Friday, when the funding was announced.
"I think that for far too long there's been huge gaps in services for our young people," she said, adding that it's often difficult for people to trust community resources like hospitals.
"To have those resources come to them, meet them where they're at, that can be really life changing for people," Scott said.
WATCH | Remembering Tina Fontaine
The centre was renamed in honour of Tina Fontaine in 2017. Since then, it has been operating around the clock, and over the years it's rebuffed programming to offer counselling, housing, employment services, as well as other resources for those between 13 and 24 years old.
Tina Fontaine was 15 when she went missing. Nine days after her disappearance, her lifeless body — weighed down by rocks and wrapped in a duvet cover — was pulled from Winnipeg's Red River near the Alexander Docks on Aug. 17, 2014.
Police arrested Raymond Cormier and charged him with her murder, but he was acquitted in February 2018, and no one has ever been convicted in her death.
Cormier died in Ottawa in early April, police in the nation's capital said at the time.
National outcry
Tina, who was from Sagkeeng First Nation, was in the care of Child and Family Services when she died. She began to struggle after her father was murdered in 2011, and soon fell into a world of addiction, homelessness and sexual exploitation after she went to Winnipeg to reconnect with her mother.
The night before she was last reported missing, she was dropped off with a contracted care worker at a downtown hotel, but she later walked away.
Tina's death led to national outcry and her death also helped galvanize the federal government into launching the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. The inquiry's final report was published in 2019, listing 231 calls for justice in areas including education, health and justice.
"Tina Fontaine's murder, her little life, has literally led to saving countless Indigenous, women girls and two spirited lives," Families Minister Nahanni Fontaine said at Friday's announcement.
Amber Laplante, the creator of a database with information of murdered and missing Indigenous women, was at the announcement and said Tina Fontaine's story has "impacted everybody."
Laplante said she hopes the funding will give young women, girls and two-spirited people some "community love that's so desperately needed" and prevent others from going missing.
"I grew up in care, I also experienced going missing," said Laplante. "Back then there wasn't a lot of support for youth to be able to access services and there wasn't a lot of trust or safety."
In a news release Friday, the province said $586,000 — which includes $400,000 in new money from this year's budget — will support ongoing operating costs and programming.
Meanwhile, an additional $400,000 will be allocated to the centre by the federal government through its National Action Plan to End Gender Based Violence. It will provide weekly public nursing services and support from a cultural worker and mental wellness therapist at Tina's Safe Heaven.
With files from Gavin Axelrod and Santiago Arias Orozco