Stepping Stones shelter is true to its name - Part 2 of 3

Neighbours living near Stepping Stones say the shelter has brought ongoing noise, drug activity and disruption to the area. In a letter to provincial officials, they called for the overdose prevention site to be removed, the shelter’s operations to be reviewed and the suitability of the site to be reassessed. Residents had been meeting with Nelson CARES for two years to discuss concerns including shelter rules, perimeter monitoring and safety. In 2025, they ended those meetings, saying they were frustrated by what they saw as broken commitments and a lack of meaningful change. Stepping Stones on Vernon Street is Nelson’s only emergency shelter. Their website states that the shelter is staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week to support people and make referrals to access social services, find stable housing and employment. Joanne Motta, housing director with Nelson CARES, gave me a tour of the premises. “This is a really well run operation. It’s very accessible, it’s right downtown, it’s close to services. I think it’s a really important service for people who are oftentimes at the worst moment of their lives. I would love for people to see what that looks like once they kind of cross the barrier of the threshold. And you know, we’re able to provide food, a bed, and some resources to hopefully get them back on track.” There are lots of rules and protocols in place for organization and safety. There are designated spaces for different activities — some for meeting with social workers and completing applications for housing, employment and essential documents. Others are for spending quiet time, watching TV or eating. The fenced backyard contains three areas for shelter guests. One is for talking quietly and drinking coffee. Another is a smoking area for cigarettes and cannabis. The third is an overdose prevention site where shelter guests can use illicit substances. The risk of overdose can increase when people use drugs in unfamiliar spaces — a phenomenon known as situational tolerance. The OPS area is monitored by a camera and is easily accessible to emergency services by way of a door in the fence. Motta says staff have been intentional about keeping the OPS area as strictly functional. That is, it is clearly not intended as an area for hanging out for long periods of time. It contains two basic fold out chairs and some overdose prevention supplies. The OPS in Stepping Stones is a simple setup. Dr Kora DeBeck, a research scientist for the BC Centre on Substance Use, explains how this simple approach is effective. “There’s sort of two main branches of supervised consumption sites, so there are federally sanctioned sites, so a place like Insite (Vancouver) and there’s nurses and the regulatory processes are really high barrier, so they’re quite medicalized facilities. And then there’s overdose prevention sites, which really came online during the pandemic, which are much more community driven, much more accessible. And (OPS sites) have a huge amount of benefits in terms of many of the sanctioned sites can’t accommodate smoking, which is what most people or how most people are using fentanyl. So the overdose prevention sites are much more tailored to what the reality is for the folks who need them.” Skye Spears is currently the day-to-day coordinator at Stepping Stones. His job includes meeting the immediate needs of guests. He also provides harm reduction supplies and other resources as needed or requested. Spears explains why Nelson CARES created the OPS. He says that when people were not allowed to use drugs in the shelter, they would end up using close to the shelter after leaving. “In the past, we used to just ask folks to not use on-site, and so we found a couple different things were happening. One they would either sneakily use inside, like in the washrooms, in their rooms, and that would create both unsafeness for themselves and for others. Or they would use in community – and so often in front of the building or on the block, and so just mainly for safety purposes, but then also to create a positive relationship with the neighbourhood.” Dr DeBeck says studies in Vancouver show less visible drug use in areas with supervised consumption or overdose prevention sites. “There’s been peer reviewed, scientific studies documenting that street disorder in the direct vicinity of the facility, so this would be things like discarded needles and syringes and drug paraphernalia and those types of things, went down when the site opened, by a significant amount.” She also speaks to the perception that the OPS site increases neighbourhood disruption. “I think there’s a perception that supervised consumption facilities cause street disorder and attract homelessness in a sense. But y’know, those are the things that were already in the community…They’re a place where people are using outside of the public and not on the street.”

Secondary benefits of the OPS

Stepping Stones exists to provide basic necessities. The OPS helps prevent overdose. Staff also refer people to outside resources. “We have supported quite a lot of people to go to treatment.” Motta says Stepping Stones has referred many people to treatment, but getting people into treatment and keeping them there can be challenging. Some people make it to detox or travel to another city for treatment, she says, but may lose their treatment bed or take a break from services before returning to the community. Dr DeBeck explains some secondary benefits of connecting with an organization like Stepping Stones. “And the kinds of connections that people make…even if it’s a peer worker who can then maybe connect them with some counseling or other kinds of services in community, those can be very important connections and opportunities for people to improve their health and their longer term trajectory. So there’s certainly lots of other kinds of benefits that happen, not just for the individuals who use them, but for the surrounding communities and the public.” She also explains why OPS sites make drug use safer in general. “They’re more likely, for instance, if they’re injecting to use clean equipment. They also can do things like go slow instead of feeling like they’re in a high pressured environment out in public, and they just use all their drugs at once, which can be quite risky…So there’s lots of sort of secondary benefits, not just to reversing an overdose.” Lack of proper housing, she says, is central to the issue of unsafe drug use. “What we know is underlying that is a lack of services, a lack of alternative places for people to go. Insufficient housing, insufficient support… We’ve done many studies in Vancouver that repeatedly show that people who are homeless and have a lack of access to a private space are the ones who spend the most amount of time on the street and who use drugs in public. And then we’ve also found when we’ve asked them ‘would you be willing to relocate if you had more access to private space’? The vast majority of them say they would. So, what this really underscores for me is that, you know, people are using drugs in public, they’re out in public because they don’t have other options. Oftentimes even if someone is housed, they’re not able to have guests over or the size of their accommodation is very small, so they can’t be around other people, which from a public health perspective when someone’s using drugs we say, ‘don’t use alone use with other people’. So essentially, if you’re following public health advice, you’re going to be out where other people are. So, if we’re not creating spaces for people to go, they’re going to be on the street.”

Emergency housing

Motta says Stepping Stones were able to secure housing for 32 people who accessed emergency shelter services during the last fiscal year. That said, the process comes with challenges. “Emergency housing has unfortunately become sometimes long-term housing, so people are here for 30 days or more…We are very housing-focused and trying to align people as quickly and limit the time that they spend here as much as possible. And hopefully find the supports so that if they do find tenancy/vacancy that they can be matched with it quickly and maintain the tenancy success.”

Neighbourhood concerns / dry shelter

The Neighbourhood Network want the site either removed or changed: “Well, the one on Vernon Street, I think it should be sold just like we did the Interior Health building, and if not, then we’ve requested to turn it back to a dry shelter, which is what it was in the original state.” “We would love to have a dry site. Right now the funding structure is low barrier, which means that we take people where they’re at, and accept people in a non-judgmental, trauma-informed, and person-centered way. If we were to move to a dry site, that would exclude a whole lot of people…There, in my mind, will always be a place for emergency housing…Things happen. Emergencies happen, fires happen, family breakdown happens.” Next week, we’ll look at another part of the debate: the challenges of accessing addiction treatment, what’s available locally, and what the evidence tells us about what works. DeBeck says the evidence on overdose prevention sites is extensive. “Decades of research, hundreds of studies, almost an embarrassing amount of studies that have been done around these facilities. I say that because when we think of other public health interventions, once we see strong signals that they’re effective and they work, we don’t study them in the same way, but because it’s been so controversial these have been very rigorously studied, and time and time again they’re shown to have benefit. Not just for the individuals who use them, but also for surrounding communities.”