The recent $50,000 funding request made to city council by St. Albert's 2SLGBTQ+ youth support and advocacy group Outloud will likely go unfulfilled, councillors say, which has left the organization's director feeling very disappointed.
Outloud's funding request was made in hopes of hiring an additional full-time support worker and shifting a current part-time staff member to full-time. Council heard last month that the organization regularly experiences a youth-to-staff ratio of 20-1 at the weekly drop-ins, and has seen a spike in youth suicide attempts over the past year, to the point of labelling it a crisis.
Outloud's executive director, Terry Soetaert, says he's not sure what the organization is going to do without the help.
“I'm very disappointed,” he said. “We're in a dire situation — I don't know what's going to happen.”
St. Albert's kids are starting to slip through the cracks, Bekah Marcellus, one of Outloud's two full-time support workers, told council on April 18. Marcellus also explained that the organization noted over a dozen suicide attempts in the local community in just the past year.
Five city councillors who spoke with the Gazette on May 4 said they have no plans to bring a motion forward to provide funding.
“While I sympathize with their challenges, I have no plans to bring this forward,” said Coun. Ken MacKay.
Coun. Wes Brodhead and Coun. Natalie Joly both said that while they didn't plan to fund the request, they hope council will be able to increase the annual grant funding many local non-profits receive from the city each year, including Outloud.
“Hopefully our funding pot expands such that expanded requests can be considered,” Brodhead said.
“I'd love to see more funding available through our grant process, and I'm hopeful that will happen in the next budget discussion,” said Joly.
Coun. Shelley Biermanski said she thought Outloud's request wasn't feasible due to the request being outside the city's usual grant funding process.
“This would have to go through the proper channels when we dedicate all of the non-profit groups funding,” she said.
Likewise, Coun. Mike Killick said he thought that if council was to provide a non-profit with funding outside the parameters of annual grants, it could create a “snowball effect.”
“The challenge I think, looking at the big picture, is that if we were to fund $50,000 for Outloud then we open up (a sequence of) funding requests from all other charities,” he said. “If we did it for one then we'd have to look at everybody else's, then it becomes a much larger challenge for council to address.”
“While we understand that the need is growing, the need is growing everywhere.”
Soetaert said he hopes the situation doesn't become too dire with the city's youth.
“I hope it doesn't get to that point where somebody actually does commit suicide and then we're backpedaling, us in the city and the mental health system, and looking at something foolish like 'why did this happen?' when we know why it's happening and we know that it's happening right now.”
Soetaert said Outloud will continue to work with the staff and resources they have and look for other sources of funding, although they've been turned down from multiple other grants already.
Council looks ahead
Killick said Outloud's request, as well as the current suicide attempt crisis identified in the community, struck a chord with council, but in order to be fair to all non-profits the best way council could help would be to increase the amount of grant funding available each year.
Local non-profit and community service organizations receive city funding to put towards operating costs through Family and Community Support Services (FCSS) program funding, which is funded primarily through the provincial government; and the Outside Agency Grant, which is municipally funded.
As part of the 2023 budget, the provincial government boosted the FCSS budget province-wide by $5 million, bringing it to total of $105 million.
During the city's 2023 budget deliberations in December, council passed a motion that will allow council to update how the Outside Agency Grant is funded, with the intention of increasing the funding pot.
Currently the funding pot is generated through an annual $9 per-capita levy, however council will be considering changes the funding formula to account for things like inflation, and automatic adjustments as St. Albert's population increases each year. A date has not been determined for council to debate the funding formula, however it will occur prior to the 2024 budget being finalized in the fall.
“Hopefully long-term we'll have a better solution but it's very challenging to deal with one-off requests without thinking of all of the other groups that are very needy as well in the city,” Killick said.
Mayor Cathy Heron was unavailable for an interview, however an email to the Gazette from the mayor's office states that Heron had no “new information” to provide, and the Gazette's question about whether or not Heron planned to bring a motion forward went unanswered.
