On a sweltering day in late June, two dozen people filed into a small room at the back of the Anti-Hunger Coalition Building in downtown Timmins to learn about a novel solution to the city’s growing opioid and homelessness crises.
Over the next two hours, Renée Yu and Laura Meng — two Vancouverites with backgrounds in the tech sector — walked the group through a new app they were piloting in the community.
The premise of the app, called Hummingbird, is simple: residents, business owners, and other community members who encounter a person in crisis can put in a request for assistance from a volunteer outreach worker.
These outreach workers are from two local grassroots organizations: DIY Community Health and the Mushkegowuk Fire Keeper Patrol, both of which conduct daily patrols of the city and proactive check-ins with vulnerable members of the community.
The assistance they provide can take the form of conflict resolution between the person and local business owners, residents, or law enforcement — but more often involves simply offering a bottle of water, lending an ear, and trying to understand what they need in the moment.
“We’ve been asking folks why they choose certain spaces to do what is seen as loitering, for example,” says Michelle Couture, one of the app’s 12 outreach workers. “It’s usually because they feel safe: either it’s shaded from the sun or it’s an open area where they are not confined.”
Since the launch of Hummingbird last month, outreach workers have supported 28 at-risk individuals and cleaned up approximately 300 needles through requests received via the app.
Now, they are moving on to the next phase of their pilot, which involves launching on official app stores, expanding their team of outreach workers, and trying to secure funding to expand the scope of their work to other municipalities across the country facing similar challenges.
From Vancouver to Timmins
In 2021, Meng and Yu noticed the need for community-based support for people living on the streets in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
“It was during COVID when we started to really see the impact of the pandemic on the community around us: stores closing down, buildings becoming vacant downtown,” says Meng. “The public was starting to get angrier and angrier, and there were safety concerns and conflicts stemming from rising social issues at the time — namely, homelessness and substance use. That really drove us to understand why this is happening and if there was something we could do to help.”
The following January, they began to research interventions. They conducted 40 interviews, including with people with lived experiences of homelessness and opioid use, professionals in the justice system, managers and staff from community-based organizations, business owners, and scholars.
In August 2023, they began to design Hummingbird.
Renée Yu and Laura Meng are the co-founders of Hummingbird. (Kunal Chaudhary)
When it came time to pilot it, however, Vancouver proved to be a challenging place to launch. They would need a smaller city, with a stronger sense of community.
“Strategically, it just made sense for us to test in a smaller city, on a smaller scale,” says Yu. “In Vancouver, where we live, we barely talk to our neighbours. But in Timmins, it feels like everyone knows each other.”
Through a circuitous process of word-of-mouth referrals, they found their way to Jason Sereda, a professor at Northern College and founder of DIY Community Health in Timmins.
“The universe just aligned that we met each other at the right time,” says Sereda. “Timmins has a lot going on that allowed us to really dissect the issues and come up with an innovative way to try to address them.”
They settled on the first week of July to launch their pilot.
At the Anti-Hunger Coalition building in late June, Meng and Yu helped a selection of community members to get the app on their phones and walked them through the research behind its development.
The interest in the room was palpable, as people jumped in with questions and comments for the pair.
“This is such important work,” said one woman. “I’ve lived here for 30 years, and I’ve never seen things this bad.”
Building relationships
Their timing, it turned out, could not have been more critical. The week of their launch, Timmins lost its only safe-consumption site for opioids. Many feared this would mean more people out on the street and using in isolated corners of the community — and, ultimately, more deaths.
These concerns materialized almost immediately.
“We’re just seeing more risky substance use,” Sereda says. “People hanging out in alleyways, people sharing needles again, people sharing pipes, people not having access to even just a place to cool off on a really hot day. All those things that the Safe Health Site was addressing are now popping up again throughout our downtown core.”
Jason Sereda is a professor at Northern College and a founder of DIY Community Health in Timmins. (Kunal Chaudhary)
Last week, the community had its first opioid-related death since the closure of the site.
In these circumstances, DIY Community Health is busy training new outreach workers to patrol the city and make connections with people living on the streets. This training focuses on basic health and safety, de-escalation, first aid, and building trust.
“We make sure any new volunteer is matched with someone more experienced who has been doing it for a while,” Sereda says. “That way, they can learn on the job,”
Those working with Hummingbird, Meng says, “transfer these skills of de-escalation and building trust to build relationship with residents and business owners as well.”
The response from the community has been overwhelmingly positive. But, the team notes, there is always more to be done.
“The next big step is to turn all the outcomes we’re seeing right now to refocus the community on a more positive narrative about how we can all work together to solve these issues, instead of being angry all the time and blaming each other for them,” says Sereda.
“It’s been a difficult time with the closure of the Safe Health Site, but I also know that, if our teams hadn’t been out there this past month, it would have been considerably worse.”
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