Active Voice

CREAM OF THE REHAB CROP MAKE STATS LOOK GOOD

The mesh on the social safety net in the Central Okanagan just got a little
tighter this week with the introduction of the Out of the Cold program.

Every night now, just before 10 p.m., a crowd of homeless people gather
outside the Kelowna Gospel Mission, most of them carrying all their worldly
possessions on their backs.

When the Out of the Cold vans pull up to the curb for its nightly pick-up,
they rush to find a place, not wanting to miss the bus.

They're a mixed bunch young and old, men and women, of varying races and
religions.

For whatever reason, they are living on the street. And for completely
different reasons, they are not able to take full advantage of what little
resources exist for the down and out. What they have in common is they are
the one's that have fallen through the mesh on the safety net.

And their presence on Kelowna's Leon Avenue every night is indicative of a
phenomena in the social service world known as creaming.

That's where the agencies entrusted with dealing with society's castoffs
take the cream of the crop-those clients who are the easiest to handle and
most likely to be successfully dealt with.

It doesn't mean the people with the worst drug and alcohol addictions or
the most severe mental illnesses or even the clients who speak their minds.

A classic example though by no means the only one, is Crossroads Treatment
Centre up in Rutland.

The government-funded centre purports to treat drug and alcohol addiction
with an intensive 28-day residential treatment program.

Clients are mainly refereed there by addictions counselors with the
government or by their own counselors in the detox centre they run next
door. Addicts must have at least some clean time before entering and any
relapse is punished by ejection from the program.

This is creaming at its finest. The clean time requirement already takes
out the majority of addicts who can't put two days clean time in, never
mind two weeks.

And when those that do qualify slip up-essentially displaying symptoms of
their addiction-they are thrown out.

This leaves behind the compliant, easy-to-deal with addict who has already
managed some clean time on his or her own.

Makes it easy to claim a high success rate when you've already denied
access to the people with the most severe problems.

And it leaves the people that are running Out of the Cold-essentially a
couple of local churches and a former street dweller with a vision-to clean
up what's left behind.