Homeless advocate puts out call for help as temperatures drop
By Lethbridge Herald on November 19, 2021.
Alvin Mills, right, founder of the Kii maa pii pii tsin (Kindness to Others) organization, hands out sandwiches Thursday afternoon downtown. With the winter months set in, Mills is looking for coats, toques and mittens to help the city’s vulnerable. Herald photo by Dale WoodardDale Woodard – Lethbridge Herald
With the winter months settling in and the temperature dropping, an initiative is underway to get warm items of clothing to the cities vulnerable.
Alvin Mills, founder of the Kii maa pii pii tsin (Kindness to Others) organization, is putting out the call for winter clothes for the homeless.
And with reports of a sleeping agent being mixed in with opioids, making the drugs that much stronger, he says the need for help has become even more dire.
“Right now, I would like to make a call out for jackets, gloves and toques for the ones struggling in the City, given that they’re struggling with addiction and now the drugs are getting stronger,” said Mils. “So I see them sleeping in all parts of the city. The Watch and the security guards have been doing a good job at locating these individuals who have succumbed to the effects of the drugs.”
Which heightens the need for clothing as the winter months advance.
“Anything that will help with the oncoming winter that they could wear because once you start feeling the effects of what they’re doing because sometimes they’ll nod off anywhere,” said Mills. “So we’re encouraging them to not be alone and to be together.”
Mills said he is trying to start a patrol between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. to scour the city for overdoses.
“I did it solo, but I want to talk to The Watch and the City about that because we do need somebody to watch out for them. Given the circumstances of the drugs getting a lot stronger,” said Mills, adding he heard about the sleeping agent being added about three months ago.
Meanwhile, Mills said the homeless situation is the worst it’s been.
“We’re getting a large influx of the Indigenous coming in from the reserve and into the city and they’re getting younger,” he said. “Something has to be done, because as the weather gets colder the situation is going to get a lot more dire than how it is right now.”
Those interested in donating winter clothing can contact Mills at (403) 331-3768.
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Oh those poor druggies! Lets find more clothing for them so they can discard them literally EVERYWHERE after they use them once. The city has become a dumping ground for their untidiness. Lethbridge use to be called a clean little city!
Lets send this vermin back to where it came from and reclaim our once titled “Clean little city.” If that means back to the reserve! Then so-be-it! This Lethbridge sh.t-sh.w has to have a conclusion.
Oh no Johnny what have you just done! You are going to stir-up the Liberal bleeding-heart hornets-nest that resides within this forum! OH WELL!
I cannot tell you how many coats, jackets, pants, socks, gloves, toques, etc I have seen on the ground, discarded for no reason, but not knowing if there were bedbugs or something on them I didn’t want to pick them up to wash them and give them back to the organizations that hand them out.
When you get something for free there is no respect to where it came from, what it costs or just how lucky these people are that someone would think of them enough to give clothes to them.
We have destroyed the concept of work for a living and we now give addicts the ideal environment to continue in their addictive behaviours. They get 2-3 meals per day at the soup kitchen, there are several organizations running around the streets day and night handing out sandwiches, other food and drinks and clothing them. That means all their money they get from AB social services/AISH, treaty moneys, and yes they did get their hands on some of the CERB funds, goes to support their addiction.
Some of the same organizations supply them with needles, tourniquets, little tin caps to cook their drugs in for injecting, meth pipes for inhalation drugs and other drug paraphernalia to do their drugs, encouraging them to continue in their behaviours!
Veterans, senior citizens could only dream they could get all the clothes they want and food for free and diabetics have to pay for their needles and supplies!
Lethbridge and it’s citizens spends tens of millions annually in total for donations, funding organizations, police/fire/EMS responses, healthcare, sheltering/housing because of the failed ‘harm reduction’ concept that has never, ever been able to put all 4 pillars in place! Thousands have died just in BC over 18 years of this failed concept!
Firm policing, drug courts, effective treatment programs that last over 1 year are the cheapest way and most effective way to take back our city and end this high cost and loss of life!
A few years ago Cindy Vos releasing a report that stated addictions costs per addict were around $1 million per year, while BC studies saw costs per addict that were always in the system as high as $4.5 million per year!
With all of the cutbacks coming in the next 3-5 years federally, provincially and municipally, where do you want your tax dollars going?
It is time we took back our city and put an end to this gong-show that the previous government allowed to spawn! We do have a choice what happens in our city on our streets!!!
Here is a great read
https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/why-we-must-arrest-drug-addicts?r=nlphz&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=copy
So, they should go use the homeless washing machines and dryers?
See the same people druggies or whatever the past year camped in the galt gardens with their makeshift tents most were their l; last year same people, kicked off the reserves and dumped on the City. We wonder why the so-called Sook-o Toki friendship center on 2ave, paid for by our tax payer dollars becomes friendly towards their own people. Get them the hell out of the cold, The blood band supposedly reported in the Herald article has over $500 million bank account give out some dollars and pay for your people you kicked off the reserve. We do not build shelters Streets Alive will take care of them.