Image: The Wheelhouse of Waterloo Village, Facebook.
The Wheelhouse, a co-working space and business centre in the Waterloo Village neighbourhood in uptown Saint John will soon become affordable housing for youth in need.
The building at 105 Prince Edward Street has been purchased to support the participants in the UYES [Urban Youth Employment/Education Service] program.
The UYES initiative is a collaboration between five Saint John non-profits: The Learning Exchange; Community Loan Fund; Outflow Ministries; Human Development Council; and the Teen Resource Centre (TRC). The program aims to remove barriers for youth in the Saint John community and helping them move towards their employment and education goals.
In the program, the TRC provides individualized case plans and case management support to the participants. The Saint John Learning exchange provides educational programming, re-employment training and skill development opportunities. Basic carpentry skills training opportunities are also available to participants at the Outflow Carpentry Training Centre.
The Wheelhouse’s previous owners Owen Green and Haley Adams, owners of Adams Green Accounting, purchased the building back in 2018 and turned it into a co-working space for both businesses and non-profits, and hosted a variety of workshops and events. Adams Green Accounting also ran their business from there.
But at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, people started working from home.
“The pandemic had us questioning what the future of the Wheelhouse would be,” said Green. “Before we had a chance to seriously consider any other alternatives this opportunity was presented to us and we couldn’t imagine a better outcome.”
Adams Green accounting works with lots of community non-profits and through a casual conversation with a client, they were asked whether or not they’d consider turning the building into affordable housing. They were then connected with Housing Alternatives Inc., a partner of the TRC, and it went from there.
Green says it was the perfect outcome.
“We think it’s amazing,” said Green. “The Wheelhouse never became what we’d envisioned, but this is better. Organizations like these three are the ones most likely to positively impact our region’s housing crisis.”
The Wheelhouse will house seven UYES participants between the ages of 16 to 19, who will live on the upper floors of the building. Each youth will have their own room, with shared common spaces. The building’s bottom floor will be rented out to another community organization.
Callie Mackenzie, project manager with the Human Development Council, says the Wheelhouse is the perfect location because it places youth right in the centre of all the services they can access for support. The Social Enterprise Hub, where the Saint John Learn Exchange is based, is just down the Street, while the TRC is just around the corner on Richmond Street.
“There’s a lot going on in terms of not-for-profit agencies and service delivery in Waterloo Village and this is right in between,” said MacKenzie “So just the proximity and knowing that working with youth, they would need monitoring and case management. To be able to have them right there in the neighbourhood really fit well.”
Amelia Bernard, a case manager for the UYES program, says the Wheelhouse will fill a gap in housing supports for youth 16 to 19. It will provide independent housing for youth in that age range, something that’s not currently available in the city.
“At the TRC and at the Learning Exchange and in the UYES program, we really strive to listen to the youth’s voice and to empower them to help us to develop our programs and to tell us what they need,” says Bernard.
“In doing that, we heard them say, ‘there’s nothing out there right now that works for me. I don’t feel like I have a place to go.’ From there, we just tried to develop that place for them to go.”
The upper floors are currently undergoing some minor renovations that are expected to be completed by June 1. The participants are expected to move in shortly after that. Mackenzie says they’d love to see The Wheelhouse model replicated, whether it be by UYES or by other agencies in the city.
“Ideally whether it’s from the projects we’re working in, or maybe its another set of agencies in Saint John, that this model might be able to be replicated,” she says. “If we can bring about success with this, maybe it can be expanded by somebody else.”
The UYES program gets forms of support from the community and the public sector, however, Mackenzie says the program doesn’t have much private sector support yet. Any local businesses interested in giving support, monetary or otherwise, are encouraged to reach out.
If people [in the private sector] who become aware of this project and the Wheelhouse and our plans for it are interested in being a part of that … I think that would be enormously helpful. Even just in terms of setting up the housing support program or the rooms themselves. There is a lot of need,” says Mackenzie.
“Obviously, the people who would be accessing these resources, they’re not choosing to be in the situation they’re in. They’re sometimes coming in with very little. Maybe it’s the clothes on their back. Just to have more businesses involved would be that much more enriching.”
Cherise Letson is the associate editor of Huddle, an Acadia Broadcasting content partner.
