In addition to operating two apartment buildings, Options Bytown operates a number of resource centres in Ottawa Community Housing complexes.

Work at the Resource Centres is focused on early intervention and empowering tenants by helping them to strengthen their ability to live autonomously. There are three main aspects that help to realize these objectives.

Maintaining people in housing is the key function of our position and everything we
do is basically geared towards that outcome.  Specifically this could involve dealing with tenant arrears to sorting out tenant conflict.  As part of the Hostel Redirection Project, we also have a mandate to house ten people in each Centre from local Shelters.  This involves interviewing and assessing each applicant’s suitability to independent living.

The second important aspect of our work involves a counselling element.  The majority of this aspect is focused on health issues especially mental health issues.  However it can also include such topics as employment or educational pursuits, recreational interests, legal matters or help regarding finances.

The third aspect of the job involves Community Development.  This involves such matters as promoting activities, working with tenants associations or inviting speakers to come and talk about issues that are of some concern or interest to tenants.  Additionally we encourage tenants to come forward with ideas and to become more involved in their community.

While many of the clients issues can be dealt with individually, other tenants’ issues are much more complex and beyond the remit of our mandate.  Consequently we often refer tenants to appropriate agencies or to formalized counselling for more in-depth work.  The links we make in the community are very important and broaden our scope of service while helping clients to address their needs promptly.

Obviously the main agency with whom we work is Ottawa Community Housing (OCHC).  Working as an Agency within an Agency means we are inextricably bound together.  However we maintain a certain amount of autonomy, and this we believe works to  the tenants’ advantage.   Additionally we are also able to work more intensively with tenants.  With the average OCHC worker having around 1500 tenants, they are often stretched and they are frequently working in crisis management mode.  By contrast we work with 200 to 300 tenants, which allows us more time to give individual tenants.  It is not uncommon for us to spend 1-3 hours with individual clients who are in crisis.  OCHC simply could not justify such individual attention given their workload.  Because of this we are in the unique position of being able to take the time to help tenants grow in confidence while influencing them to make better choices in their lives.

Working in an age-mixed building is somewhat different to the situation in the Options Bytown buildings.  As a significant percentage of the tenants in age-mixed buildings are seniors the issues presented are quite diverse.  Some of the seniors have lived in our buildings for 25-30 years and have often experienced fulfilling careers in areas such as nursing or industry.  Helping seniors may be as simple as filling out a housing form to something as involved as assisting them to move into a long-term care facility.  On the other hand many of the non-senior tenants are in the process of sorting out their lives.  Whether assisting them to obtain employment or education, helping them through feelings of inadequacy, dealing with addiction issues or sorting out arrears of rent the work is always an interesting challenge.