Help Along the Way

Help Along the Way

New Journey Housing Provides Support to Newcomers

By: Michel Durand-Wood, Community Booster, Civic Educator, and Author of You’ll Pay for This: How we can afford a great city for everyone, forever.

Photo credit: Ian McCausland

Stepping out of the elevator, I can already tell I’m about to experience something very special. I’m in a nondescript hallway on a frigid February afternoon, but a single brightly coloured sign stands out from the various shades of beige, a beacon calling me towards the door to the offices of New Journey Housing.

Inside, I’m immediately immersed in the sounds of laughter and conversation. Three men are sitting in the nonprofit’s reception area, likely waiting their turns to meet with one of the housing and benefits advisors. They speak to each other with a shared bond as friends or family members would, but the number of empty chairs between them hints that they may have just met. At the very least, they didn’t arrive here together.

“Welcome! What can I help you with today?”

That’s Oksana Slobodianiuk, the friendly face at the reception desk. Her greeting is warm and genuine, like she deliberately chose the word ‘help’. It’s clear she loves her work here, and it’s not hard to imagine her running this place one day.

Today, I’m here to meet with Codi Guenther, New Journey Housing’s Executive Director, to learn about the organization and the impact of a $15,000 Community Grant received from Winnipeg Foundation to review their Affordable Homeownership Program. Jumping right in, she speaks with boundless energy and passion about all the work that happens here.

And that list is long. New Journey’s main focus is providing housing supports for newcomers to Canada to rent or purchase housing, but they also provide money management training, income tax filing help, and guidance on accessing various benefit programs. And while their primary clients are newcomers to Canada, they also support sponsors, landlords and anyone involved in newcomer housing.

In particular, their Affordable Homeownership Program has helped 42 families buy their first home by providing up to 10% of the purchase price, to a maximum of $27,500, towards the down payment and closing costs. But it’s as much an educational program as it is a financial aid program.

As one of the Housing Advisors, Azarias Butariho, shares with me,

“When newcomers to Canada come here, they don’t know the system here, for example, how to rent, how to buy houses. Back home is easy, but here, when they don’t know the system, sometimes they can have problems, and sometimes they can make mistakes.”

That’s why the program starts with a series of workshops. Participants learn about the advantages and disadvantages of buying versus renting. They learn money management skills, as well as the ins and outs of property taxes and insurance. And they learn the details of the house-hunting process, the purchase transaction, and mortgage borrowing.

They must still meet certain income thresholds, have some of their own funds set aside, and qualify for pre-approval with a mortgage lender before they can begin looking for their new home. But what the program does is help to accelerate the process for these families, which is extremely beneficial as some are making the leap from subsidized housing into their very own place.

More broadly, in a typical month, New Journey helps 50 to 60 new households with various supports, a number that spiked to nearly 200 per month during the Ukraine response in 2022, pushing them to hire extra staff who could speak Ukrainian. They now have nine staff who speak fifteen languages between them. Azarias alone speaks six: French, English, Swahili, Russian, Kinyarwanda, and Kirundi, a skill he says helps create connections with people who come for supports.

For some, that support is as simple as one-time help filing a change of address with a government agency. For others, like refugee claimants, the staff is involved within days of their arrival in the country, to help them transition out of shelters or hotels into rental accommodations, refer them to employment agencies and get set up with any benefits they’re entitled to. In most cases, it’s only a few months before they’re working, renting and contributing to their community.

Although the government funding for their Affordable Homeownership Program ran out two years ago, New Journey is using the grant from The Winnipeg Foundation to evaluate the program’s effectiveness, by conducting interviews and surveys with past program participants, partner agencies, as well as some of the many people who find themselves on a waiting list for a potential future revival of the program.

Once finalized, the report generated will help their advocacy efforts with Manitoba Housing to try to get the program renewed. The need is definitely there: the waiting list already has nearly as many families on it as were helped in the first round. They’re also hoping to uncover ways to improve the program.

But just as importantly, Codi thinks it will do amazing things for the New Journey team, to help them recognize the importance of their work for these families. “To take the time to listen to how your clients were impacted… to a certain extent, no news is good news. But sometimes you don’t hear the good news.”

Not that the staff here seem to need the external validation. Codi has been with the organization since its inception, starting as receptionist in 2009, before progressing to Housing Advisor, and then Executive Director. Marnermoo Galloway-White, a Housing Advisor, also started as receptionist fifteen years ago. And Ireen Baylon is an Access to Benefits Advisor today, but ten years ago, she worked as the—you guessed it—receptionist. Seems my impression of Oksana might not have been that far-fetched. But it doesn’t end there: Habtemicael Beraki recently celebrated ten years with the organization, and Tarek Gomaa marked nine. You don’t get that kind of longevity in an organization without a deep love for the work you do.

“It’s really rewarding when you see you are helping somebody. When they come here, we help them to solve problems. They come here crying, when they leave, they are smiling. It’s really amazing.”