'Everybody needs friendship': How Helping Hands Street Mission in Hamilton is meeting that need

Friendship is at the heart of everything the small staff does at Helping Hands Street Mission in Hamilton, and the organization's executive director says the need for it is especially important over the holidays.

Alice Plug-Buist said Helen Norris started the mission 21 years ago because she was inspired by a woman who befriended her and helped her out during a "very difficult" period in her life.

While Norris "started out with a van full of supplies for people," Plug-Buist said, the founder always knew it "was about much more than just stuff that really helped her out of her difficult situation," so relationships, and being seen, heard, valued and befriended were even more important for her.

Norris and her husband Tom later rented a Barton Street storefront, where they set up a store of supplies that people could get free. Free coffee was also provided, Plug-Buist said.

"All that time, it's always been like, 'How can we help provide for the needs of people, but actually dig deeper and engage people?'" Plug-Buist  told CBC Hamilton.

"So that's kind of where that whole friendship piece grew out of."

Years later, the organization hired an outreach worker to support people with their everyday needs, but Plug-Buist said it started becoming a bit too clinical and too much of a social service provision rather than about maintaining friendship.

Plug-Buist said that over the last five years, Helping Hands Street Mission, which is a registered charity, has tried to return to more of a friendship-based support space. 

"We're not trying to take the place of other social service providers in the area, but instead we're trying to be that piece in between that gives someone a friend to walk alongside them to access all those other resources that are in the city, so that they're not alone in their journey of trying to find housing or trying to find grief support, trying to find medical support and things like that.

"There are friends who will walk alongside them when they don't have any other stable people in their lives who can provide that kind of friendship support that many of us who have larger support circles have," Plug-Buist said.

As Helping Hands refocused on its core mission, the outreach worker role morphed into a new position about three years ago, with a new title — friendship manager, Plug-Buist said.

"The friendship manager is the front-line person of this. The person doesn't do all that friendship themselves, but helps all of our volunteers as well as just community members to learn how to be those kinds of friends for people," she said.

"We have a tiny team of five people at Helping Hands as our staff team, but we have over 50 volunteers who we are trying to … train and empower to be those kinds of friends to each of the people that come to Helping Hands." 

Helping Hands operates a free store where people share their closets with friends, Plug-Buist said.