Program offers supports to street workers

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You only have to look at some of the headlines peppering newspapers across the country to see that prostitution is dangerous. It's also a life from which it is difficult to escape. But for the past decade an organization in Regina has been working to help people involved in prostitution turn their lives around.

The Street Worker's Advocacy Project (SWAP) began as a drop-in centre for street workers, opening its doors in July 1994. The project was designed to meet the needs identified by the street workers themselves, to provide programming they wanted to see put in place.

That philosophy-of having the people the program is designed to assist actually having a say in what form that assistance would take-is still an important part of how SWAP operates, said executive director Barb Lawrence. The organization's bylaws say that at least 51 per cent of the SWAP board must be made up of people who have worked in prostitution, but most of the time at least 80 per cent, if not 100 per cent, of the members bring that experience to the work they do.

"I think there's been this recognition that they are the true experts in terms of their lives and their needs and the circumstances that leave people vulnerable to being out in the street, and in terms of providing direction about how those needs might be met, how people might be assisted," Lawrence said.

"Our primary, number one goal isn't necessarily to get people off the street. It's to help people with whatever issues they may be struggling with at any point in time."

One of the services SWAP provides is an education program, which includes academic, life skills and parenting components.

The academic portion is offered on an individual basis to meet the specific needs of each client. Students in the program can upgrade, prepare for their general educational development (GED) exams, get help preparing to enter the workforce or begin a post-secondary education or even prepare to take a driver's exam.

"You have such an incredible diversity of where people are coming from, and sometimes in abilities too," Lawrence said. " [A] lot of people we work with may have a learning disability. They may be compromised through any of the related fetal alcohol disorders ... Or they may have just been told all their life that 'You're a failure' or made to feel that. And in fact they maybe have incredible intellect, have just wonderful gifts, but have no faith, absolutely no faith or no sense of that themselves."

The life skills component is an important part of the education programming, Lawrence explained.

"The majority of people that we're working with still have both feet fairly firmly on the street and they're dealing with just an incredible complexity of issues. And so it's really hard to focus on an academic program when you're not sure if you've got a roof over your head that night."

For many clients the process to make the changes they need to improve their lives is a long, hard road, and they may stumble along the way, but SWAP will still be there waiting for them when they find their way back onto the path, Lawrence said.

"This is just really long-term, intensive work. We've had people in our program for three or four years. They'll fall by the wayside and we may lose them for six months and they'll come back ... And there's only so much that we can do and let them know the doors are always open; we're always there."

And it's a good thing that SWAP is there, because many of the clients enrolled in the organization's education program don't have a lot of other options.

"The people that come here are often screened out of other alternative programs, simply because they have so many issues," Lawrence said. "And program managers recognize, 'Well, gee, I'm not going to be able to put this person through a GED program in six months. There's no way that's going to happen. And if I don't the funders aren't going to continue to fund me.' So they just scre them out."

Keeping the funders happy is also something SWAP has to contend with, but some of them are beginning to acknowledge the unique situation the organization finds itself in.

"They're recognizing there's a whole population in this community who are extremely deprived and who need some intensive supports to be successful. Because they can indeed be successful," Lawrence said. "It's too costly in all aspects for us to ignore this population. And we've had to present it in some pretty stark perspectives for our funders."

Wendy Laxdal is SWAP's education program instructor. She sees first-hand the impact the program is making on clients, and on their children.

"We do try and work with anybody who has kids to keep them reading with their kids. And so that their kids can go and have a positive experience at school," Laxdal said. "Because most of our clients didn't have that positive experience. That's why they quit. And if they can make it so that it's good for their kids then maybe their kids won't have to go through the same kind of garbage that they did.

"When they come in in the morning, there's some of them, they'll come in and say, 'You know what? My kid came home with such and such homework last night and I could help them with it.' Or 'I took my homework home and my son or daughter sat down and said, Hey, I'm doing something like that too, and they brought out their books and we worked together.' And that's great. Sometimes it feels like it's tough to make a difference with the clients that we have, just considering everything they've been through. But that's where you really see the difference, I think, is in how their kids are affected."

The education program is just one of the things SWAP offers to its clients, Lawrence said.

"When people ask me, 'Well, what do you help people with?' I just shake my head because it's whatever people bring in at any given point in time. And it runs the entire spectrum of human need ... they need seter, they need food, they need clothing. And it's not that, of course, that we can directly provide that ourselves, because we can't But as an advocacy agency it's helping make referrals, plug them in to the folks with the people, the resources in the community."