Lack of funding closes night shelter

Press, 11 September 1989, Page 8

Lack of funding closes night shelter

By JANE DUNBAR The Christchurch women’s night shelter has closed while supporters try to find funds to keep the centre running. "We’ve stopped taking people in and have given staff a month’s notice,” said a Y.W.C.A. board member, Mrs Judith Lance. The Y.W.C.A.-run shelter was set up to take in women who had nowhere else to go. Some of these women would now have to sleep on the streets, said Mrs Lance. A meeting of the original groups which set up the shelter, such as the Women’s Refuge, the Women’s Drop-in-Centre

and the Housing for Women Trust, would be held to see how much support there still was for the shelter. One possibility of funding was the Twigger Trust Fund, which had been set up a number of years ago by the North Canterbury Hospital Board, said Mrs Lance. But 50 groups had applied for money from the fund, now administered by the Public Trustee, and no idea had yet been given on which groups would be successful. , Mrs Lance said the shelter needed about $5500 a month to pay for rent, food, electricity, telephone, maintenance and staff.