DTES Sex Workers Left in the Cold as Support Services Close

In late December the WISH Drop-In Centre Society, which supports street-based sex workers in the Downtown Eastside, announced it would be temporarily closing its drop-in centre and kitchens, ending the daytime MAP Van service which offered harm reduction and outreach, and cutting back on programs.

These changes are due to “funding constraints” and are “necessary to support our financial sustainability through the end of our fiscal year,” WISH said in a notice posted to its website.

The drop-in centre would be closed for at least two months, WISH said. It remains closed today.

On Feb. 26, PACE Society, which also supports sex workers in the DTES, said it had suspended all services and programming and laid off most of its staff due to a “shortfall of funding.” Its charity status had also been revoked due to late CRA filing, it added.

PACE’s drop-in centre, outreach mentorship program, counselling, gender self-determination project, peer-health navigation, legal clinic and sex worker occupational health and safety have all been suspended.

The next day Atira Women’s Resource Society announced it would be temporarily closing its SisterSquare overdose prevention site as it prepares to move to a new, permanent location. This service was not directly supporting sex workers but it did offer a warm, dry space for people to spend time in.

These closures dealt a huge blow to sex workers in the DTES and left them with nowhere safe and welcoming to go to eat, rest or shower between jobs, especially at night, four women currently or formerly involved in sex work told The Tyee.

These programs are trans-inclusive, serving cisgender and transgender women, non-binary people, Two-Spirit folks and femmes.

The four women who spoke with The Tyee were critical of the closures but also stressed the need for nuance when talking about accountability in services that support sex workers.

Criticism of the programs, they said, can be used to justify reducing funding, grants or services, which would directly impact sex workers who most rely on these services. This is not what they wished to emerge from speaking out about the closures.

The Tyee requested interviews with management at WISH and PACE, but both organizations declined interviews. In an emailed statement, WISH said its funding was back on track but didn’t say when the drop-in centre would reopen. PACE said it had secured funding to reopen its Tuesday Trans Lunch Club and Thursday Indigenous Sharing Circle in early March.

Current and former employees of the two organizations did, however, speak with The Tyee. All of them praised the hard work, time, passion and energy given by people behind running non-profits that support sex workers.

Meghan, whose name we have changed for this article, was a senior employee at WISH before being laid off. She said she wants to know why there wasn’t more communication from WISH about its dire financial situation before the layoffs and closures were announced in December.

WISH also gave almost no notice about the closures to the women who rely on its services, she said.

WISH laid off 53 staff who are current or past sex workers, and several administrative positions, Cynthia, who still works at WISH, told The Tyee. Cynthia is a pseudonym.

The Tyee agreed to withhold Meghan and Cynthia’s identities because of concerns around future employment, retribution from their employer and being outed as sex workers.

“I believe people would have rallied behind WISH if there’d been a call-out for emergency funding,” Meghan said. “Even when we weren’t in trouble people would show up to help when we did call-outs. But sex workers and the people who support them were never given an option to support WISH.”

It was a good job, with flexible work hours and benefits, Meghan said, adding that most people who were laid off have found other work or have gone back to sex work.

Sekani Dakelth, a longtime member of PACE who worked for the organization for eight years, points out that non-profits are supposed to have their finances planned out a year in advance. Any financial hardship should have been flagged and communicated a year ago, Dakelth says. She told The Tyee she plans to ask about how the funds were managed this year at the next annual general meeting.

Lisa Kreut, an activist and former sex worker who served on the board at PACE, was critical of PACE for not being more transparent about its financial situation.

To run out of money and lose charitable status is a “red flag” that there’s a “serious issue with management,” she said.

Kreut says non-profits across Canada struggle with funding because they’re often given program-specific grants rather than dedicated core funding that could go towards staff and operating expenses. This means staff are usually hired for one job and then asked if they can take on unpaid work like cleaning or being at the front desk, she said.

As “scary and disturbing” as it is to see services shut down, it creates an opportunity to “evolve” these organizations to better support all sex workers, she said. Organizations such as WISH and PACE could be restructured so that they run more like a union or professional organization, where workers standing in solidarity help build community.

A “little bit” of core funding could create a “massive” change for these essential non-profits that mostly survive off of short-term grants for specific programming, Kreut said.

Dangerous closures

Street-based sex workers sleep during the day and work all night, so closing the only 24-hour drop-in centre for sex workers is not only devastating, but dangerous, Meghan said.

The drop-in centre and MAP Van were created in part to protect sex workers from serial killers like Robert Pickton.

Pickton preyed on sex workers on the Downtown Eastside for decades and was convicted of killing six women in 2007, although he claimed to have killed 49 women.

As part of a government inquiry after the trial, commissioner Wally Oppal wrote a report that said Pickton was able to kill as many women as he did because the lack of social assistance programs, ongoing effects of colonialism and criminalization of sex work marginalized women.

To improve the safety of sex workers, especially in the DTES, Oppal recommended the province fund 24-hour services supporting women in the sex trade, as well as enhanced public transit in northern B.C., especially along Highway 16.

“The need to save women’s lives should be sufficient to counter arguments based on fiscal limitations,” Oppal wrote.

The Tyee contacted the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General to ask if it had changed its funding for services that support sex workers and if the ministry thought it was fulfilling Oppal’s recommendation to fund 24-hour services.

In an emailed statement, a government spokesperson told The Tyee that B.C. “contracts with service providers to deliver programs in communities based on service hours per week” and that there had been no reductions in the number of contracts or funding levels for these services.

But the spokesperson added that in March 2023, the province provided one-time grant funding to projects providing services for sex workers. This one-time funding went to PEERS Victoria Resource Society, PACE and WISH, and runs until 2026.

These grants represent a fraction of the overall funding the province provides to WISH and PACE.

The Tyee also contacted Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim’s office to ask if municipal funding for organizations that support sex workers had changed but did not hear back by press time.

As WISH and PACE also declined interviews, it’s not clear at this time what funding changes, if any, caused these closures.

The Tyee will update this story when it learns more.

According to PACE’s charitable tax filings from spring of last year, the organization received $159,200 from the federal government, $583,200 from the province and $204,000 from municipal/regional governments, making up a little over 82 per cent of the charity’s total funding.

WISH’s charitable tax filings for 2024 say just under 69 per cent of its funding comes from government, with $125,000 from the federal government, $4.8 million from the province and $209,300 from municipal/regional governments.

In its 2024 filing, WISH said it had 30 full-time permanent positions and 142 part time employees, with its highest paid employee earning between $160,000 and $200,000, its second and third highest paid employees earning between $120,000 and $160,000 and seven other highest paid employees earning between $80,000 and $120,000.

PACE said it had 12 full-time permanent positions and three part-time, with its top 10 highest paid positions in the $40,000 to $80,000 range.

What’s been lost

Cynthia says the layoffs made WISH employees feel abandoned and scared.

By closing the drop-in centres sex workers don’t feel like they have anywhere safe where they can rest and relax, she said.

“They’re in a panic,” Cynthia said. “Where are they supposed to go? They keep having tents taken down and getting kicked out of Crab Park. It’s not safe for them in many shelters because they get beat up and sexually assaulted.”

WISH’s 27-bed shelter will remain open, but without the drop-in centre the living space has been “halved.”

So long as they kept the lights on women were welcome to sleep in chairs in the drop-in centre, Cynthia said.

“The drop-in fed and clothed people and meant we could care for someone if they overdosed,” she said. “It was one of the only places where women could shower, sit and watch TV and have a normal piece of life.”

Around 100 women would come through WISH on an average night, Meghan said.

The only other bathroom open at night on the Downtown Eastside is in Carnegie Hall, she added.

The women, non-binary people and Two-Spirit people WISH supported will now need to rely on the DTES Women’s Centre, which is trans-inclusive but not specifically for sex workers, and the Kingsway Community Station at Kingway and Windsor, which has inclusive washrooms for women involved in sex work, Cynthia said.

With its kitchen closed, WISH is no longer offering hot meals. WISH was the only place where sex workers could get hot food in the middle of the night.

Taking away the drop-in centre also erodes the social fabric of street-based sex workers, Meghan said.

“When you see women get in a car it can feel like she’s taking money away from you by taking that job,” she said. “It’s important for women to have a space where they can just be and not compete.”

Dakelth, who is Two-Spirit and Indigenous, says she’s been attending PACE’s Trans Lunch Club, which used to be called the Trans Supper Club, since it started around 23 years ago.

At the time society would talk about inclusion but then exclude trans women from female spaces, she said. Being trans also seemed to make it harder to get a job, she added.

She says that meant when the rent was due many trans women would turn to survival sex work to pay their bills.

The Trans Lunch Club and Indigenous Sharing Circle helped bring the community together where women could gather and share their experiences, she said.

She praises PACE and these programs. “They’re amazing. They did so much for me and have given me so many chances,” she said. “Now I’m at a point in my life where I can thrive.”

“For both of these groups the majority of women attending are women of colour, half are Indigenous and most have done survival sex work long term,” Dakelth said. “A lot of the women rely on the community and being able to talk about the current landscape of safety on the street.”

Cynthia also says services that support sex workers are “not just about livelihood but about safety.”

There’s a “bad date sheet” shared between sex workers where women can report men who get violent or men who refuse to pay for services, but there’s still high rates of assault, especially for Indigenous sex workers, Cynthia said.

Meghan added, “Our participants are the strongest people in the world and they’re experts in surviving and thriving in ways society doesn’t even recognize.”

But that doesn’t mean any services should be rolled back, she added.

“Make no mistake, people will die from these closures and some are gone already,” Meghan said softly, adding, “DTES women and gender-queer people have amazing mortality rates.”

The WISH drop-in centre also created a space for sex workers to get together and grieve when someone died.

“It’s predictable in a two-month closure many people we serve will die and we won’t find out until we re-open,” Meghan said.

Cynthia added there were regular vigils held every month at WISH to mourn the passing of women killed by the unregulated toxic drug supply.

Where to go from here

The first solution to improving services is dedicated core funding, Kreut said.

Dakelth says she’d like to see municipalities and provinces work with sex worker supporting organizations to either reduce the rent when they’re experiencing financial hardship or help them secure permanent office space to own rather than rent.

Gentrification seems to be working to push sex workers and the organizations that support them out of the Downtown Eastside, and if organizations could own a building it would help them push back against gentrification, she said.

Kreut also said she’d also like to see entire boards, and especially the chair, be marginalized people with sex work experience.

Currently there’s a tendency for non-profits to elect a trans person or a person of colour to the board and then overwork them while under-supporting them, leading to burnout and forcing that tokenized board member out of the position, she said.

This was her experience as the only trans board member at PACE, Kreut says, but it’s a common experience at non-profits broadly across the country and more work needs to be done to recognize the pattern. Creating a critical mass where most if not all of the board are people of colour and/or trans and have sex work experience would help disrupt the pattern, she added.

The closures at WISH and PACE disrupted essential services for society’s most vulnerable people, so “why was it not treated like an emergency?” Meghan asks.

There’s a lot of misinformation about who does sex work, Cynthia said. “A lot of these girls aren’t who they’re made out to be.”

“They’re not uneducated, just people who fell through the cracks,” she said, adding she knows nurses and health-care professionals who do sex work.

“People assume they’re uneducated or lazy, but I see trauma, either multigenerational or because of colonization. And some just choose to do sex work, which is legal to do.”