By Fred Alvarado
Fred is a community journalist with FOCUS MEDIA ARTS CENTRE 

Street Haven is a multi-service agency that provides emergency shelter, supportive housing, an addiction centre, and a learning centre. 

On Friday May 26th, Street Haven, Canada’s first women’s shelter, launched the first SMART community hub room at 87 Pembroke St, near the intersection of Sherbourne St and Dundas St East. Community members, clients, staff board directors and City Councilor Chris Moise were at the grand opening ceremony to celebrate the inauguration of this community space.  

The new community hub room is equipped with technology in a renovated atmosphere with a bio-wall, coffee machine, projector, chairs, and more.  It is designed to better meet the needs of vulnerable women in the Downtown East communities and serve as a space for recreation, socializing, workshops, trainings, and counselling.  

RPTV reporter Fred Alvarado was at the event and interviewed Siu Mee Cheng, Executive Director for Street Haven.  

“This is Canada’s oldest women shelter and we have recently developed a SMART community hub room. Today’s event is extremely special to us because we actually renovated this whole space. We renovated it so it can serve several purposes: it will provide a nice safe meeting place for training and workshops for our clients and their peers, it also act a as a counselling room so we can provide social services, it will also be a nice recreational space for our clients to hang out, socialize, and build social networks with each other. We can also have movie nights in this room. This room is actually quite special because it is a SMART room, we are moving towards digitalizing and technologizing the whole room so it will have Microsoft smart community hub screen, so it is going to be an exciting place to us.”