An official with Hotel-Dieu Grace Healthcare says “they’re pleased with what they’re seeing” when it comes to treatment rates since the Windsor-Essex HART Hub launched one year ago. Hotel-Dieu Grace Healthcare (HDGH) co-leads the hub, alongside the House of Sophrosyne and the Windsor-Essex Community Health Centre, with support from the Windsor-Essex Ontario Health Team. The hub is not a standalone building but rather a series of services that exist within a number of organizations, including Brentwood Recovery Home, the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) Windsor-Essex branch, the Downtown Mission of Windsor, and Family Service Windsor-Essex. The idea behind the hub is to address homelessness and addiction by providing centralized access to services such as mental health care, addiction treatment, housing assistance, and employment support to provide people a place to stay during their recovery effort. Director of Crisis and Addiction Services at Hotel-Dieu Grace Healthcare Kevin Matte says what they’ve seen in the first year is what seven partners can accomplish when they work together as one team. In Year 1, the program provided service to 181 unique individuals. As of October 1, 33 people had graduated from the program and are now living in recovery in subsidized housing with ongoing support. Another 24 people have graduated from the program and are in transitional housing with supports while work is done to find permanent subsidized housing that’s suitable to their needs. Matte says they’re working with clients that are unhoused and going through an addiction. “It’s really important to wrap these services around them, and the success we’re having is really in the numbers that are getting people graduated through the program and into housing,” he says. Matte says what you’re also seeing is that addiction recovery takes time in providing all the services that are needed. “Giving seven or eight weeks of stabilization and treatment that really sets people up, and then farther than that, once they graduate that, looking for an environment that will set them up for recovery for long-term and then to keep those people in recovery and housing,” he says. Matte says like many communities across Ontario, they’re seeing significant demand for addictions treatment. “We talk a little bit about the outcomes, and while we’re pleased with what we’re seeing, the waitlist for the bedded treatment continues to grow, which highlights the need in our community and the value of continuing to invest in these services that build capacity. That’s one area we’d like to address,” he says. The Windsor-Essex HART Hub opened in late September 2025 as part of a three-year provincially funded program. In January 2025, the province approved an application to establish a HART Hub in Windsor, a model the government endorsed over supervised consumption and treatment service sites.
