Brandon Bear Clan going strong

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This article was published 21/06/2021 (1648 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Earlier this month, members of the Brandon Bear Clan celebrated the group’s four-year anniversary by carrying out their usual safety patrols in the downtown area, supplying food, clothing and moral support to those in need.

While health restrictions eliminated the possibility of putting together a big celebration, founding member Kim Longstreet said the occasion still gave volunteers pause to think about how far this group has come since 2017.

Talking to the Sun last week, Longstreet said the organization was originally formed in response to an uptick in violence being reported in Brandon’s downtown area throughout 2016, with many of the cases involving women.

“The Brandon Friendship Centre and Tammy Hossack actually pulled together a community meeting,” she said. “Ian Grant was our chief of police at the time and he was fully on board with the concept.”

After months of planning, the Brandon Bear Clan finally hit the streets on June 2, 2017, hoping to follow in the footsteps of the Indigenous-led approach to community safety and conflict resolution first popularized in Winnipeg.

“Some of the members actually went into Winnipeg and walked along with the Bear Clan there to see what they did and we brought back some of what they were doing … and made it fit into our community,” Longstreet said.

At first, Longstreet admits the group was a little bit out of its depth, with members going on patrols with a negligible supply of food that provided little nutritional value for Brandon’s most vulnerable populace.

“Then we started recognizing that people were hungry and a cookie and granola bar wasn’t going to suffice, so we moved to providing a (full) lunch,” she said, adding the group eventually branched out to also provide clean clothes and hygiene products.

Longstreet and her fellow volunteers also weren’t prepared for the sheer amount of used needles they would find on Brandon streets, and quickly made syringe disposal a regular part of their patrols.

The Brandon Bear Clan got rid of more than 1,500 syringes last year, which marks a significant uptick from the 1,060 needles they disposed of in 2019.

Outside of all these new services, Longstreet believes the group’s biggest accomplishment during the past four years has been the strong ties they’ve established in the Westman community at large.

While the group’s patrols are mostly relegated to Brandon’s downtown core, Longstreet said the emotional and financial support they’ve received over the years extends far beyond this small geographic space.

“When we first started, never could we have imagined how the community would embrace us,” she said. “Not just our community, but the whole Westman area. We’ve got a lot of support from rural communities as well.”

This level of engagement was really put on display in the wake of the Massey Manor fire of 2018, when the Brandon Bear Clan organized a food and clothing drive for families who lost everything in the blaze.

“We had to shut down within about 25 minutes,” Longstreet said. “Because we were so bombarded with stuff … the cars were right around the block. The community always comes forward when we need it, so we’re very blessed for that.”

A lot of this momentum was ground to a halt in March 2020, when COVID-19 cases first began popping up across Manitoba.

While the Brandon Bear Clan has been active throughout the entire pandemic — completing their 400th patrol at the beginning of this year — Longstreet said they haven’t been able to provide their clients with the same kind of intimate contact that sometimes makes all the difference.

“We give people the trust and the comfort level to be able to talk to us about anything,” she said. “There’s lots of laughter and lots of tears, sometimes, on patrol when people share their pain with us.”

The inability to provide a friendly hug or handshake has been especially difficult lately, following news that a mass grave containing the remains of 215 children was recently discovered near the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in B.C.

Longstreet said she can see the ripple effect of Canada’s residential school system every time she goes out on patrol, especially since a similar facility operated in the Brandon area between 1895 and 1972.

“I would hazard a guess that pretty much any Indigenous person we see (on the street) is a direct descendent of somebody who has been in a residential school,” she said. “Whether that is directly with a family member or indirectly dealing with the fallout of that, we do see that a lot … the pain and the hurt that comes with knowing what went on there.”

Now that COVID-19 vaccine rollout is fully underway, Longstreet is hopeful their services can get back to normal soon and leave room for the Brandon Bear Clan to branch out even further in the future.

Not only does the group want to establish its very own headquarters outside of the Brandon Friendship Centre, but Longstreet is hoping they can expand their reach beyond the downtown core and begin regularly patrolling other areas of the city.

“That’s kind of our mission now, is to grow a little bigger so that we can do a little bit more work in the community,” she said.

Despite all the ups and downs the group has experienced during the past four years, Longstreet believes the Brandon Bear Clan has a bright future, especially given how much support and resources they’ve accumulated in such a short period of time.

“We absolutely need everybody to know how much we appreciate their support,” she said. “Because we literally could not be doing what we do without the community.”

By Longstreet’s count, the Brandon Bear Clan consists of more than 400 registered volunteers, with 30 to 40 volunteers regularly taking part in patrols.

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