A Canadian perspective for ending homelessness

Drawing on extensive data and comparing responses to natural disasters to explain that homelessness can be solved with a coordinated system level response, Tim Richter presented the alarming figure that homelessness in Canada will erase 17 years off a person's life.

Furthermore, he framed the cause of homelessness as not being mental illness and addiction or any personal fault or failing – homesless is a housing problem. 

Watch his full presentation below

Note: Tim refers to the Invisible People podcast, which you can listen to here.

From more presentations from the Australian Homelessness Conference, visit AHURI's YouTube channel.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: TIM RICHTER

“Thank you for the opportunity to be here. This is my first time ever in Australia, and I kind of feel like I'm visiting favourite cousins and uncles and aunts who you know live in a really cool place, but have funny names for things. I'm really struck though by how much Canada and Australia have in common for good and for ill and I'm really uh looking forward to the opportunity to learn from you and I've really enjoyed the sessions that I've been able to take in so far.”

“Today, I'm going to talk a little bit about a Canadian perspective on ending homelessness. So to start, I want to start as you do, with a land acknowledgement or acknowledgement of the territory. So, I'm from a small town just west of Calgary, Alberta which is on Treaty 7 territory. It's [the] traditional lands of the Stony-Nakoda peoples of the Chiniki, Bearspaw and Wesley bands. And also, the Tsuut’ina, the Blackfoot people of the Siksika, Piikani and Kainai bands, and the area is also home to Métis Nation Region 3.”

“I also want to acknowledge, as you have, that we're meeting this morning on the traditional country of the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains, and pay respect to Elders past and present. I recognize and respect the cultural heritage and beliefs in relationship with the land.”

“In Canada, I think, like Australia, Indigenous peoples make up less than 5% of our overall population, but more than 30% of people experiencing homelessness. And in some communities, like Winnipeg in Manitoba, indigenous people are over 70% of those experiencing homelessness. And so, we have to understand — certainly in Canada we're recognising— that colonization and cultural genocide have to be understood as critical factors leading to homelessness for indigenous people. But we're also recognising that housing and homeless systems are actually still part of the machinery of colonisation. Our work to end homelessness is an act of reconciliation with indigenous peoples, but we have to have, as part of our work to end homelessness, an intentional, thoughtful and deliberate effort at decolonisation.”

“So, I don't know about you, but I kind of feel like the little dude in the red shorts, when working to end Homelessness. I'm sure many of you feel the same. I wish I could come here and tell you that in Canada we've got this all figured out, sadly the situation in Canada is verging on catastrophic when it comes to homelessness. We are dealing with multiple compounding crises: we have a housing crisis that is 40 years or more in the making; we shared the impact of the global pandemic; we have subsequent cost of living crisis; we're dealing with an awful drug poisoning crisis, which means we're seeing a wave of new homelessness — the likes of which I don't think we’ve seen in Canada in generations if ever before.”

“And it's a wave of homelessness that is much more visible than Canadians are used to, and much more lethal than ever. As a result, we're seeing waning public support for the work we're doing, and growing unease and discomfort with visible homelessness getting worse and worse. Populist political forces are exploiting this fear, this public unease, and that's driving pressure on cities to use criminalisation to respond to unsheltered homelessness in particular. We see a growing kind of withdraw back into emergency responses to homelessness and the use of enforcement. Communities are overwhelmed, right? And you know, burnout, fatigue, moral injury… they're really beginning to see that plague the sector. Our frontline workers are being asked to do more with limited resources, and homelessness is overwhelming.”

“But in spite of this, I still firmly believe that homelessness is solvable, and that ending homelessness is possible. And I believe that homelessness can be rare, brief and non-recurring, and that there is a path forward. And that's what I'm going to talk a bit about today.”

“So, this is a photo from the downtown east side of Vancouver, some of you would have would have heard about it. The loss of housing Canada is experiencing today is higher than that of our largest natural disasters. We estimate between 265,000 and 300,000 different people will experience homelessness this year. In fact, overnight I caught an article from Ontario where unofficial provincial government estimates say that as many as 230,000 people in Ontario alone will experience homelessness.”

“So, this is bigger than our largest natural disaster. I'm from Calgary; in 2013 we had a flood that forced 77,000 households out of their homes. In 2016, in Fort McMurry in Northern Alberta, a city of 85,000 was forced to evacuate due to wildfire. And last summer, Yellowknife Northwest Territories was forced to evacuate due to wildfire as well, and that's a town, or a city of 15,000.”

“Homelessness in Canada is among our top 10 most lethal disasters in Canadian history. There was just a report out last week that said homelessness in Canada will erase 17 years off of a person's life. It is a humanitarian disaster in any way of measuring it.”

“But the good news about homelessness is that it's solvable. It's preventable right? You can't necessarily stop a storm or a fire, but you can stop homelessness. So I think it's important to know if we're going to if we're going to try and solve it we need to understand why it's happening.”

“Homelessness is not caused by mental illness, or addiction, or any personal fault or failing. Homelessness is a housing problem.”

“Homelessness is a housing problem.”

“And, I want to illustrate this using musical chairs —which I'm told Australian kids also do. So, imagine a game of musical chairs. You got 10 kids [and] you got 10 chairs, right? The music will play…[the] music stops, the kids will sit down. Now, in this game of these 10 kids there's a girl named Alice. You know, Alice has got a broken ankle right? And so, they take a chair away, the music starts… the music stops, everybody sits down but Alice. Now, if you asked Alice, you said, ‘well how come you're still standing?’ She’d say ‘well you know, it's because I've got a broken ankle and I can't get to the chair as fast as the other kids.’ Now, is she without a chair because she has a broken ankle? Or is she without a chair because there aren't enough chairs? Chair-lessness is the inevitable outcome of a game without enough chairs. Homelessness is the inevitable outcome of a system without enough housing, right?” (applause).

“So, I think it's also important to note that that doesn't mean that we have to wait until we've got the perfect system, we've got enough housing to begin to act end homelessness. And it's not to say that precipitating factors like the broken ankle, things like racism, colonisation, addiction, mental illness, they that they aren't factors, but that doesn't explain rates of homelessness.”

“So, there's a really good book out of the United States by a guy named Gregg Colburn and his partner Clayton Adlern called ‘Homelessness is a Housing Problem’ — the conclusion’s in the title. They tried to understand; why do some US cities have higher rates of homelessness than other US cities? You know, so they looked at factors like poverty, they looked at rates of mental illness and addiction, they looked at weather, they looked at whether they were Democrat or Republican, you know, because surely the Democrats or Republicans must be at fault for one thing or another, but what they found was when you looked at all of the factors the only evidence that explained the difference in the rate of homelessness was the cost of rent, and vacancy.”

“In high-rent, low-vacancy environments you had high higher homelessness. It wasn't poverty — Detroit has among the highest rates of poverty in the United States, and lower rates of homelessness. West Virginia has among the highest rates of addiction but one of the lowest rates of homelessness.”

“It isn't even weather. You can't when you compare Los Angeles and Boston on a per-capita basis. That doesn't explain differences in the rate of homelessness only the housing market. High-rent low-vacancy equals higher homelessness.” 

“Understanding homelessness as a housing problem is really, really, really, really important, right? Because if we continue to individualise homelessness, [if] we inevitably attribute it to addiction or mental illness or some personal fault or failing, we're going to continue to chase the wrong solutions. We have to solve a structural problem with structural solutions. Again, which is not to say we're not powerless to do any anything about it. I think there's more than enough resources for us to get started solving homelessness, and what we don't have we can make happen. And in my mind one of the biggest mistakes — and a lot of folks here are in the housing and homelessness policy world — and I don't know about Australia, but in Canada often it's one Department that's doing homelessness, another department that's doing housing, right? Look you can't solve homelessness without housing. We built an entire National Housing Strategy in Canada, the vast majority of the billions of dollars invested won't house anybody experiencing homelessness. Because the housing policy was done by one group, and the homelessness policy by another. And the two weren't connected.”

“So, where does modern mass homelessness in Canada come from? It's not always been this way. Like, I'm old enough to remember a day when there wasn't homelessness on the scale we see it. And it really began as a result of successive government disinvestment in housing — a story I'm told is also familiar here in Australia.”

“[It] began in the 1980s. Most of Canada's rental housing stock was actually built before 1980, and that's because before 1980 the federal government provided incentives for the construction of rental housing [and] those began to come off in 1980, and cuts to affordable housing programs began through austerity. Canada was a pretty enthusiastic acolyte of Reaganomics and Thatcherism and all of that austerity business, and the results are seen on our streets. in 1996, so the gentleman on the on the right is Brian Mulroney, who was our conservative Prime Minister until about 1993 and on the left is Prime Minister [Jean] Chrétien and his Finance Minister Paul Martin who later became Prime Minister. In 1996 the Chrétien/Martin government eliminated the Federal Affordable Housing Program, and cut social transfers to Provinces that funded welfare and healthare, and things like that. And so the provinces did the same. We went from building about 25,000 units of affordable housing a year in 1983 to zero. Zero after 1996.”

“And you fast forward to the pandemic, right? And now we're seeing, and like I'm sure you've seen here, people pushed out of their homes, and then people already experiencing homelessness pushed out of shelter for health reasons, social distancing all those things — or fear. People experiencing homelessness were five times more likely to die from COVID, 11 times more likely to end up in ICU. 20 times more likely to catch it in the first place. And that began to spark a rise of encampment in the country. And hot on the heels of the pandemic, we saw a cost-of-living crisis that had a dramatic impact on lowest income households.”

“In Canada, the inflation rate is measured by the Consumer Price Index — which is a basket of goods in a middle-class, middle-income home. But if you're a low-income home 90% of your budget is rent and food. Through the cost-of-living crisis, rent was going up 20, 30%. Food was going up 10, 15% every year. If you're a low-income household you have no wiggle room to absorb that kind of change, and so people were forced out of their housing and onto the streets, and then they were met there by a drug poisoning crisis.”

“So, with that, I want to talk a bit about what it's going to take to make homelessness rare, brief and non-recurring. And I think there's two really critical first steps. There's obviously more to it than this, but there's two really critical things.” 

“First, we gotta deal with affordable rental housing, and the second; we need to build local systems modelled on Disaster Response. Remember I talked about homelessness being a disaster, and I'll talk about that a bit more in a second.”

“To deal with the housing crisis in Canada, a year ago we got together with a group called REALPAC, which is [Canada’s] Real Estate industry group, and another group called The Place Centre and built the National Housing Accord.”

“The Canada Mortgage Housing Corporation estimates that by 2030, in order to restore affordability to our housing market Canada needs to build 3.5 million units of housing — 2 million [of those] purpose-built [for] rental.”

“Canada also has one of the lowest rates of social housing — so, social housing as a percentage of the overall housing market at about 3 and a half percent. For us to get to the OECD average, we have to build 655,000 units of social and supportive housing. To put that in perspective in the last 30 years Canada's built 500,000 units of purpose-built rental housing.”

“For interest’s sake, I looked up Australia […] Canada's at 3.5%, Australia is 3.2 [%]. And interestingly when you look at the rent burden… So, of households that are spending more than 40% of their income on rent, 35% of renter households in Canada are spending more than 40% of their income on rent. In Australia, 25% are doing so.”

“So, solving this is a massive undertaking. It's a trillion-dollar problem, and it's not going to be solved by any one sector alone. And so we built the National Housing Accord which is a 10-point plan. And I joke to the Government that I could have called it ‘Back to the Future’ because damn near everything in there has been done before. We actually went back to the 1980s and said, you know when we solved the housing crisis in the' 60s we had accelerated capital cost allowance for construction of purpose built rental. Oh! In the 1940s at the end of the Second World War, we had a catalogue of home design that we could draw to accelerate the design process. We went back to what was done in the ‘40s, what was done in the ‘60s and previous housing crises, and what we saw around the world.”

“But, in less than a year, we've been successful in shaping a new Federal housing policy and we moved over C$65 billion in Federal financing and direct investment in market, and non-market housing which is expected to create hundreds of thousands of new units of purpose-built rental housing.”

“Policy announcements also included major new investments in homelessness including a C$250 million encampment program — better late than never — an expansion of the Federal homelessness program, and a C$50 million homelessness reduction accelerator that we hope to work hand-in-glove with Built for Zero Canada. we're currently in the process of building a new coalition to build a new national campaign to build on the success of the Accord, and build the political power of our movement to drive for change at federal, provincial and municipal levels. Remember: Homelessness is a housing issue. Housing is controlled by policy, and policy moves at the speed of public opinion, right?”

“We can move public opinion. We can move policy to solve the housing issue.”

“I talked a bit about homelessness as an unnatural disaster. I spoke earlier about, you know, disasters in Calgary and Fort McMurray and Yellowknife. And you're no stranger to disasters here in Australia. I understand that there may be some flooding as we speak up north, so, I want you to think, you know, if you think about the last time a disaster struck in Australia — and I think about the floods in Calgary, or the fire in Fort McMurray, or the fire the fires that threatened Yellowknife; how many people do you suppose are still homeless as a result of those natural disasters? Not many, if any. In those cities, almost none.”

“Which is not to say that disaster response is perfect, but 77,000 households were made homeless in a flood in 2013 in Calgary. None of them are still homeless. 85,000 people were evacuated made homeless by a fire in Fort McMurray none of them are still homeless — unless of course they were homeless before, right?”

“The only difference between homelessness due to a lack of housing, and homelessness caused by a natural disaster is the mechanism of the loss of housing, right? The impact is the same. The Calgary flood was one of the most expensive disasters in Canadian history; it cost C$6 billion dollars. Homelessness costs the Canadian economy C$5 billion every year, and that was calculated in 2016 before it's as bad as it is today.”

“In a natural disaster, there is a system in place a system focused on an urgent response to the crisis, keeping people safe and most importantly rebuilding and getting people back in their homes quickly. A lot of you in municipal government are here and I know you have disaster response plans. The response plan that a city can develop is very similar to what you would do in a case of a natural disaster. So I'm going to talk about some of the main features of these responses, and see what you think about how analogous this is to the response to homelessness at a community level.”

“So the first thing: the secret sauce of ending homelessness is strong local leadership. I've looked at homeless systems all over the world, and I absolutely 1,000-percent guarantee wherever there is success in preventing and reducing and ending homelessness there is strong local leadership. Ending homelessness is about problem solving. You need strong leaders to solve big problems. In the photo here is the mayor of Calgary. These examples are all taken from the flood in Calgary in 2013. His name is Naheed Nenshi, and there was a hashtag on Twitter that was trending at the time called “Nenshi needs a nap” because he was everywhere! Everywhere, all the time. But he inspired, he uplifted, he gave voice, he kept people informed, he coordinated the action on the ground, he solved problems, he rallied the community, and he brought resources to bear and was an advocate for the city, right? Mayors don't have everything they need to solve homelessness. Councils don't have everything they need to solve homelessness. Local agencies don't have everything they need to solve homelessness. But leaders can bring the community together, can lead through a process, and help find those things.”

“And this is a photo of the disaster management office, Calgary Emergency Management. Local disaster responses have a command centre and a coordinated system, right? This is the Emergency Operations Centre. You'll notice in this photo that all of the key players are at the table, right? Police, Fire, EMS… you know, the utilities, roads, sewers, you name it. All of the resources are at the table. There's clear leadership in this room, clearly outlined roles and responsibilities, and accountabilities. These are highly skilled professionals who are constantly training. They have a system of coordination that allows them to react to a dynamic and constantly changing situation, and they are using real-time data. Look at the pictures on the screen behind them; they're using real-time data to make decisions. This is what coordinated access. This is coordinated access as you heard in in homeless circles, and this is a really important point: like in disasters, homelessness is dynamic and constantly changing. There's no 140-point plan, 200-point plan, a 1,000-point checklist that you can walk through, and check these things off, and you'll solve homelessness. Homelessness is dynamic, it's constantly changing and just like disasters, right, it's constantly changing.”

“So, you need to see what's happening; you need to understand what's happening on the ground, and be able to see that in real time, and respond quickly. You gotta deal with a crisis and you gotta keep people safe. This is a photo inside a shelter that was put up outside a First Nation's community outside of Calgary. So, you know, in a disaster, people will be moved from their homes, they'll go to a Reception Centre, the Reception Centre will get their information, and they'll be put into a shelter. But the emergency response to the flood in Calgary was planned. It was coordinated. And it was geared to recovery, and it was geared to housing, right? Keep people safe but the whole thing is geared toward getting people back into their homes.”

“And so, this woman here is in the shelter with her baby, but we're not expecting her to stay in this cot to receive treatment, we're not expecting her to take counselling, or get training, or job training, or education or skills training, or anything before we get her back into her home, right? But we do that in [the] homeless system in Canada. We've certainly seen this in North America where the response to homelessness stops at a shelter. So why don't we do this with homelessness? Why don't we have a housing focused system? It's because we assume that the cause of homelessness is individual — that the flood didn't cause this woman's homelessness, it was some kind of personal fault or failing, right? If she's homeless due to a lack of housing supply, it's housing supply that's the issue.”

“In a disaster, you know, even with the best systems, the systems can get easily overwhelmed. Once we've made sure people are safe the focus of disaster response goes into rapid rehousing. The lady in the front of that picture is Laureen Harper — she's the Prime Minister at the time’s wife [Stephen Harper]. And so, Calgary people mobilized to get people back into their homes as quickly as possible. We had to get the water out of the basements, strip out the basements, so it was safe for people to go in. And even in the most sophisticated disaster management responses can get overwhelmed. But when we reach out to our communities for help what are we asking them to do, right?”

“So, years ago, the Bishop of Calgary was on my on my board, and I remember he held a Bishop's Dinner and he said; you know, in the ‘70s when the Vietnamese boat people came to Canada, he said, the Church welcomed them into the community, you know? We help them find homes, we helped them find jobs, we helped them learn English, we got the kids in school, we helped build a community around them. In the '90s when Bosnians came, the same thing happened right? We said, you know, I've got priests that are phoning me now asking for money to put showers in the basements of their churches so that we can shelter people experiencing homelessness. He said; we're asking the faith community the wrong question. We're asking them to shelter, we should be asking them to house, and support, and care and build community.”

“In a natural disaster we will often also begin talking about prevention. Really quickly, this is an image of uh… before the flood water had even receded, people were talking about how do we prevent something like this from having the impact it had? And people were even talking about building a tunnel under the city to divert flood water from the two rivers that flow through the city. But today upstream reservoirs are being created to store water and absorb river flows that led to this kind of flooding, and again mitigation measures have been made all the way along the river systems.”

“The other thing that's really important about disaster response is that there's no one government responsible for disaster, but they have agreements in place on who does what. And those agreements spell out local leadership with senior government support, right? Local leadership with senior government support. In this photo is the head of Calgary Emergency Management, the Mayor, the Premier of the Province at the time —Alison Redford—and the [then] Prime Minister, Steven Harper. All levels of government. Local governments lead, communities lead, senior levels of government support in their areas of jurisdiction.” 

“So, homelessness is an unnatural disaster. And the only difference between homelessness from natural disaster, and homelessness from a broken housing system, is the mechanism of the loss of housing. Like I said, we can learn a lot from disaster response to shape our homeless systems; the local homeless system is needed to make homelessness rare, brief and non-recurring. But the system you can use—and that we're trying to use in Canada—is directly analogous to disaster response. Ending homelessness is a continuous improvement process not a recipe or a checklist.”

“We also need to have like a nimble, housing-focused, problem-solving approach using real-time data to adapt and respond to a dynamic and rapidly changing reality. And there's a few critical components to the system:

• As I said [earlier], strong local leadership;
• A shared and measurable aim with a housing focus, and for us we're using functional zero;
• And then you have a continuous improvement process with a command centre team — a team that's leading it a governance framework of sorts, a system for coordination;
• You need real-time data so that every month, you can look at your list and say; okay, what is it we can do to reduce inflow? What is it we can do to get more people off the streets [and] into their homes? What is it we can do to prevent… Why are people are coming back into our system from housing? How do we stop that from happening?
• You need a menu of proven technical strategies. Like everything you need to know to end homelessness has been done somewhere. It's amazing how similar Australia and Canada are right? Housing First programs, prevention programs… Like, they're all there;
• And you need flexible housing and service resources. And again, you don't necessarily have enough housing to finish the job of ending homelessness, but I guarantee you have enough to start. In Calgary, my start in the work of ending homelessness was at the Calgary Homeless Foundation. We had a vacancy rate of less than 1%, and in five years, housed over 4,000 people, and reduced homelessness for the first time in 20 years of counting. We built about 3,000 units of new housing in that time, which is more than had been done in the 20 years previous combined.”

“And this is an approach, by the way, that the Australian Alliance to End Homelessness and Advance to Zero communities are using. I's very similar to what we've been doing through Built for Zero Canada. So today we're working with 68 communities around the country. 46 have real-time data, 38 have those coordinated systems in place. 13 have achieved a reduction in chronic or veteran homelessness [but] unfortunately only four are managing to sustain that. Despite this wave of new homelessness, we are still able to achieve some reductions. And four have ended homelessness for chronic or veterans.”

“Homelessness is solvable. Homelessness is solvable. It's going to be hard, but hard isn’t impossible, right? And so how do I know? Well, it happens every day. You know, the City of Toronto in Canada is housing 1,000 people a month out of their shelter system. We know homelessness on the scale that we see it today, hasn't always existed. When we had adequate and affordable housing, we didn't have homelessness like we see today. We resolve homelessness in every natural disaster in communities across Canada, around the world. Whether it's here, or in the US, or in Finland… you know, people are making progress, and they're small signs of progress.”

“I think we respond to homelessness from a lack of housing the way we do because for too long we've individualised the issue. We made it about mental illness or addiction or bad choices. We made victims undeserving of help by making it their fault. We allow homelessness to go unsolved because we marginalise the people it happens to, and they have no political power. If we're going to solve homelessness we're going to have to stand and fight — I think.” 

“We need to move the public. We need to build political power, and we need to win the political battles. And if there's one lesson that you can take from our experience in Canada, is that we can fight those battles and we can win. I was listening to a really great podcast, and I encourage you to look it up; it's by a guy named Mark Horvath from the United States called Invisible People. He did a podcast a little while ago with a guy named Jeff Olivet from the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, and he compared homelessness to the great social movements of the past. And I think he's right. I think he's on to something. We need to take inspiration from these movements, you know? Homelessness is structural. We can have all the Housing First programs we want, we can have all the great prevention programs we want we can have all the great… best data and the best research, but if we don't solve the structural issue, if we don't solve the housing issue, we won't get the resources we need, we can't possibly win.”

“Policy moves at the speed of public opinion. Like the great social justice movements, we have to move the public to our side, build our political power and win elections. One of the biggest changes that we're making in our strategy in Canada at the Alliance, is to build our capacity to win elections. In addition to helping communities build coordinated homeless systems, in addition to supporting frontline organisations build the technical skills, we're building the capacity to fight and win campaigns, and shift public policy. We have to stop preaching to the choir and reach out to people outside of these walls. 35% of Canadians have either experienced homelessness themselves or know somebody who has, and there are millions of others feeling the pressure of our housing crisis and more who are supportive of our work. We aim to turn these people into allies and activists who will demand action on housing.”

“And in the great social justice movements, you know, success was never assured. I'm sure the dream of civil rights seemed like a fantasy to too many if not most African American people. The dream of marriage equity must have felt totally out of reach, but in many cases these dreams became reality. But as we're seeing in the US today and around the world, you know, we have to continue to fight to protect those rights.”

“But it took people with a dream to lead right? It takes people willing to tough out the hard times, lift other people up, to inspire, to mobilise, to act. And that's you, right? That's all of us. I firmly believe homelessness will one day soon be recognised as an enforceable right, and homelessness will end. And as Martin Luther King said, ‘the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice’.” 

“And so, with that I turned to Bruce Springsteen. Now I put the slide up on the plane, and my son's like what the hell is he doing there? After 9/11 Bruce Springsteen wrote this album called The Rising. And into it is a song called Into the Fire and, you know, he talks about the First Responders that went into the Twin Towers after the planes hit. And he says, you know, in the song he says:

“Love and duty called you someplace higher, up the stairs and into the fire.”

“And I think of this— and I've started to make it a tradition in our conference at home—to close with this, because, like, all of you are doing this work of ending homelessness… frontline workers are doing this work of ending homelessness every day, you know? Love and duty are calling people to this work. And every day you, and people like you, get up and grab a coffee, or a tall black, or flat white or whatever you call it! brush off whatever disappointment or frustration you had from the day before, [or] celebrate the win you might have had the day before, and get right back at it right? Love and duty, it calls you someplace higher.”

“And so, I'm going to close with the chorus of this song. And it's a tribute to the people, to all of you, and a thank you to all of you who do this work, and kind of like a ‘prayer’ for the homeless sector, [a] prayer for ending homelessness, and the chorus is: “May your strength give us strength. May your faith give us faith. May your hope give us hope, and may your love give us love.”

“Thank you.”