Welcome

Our History

The Old Brewery Mission has a rich history spanning more than a century. It was born at the end of the 19th century out of a need to respond to the problems encountered by the first wave of homelessness in Montreal.

It all began during the particularly harsh and cold winter of 1889-1890. Mina Douglas and Eva Findlay, two wealthy women from Westmount, came up with the idea of taking in the poor and providing them warmth, comfort and a hot nourishing soup. With their determination, they convinced influential businessmen to support them in their undertaking and were so successful that on February 27, 1890 they welcomed their first clients in a shelter, the beginning of the Old Brewery Mission.

At that time Montreal was in a state of transformation. The railroads now linked the country from one end to the other. Industry was expanding. Business was booming and the possibilities for growth and wealth seemed to be infinite. Entire families, accustomed to rural life, found themselves in an urban environment, sometimes in unbearable circumstances of misery and dependency – a far cry from their life in the country, where they were basically self-sufficient people surrounded by friends and family to whom they could turn when in need.

In this contradictory landscape of the emerging industrial world, the Old Brewery Mission was born. Responding to the rapid changes brought on by industrialization and urbanization, what began as a soup kitchen to soothe the hunger of the poorest soon transformed itself, by the end of the 19th century, into a shelter where men who were homeless could come not only for a hot meal but also for a bed for the night. During the twentieth century, the Old Brewery Mission accompanied society’s rejected men and adapted so as to alleviate their misery.

But the end of the twentieth century the increasing number of homeless people brought a new kind of challenges and its impact on the Old Brewery Mission was major. While in earlier times the typical homeless person was an older man, out of work, often battling alcohol dependency, today that has changed. Poverty took on a new face. Men and women from 20 to 70 year of agelive in the shelter . Some of them have severe mental problems, and have been abandoned by our public institutions that can no longer accommodate them. Others are hard drug users, abuse prescription medications or inject themselves with toxic substances.

The many facets of homelessness pose many important challenges, which we must address in order to help individuals out of emergency shelters and into structured programs aimed at helping them regain autonomy and responsibility, in effect solving homelessness.