Anne Marie Hopkins joins Cornerstone Housing for Women as executive director

In June, Cornerstone Housing for Women welcomed Anne Marie Hopkins as its new executive director. In an interview with Perspective, she said that her first months have been busy learning, getting to know people and the organization in more depth. “The past couple of months have been great,” she said. “You never know what you’re going to walk into, but the team here is incredible — just the most passionate, compassionate people who just really want to do the best for women and gender diverse folks in our city.”

Hopkins comes to the role with deep experience both in frontline work as well as in management and leadership roles.

Growing up in Orleans, she recalled that has always been concerned about people who were vulnerable, getting left behind or experiencing things that weren’t fair. “Very much a caretaker, I have always loved being part of a community and giving back. … So I went into community development right out of high school.”

Hopkins began her training in a community outreach and development program at Sheridan College in Brampton, Ont. “I did a couple of really good placements there that got me some actual frontline experience and really fell in love with being in this field.” When she returned to Ottawa, she earned her Bachelor of Social Work degree at Carleton University while working at in an administrative role Ottawa Inner City Health (OICH) from 2009 to 2017. During those years, she also volunteered at the emergency shelter Shepherds of Good Hope and later at the Salvation Army in an outreach van used to visit encampments, often taking people who were homeless to and from hospital.

In 2017, she became a manager at OICH as it launched a peer worker pilot program at Shepherds of Good Hope where they hired individuals with lived experience to help provide support to people in the community who were homeless and/or who were using drugs. “That project expanded drastically because the overdose crisis got very out of control very quickly,” Hopkins said. “I was running a team of peer workers who were essentially running around the shelters and around the downtown core, just responding to overdoses. And that was a wild, wild time. Later that year, InnerCity Health opened their supervised injection site. I was the manager there…. on the team of folks who opened it. It was one of the four in the city and the only one open 24 hours a day. And it was incredibly busy. It still is. I was a manager there for five years, and then I became a director of operations at InnerCity.”

Hopkins developed a good working relationship with Cornerstone through that work. Its Booth Street supportive housing residence has an aging at home program that is run jointly with OICH. “So, 20 of the 40 units here are run jointly with Inner City Health. And Inner City Health staff are on site here 24 hours a day, managing the healthcare of those 20 folks who are typically aging, have complex health issues, who need more medical care than what Cornerstone could give. So, we run the program together.”

Last year, Hopkins earned her MBA, a program she started online at the University of Fredericton during the pandemic, and she felt ready and wanted to be challenged in a new way after 17 years with OICH. “I really wanted to work with women. I didn’t want to leave the field of [working with] the homeless, mental health, substance use. Then this position came up and…it all worked out. The timing was amazing.”

What experience best prepared her to lead Cornerstone? “It’s absolutely my frontline experience. Working those frontline positions, being a very hands-on manager in the supervised injection site at Shepherd’s, responding to overdoses beside staff, really understanding the day-to-day realities. Working in this field, in social services and in healthcare, is so different now than it was 10 years ago. …But it’s really my foundation and frontline work that keeps me really connected to the work and that really drives my passion for wanting to run a really good and strong organization.

“I’ve loved community health care and social work,” including looking for ways to reduce barriers and to take care of diverse communities, and “really believing that the folks from those communities are the strongest experts that can tell us what they need and how they need it” Hopkins said.

“Working in an organization like InnerCity that really values peer work and lived experience really helped solidify, fundamentally for me, how I want to work with communities and have that very shared approach and that understanding of what it means to have power, what it means to have power when you’re working with an equity -seeking community. Those have always been passions of mine.

“There are some mental health challenges within my family, and so I have always had a personal connection to that … and those kinds of challenges. So that also has been sort of my North Star, my guiding fundamentals … and has very much has shaped a lot of who I am, how I am a social worker and how I lead.”

When asked what the biggest challenges that Cornerstone faces are, Hopkins said funding instability is major. “There are many incredibly important social services in this city and we’re all asking for money from the same pot…. There’s been a lot of changes and some instability with funding sources. It’s been really challenging. It’s also puts more pressure on our fundraising team.”

This is compounded by inflation. Cornerstone’s costs for food have increased dramatically, but Hopkins added that has also impacted donors. “If you look at reports from the Ontario nonprofit network, organizations are struggling to fundraise because people are in more precarious financial situations and aren’t in a position to donate as much.”

She said that another challenge is “trying to keep our employees well. This is a field that has a much higher burnout rate than it did 10 years ago,” she said. “When I first became a social worker, for probably the first five or six years, I never saw one overdose. It just wasn’t something that was part of everyday life. There were people who used drugs that we supported … but they could maintain a lot more function and stability than they can now…. There are many more difficult realities when you have a population that is … impacted by the toxic drug supply…. Each overdose is a hypoxic event, your brain is without oxygen, and that causes brain injuries [which] bring a whole other level of challenges to service providers,” she said. “It’s really difficult to have a really well employee base when they’re experiencing all these harsh realities.”

Cornerstone has now hired a clinical services specialist to support staff, providing debriefing and confidential counselling after critical incidents such as overdoses or a death, as well as helping to inform decision making about the best ways to support staff and reduce burnout.

Cornerstone grew in 2024 with the opening of its Eccles Street residence, which added 46 units of supportive housing, as well as expanding its emergency shelter capacity from 60 to 165 when it moved from O’Connor Street downtown to a new building on Carling Ave. So for now, Hopkins says the focus is on stabilization in the organization and ensuring Cornerstone is sustainable for the future.

She says she is enjoying the change from working in a head office where she didn’t see any clients to working on the main floor of Cornerstone’s Booth Street residence. Now, she said, “I always have my door open, and I can hear residents laughing with the staff….” Seeing women who have been homeless and in a constant state of fight-or-flight start to settle into a sense of safety is rewarding, she said. And hearing them say, “Oh my gosh, I love my apartment, there’s this little balcony…. I’m a part of the community now, and I feel so supported by the staff…. This case manager goes the extra mile for me.’ That’s the stuff that makes all the difficult things worth it,” Hopkins said. “They go on outings as a community. They had a beach day the other day … and they went to a farm and saw some horses and pet some animals, and the photos are just pure joy. … Anytime there’s a bad day, I need to go spend some time with residents because I’ll feel better.

“And that is sort of the beauty of Cornerstone, is that everything that is done here is done with such care and intention. I knew that before I started working here, but I don’t think I understood to what level.”