Community planning is essential to preventing and ending youth homelessness. A Way Home Canada supports sector and community capacity to plan, implement and sustain effective, evidence-based and measurable strategies to prevent and end youth homelessness. Communities everywhere are asking for assistance on how to develop and implement successful plans. In response to this need, A Way Home’s Youth Homelessness Community Planning Webinar Series will provide guidance on the fundamentals for strong community planning practice over the 2017 year.
Phase One webinars, from January to March, will provide the fundamentals by introducing key concepts of youth homelessness community planning, applying the Collective Impact framework specifically to youth homelessness and focusing on the role of Ontario Service Managers and their communities in ending and preventing youth homelessness.
In Phase Two, we will dig deeper into community planning with topics ranging from the role of funders, government policy, research, youth engagement, regional planning, achieving early wins and so much more!
Who should attend?
Consider participating in one or all of these webinars if you are a(n):
- Community Leader or coordinator of a community planning process or want to start one?
- Funder who wants to increase the impact of your support on youth homelessness.
- Ontario Service Manager who wants to support better service integration for young people.
- Community Entity (CE) or Community Advisory Board (CAB) looking to enhance the impact of HPS investments on youth homelessness.
- Policy maker who wants to ensure community plans are aligned with government policy for maximum impact?
- Executive Director (or Manager) of a youth-serving agency who wants better integration of services in your community so young people no longer slip through the cracks.
- Member of a community planning steering committee or board member who wants to know more about the mechanics of community planning to make more effective contributions.
- Consultant hired to support youth homelessness efforts by conducting research, writing plans or facilitating stakeholder groups.
- Researcher working on a project with bearing on youth homelessness and want to enhance its research and policy relevance.
Upcoming webinars
Our first webinar will be on January 31, 2017 at 1PM (EST). Dr. Alina Turner will be walking step-by-step through the fundamentals involved in building a plan to prevent and end youth homelessness. Alina has developed such plans in a variety of communities: urban, rural and regional. She brings a system planning approach to her work and grounds this in Collective Impact principles. In this webinar, she will work through topics including: community readiness, research and consultations approaches, setting targets and costs analysis, and implementation considerations. To register for the webinar visit https://youthhomelessnesscommunityplanning101.eventbrite.ca
Our second webinar on February 28, 2017 at 1PM (EST) with Melanie Redman, Executive Director of A Way Home Canada and Dr. Stephen Gaetz, Director of the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness will offer a practical training on Collective Impact and the role it plays in youth homelessness community planning. The session will be peppered with mini case studies of the successes and pitfalls of Collective Impact work and what we can learn from them. Participants will gain a rich understanding of why Collective Impact is critical if we want to prevent and end youth homelessness. Registration information will soon be available on the A Way Home website.
You can also email me at mjmckitterick@awayhome.ca to sign up for our newsletter to receive updates on upcoming webinar dates and registration information.
We’re looking forward to sharing this information with you and hope to see you there!
This series was developed with generous support from the Government of Ontario and in partnership with the Ontario Municipal Social Services Association, (OMSSA) and the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness (COH).