Welcome back to the grind! I hope everyone had a lovely holiday break. Here’s the Year in Review from the perspective of the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness (COH) and the Homeless Hub.
Personnel
Allyson Marsolais, our Project Manager, has been back from maternity leave since May and although I doubt we can compete with the quality time she spent with her daughter, I know she’s pleased to be back in the thick of things!
Tanya Gulliver-Garcia, who covered Allyson’s maternity leave, is now a Research Coordinator with the COH. She does a lot of content creation, including blog posts, toolkits, reports, etc.
Unfortunately, after 16 months with us, Naomi Nichols our Postdoctoral Fellow has left us to become Director of Knowledge Mobilization and Capacity Building for the Youth Research and Evaluation eXchange (YouthREX), School of Social Work, York University. While she will no longer be our postdoc, Naomi remains on the COH grant as a collaborator, is a member of the COH Executive Committee and promises to play a big role in Research Priority Areas 6 (Legal and Justice Issues) and 8 (KMb and Research Impact). We’re thrilled to keep this connection going and wish her luck with her new endeavor.
Social Media
Our communications team has been working on raising awareness of homelessness research and making it more accessible and impactful. We’ve been using social media tools like Twitter and Facebook to help us engage with researchers, service providers, decision makers and the general public. We now have over 3,056 Facebook likes, which is 1,006 more than last year, and over 9,381 Twitter followers, an addition of 3,614 from the number last year. We are so very close to 10K followers! Help us reach that goal and follow our Twitter account.
In addition to our established social tools we are also now available to follow on LinkedIn and Pinterest. Pinterest is a great tool which has a collection of infographics we’ve created and those that we have used in our Infographic Wednesday blog posts, along with a visual list of our reports and papers, research summaries, and other graphics we have created.
Speaking of graphics, we discovered a new tool called Stacker. This storytelling application allowed us to create three exciting interactive infographics. See them in action below:
In 2014, the Homeless Hub hosted a few successful Tweet Chats. We hope to continue to hold them on a monthly basis with a range of topics on homelessness. The only thing you need to participate is a Twitter account and just a few minutes out of your day to follow the #HHChat hashtag. You can see our previous chats on our Storify account.
Webinars
We officially launched the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness in November 2014 with an online webinar. Introduced by Stephen Gaetz, four members of the COH discussed their research priority areas. Carey Doberstien’s presentation focused on system level responses to homelessness, Yale D. Belanger talked about Aboriginal homelessness, Johanna Macdonald spoke about her research into legal services for homeless youth and a presentation in French was done by Céline Bellot. If you missed it, you can watch the video and download the presentation on the events page.
Anyone can become a member of the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness for free. For a list of the benefits and a sign up form visit the COH registration page.
This year, we will invest more time into holding monthly webinars to highlight research of the COH members. Our upcoming webinar with Jesse Thistle will be January 22nd at 1PM on his Boots on the Ground research into intergenerational trauma within the descendants of Batoche Metis who historically hail from Saskatchewan. To learn more about this webinar and register to attend, please go to the Boots on the Ground events page.
Newsletter
Our weekly newsletter provides up-to-date information on homelessness research, news, events, latest blog posts from Research Matters. In the summer with the implementation of Canada’s Anti-Spam legislation, we had to reconfirm that some of our subscribers still wished to receive our e-mails. Those that did not reply were unfortunately taken off the list. While that was a big hit to our numbers, we are now back stronger than ever with over 3,317 subscribers, a growth of 914.5%!
Website
On February 13, 2014 we launched the new and improved Homeless Hub website. Along with a new look we made structural changes to the site that makes it easier to find information that is important to you. We have added a Solutions section, improved upon the Community Profiles, created a new Homelessness 101 topics section and reorganized the navigation menu based on feedback from our users. We have since then added an events calendar and continue to test and improve the site constantly. In 2014, we had 745,321 visits to our site, which is almost 300,000 more than the previous year.
Blog
Since we instituted a regular blog schedule (Monday - Solutions, Wednesday – Infographics and Friday – Ask the Hub), we have been getting quite a bit of regular traffic to our Research Matters blog. Since January 2014 we have posted 174 blog posts, while last year we had 120 posts. Not only has the number of posts increased, the engagement we received from our readers also increased on the blog and on our social media. We’re happy that these blog posts are contributing to important conversations in homelessness.
Here are 3 of our most popular ones from 2014:
Why do homeless people have pets?
Infographic Wednesday - Social Determinants of Health
How can homeless people afford cell phones?
Publications
In 2014, we provided even more original content than ever before. Together with the Mental Health Commission of Canada we launched the Canadian Housing First Toolkit, available as a website and a downloadable PDF. This exciting new resource highlights the knowledge from the At Home/Chez Soi national research project. Communities across Canada looking to implement Housing First programs can now easily make use of the wealth of knowledge we have on this highly successful program model.
We published five new reports and papers in 2014:
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The State of Homelessness in Canada 2014Gaetz, S., Gulliver, T., Richter, T. |
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A Safe and Decent Place to Live: Towards a Housing First Framework for YouthGaetz, S. |
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Coming of Age: Reimagining the Response to Youth Homelessness in CanadaGaetz, S. |
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Aboriginal Homelessness in Canada: A Literature ReviewPatrick, C. |
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Leaving Home: Youth Homelessness in York RegionNoble, A., Donaldson, J., Gaetz, S., Mirza, S., Coplan, I., Fleischer, D. |
Coming Up …
In spring 2015 we will be launching a French version of the Homeless Hub website. The French Homeless Hub will be complete with the French resources we have, a translation of all our topics and solutions sections and a whole new collection of homelessness research resources. If you have any French resources (research, reports, blogs, videos, etc.) you’d like to add to our library, please send them our way.
We will also be publishing the new Canadian Point-in-Time Count Methodology and Toolkit, Homelessness is Only One Piece of My Puzzle: Implications for Policy and Practice, a book written by people with lived experience of homelessness, as well as interactive toolkits for working with youth, new videos and infographics and much more! So stay tuned!