ekaplan's blog

We’re pleased to announce the launch of the second round of the Making the Shift Youth Homelessness Prevention Awards Program. Sponsored by Canada Life, the program is part of a broader suite of activities co-led by A Way Home Canada and the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness to transform our response to youth homelessness. We were so pleased with the results of last year’s program. We gave two awards, and one honorary mention.

A lack of system coordination has long been a critique of the social service sector. Systems have been created without the end-user in mind, resulting in complicated pathways to care. To reduce these system barriers, coordinated systems, named “Coordinated Access” in Canada and “Coordinated Entry” in the United States, have been developed to streamline access to housing and support options among people experiencing homelessness.

I’m writing an open-access e-book on homelessness and have just released Chapter 1 titled “What causes homelessness?” The PDF version of the full chapter is available here.

Here are 10 things to know.

1. Structural causes of homelessness determine whether a community has a little homelessness or a lot of homelessness. The more we understand these, the more we can work collectively to reduce homelessness.

As Australia’s most marginalized group and one of the most poverty-stricken First Nations peoples worldwide, the housing market continues to leave Aboriginal Australians out in the cold. Addressing Aboriginal homelessness requires empowerment, cultural security, self-determination and community leadership. In Western Australia (WA), Aboriginal-led community housing provider Noongar Mia Mia (NMM) is doing groundbreaking work in fostering a culturally responsive housing sector that listens to Aboriginal voices and treats culture as a birthright and great strength.

The Canadian Observatory on Homelessness (COH) was founded in 2008 thanks to a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant that supported partnership building between academics, the homeless-serving sector and beyond. In the years that followed, we built partnerships across Canada and internationally with the common goal of advancing our knowledge and understanding of solutions to homelessness. We received a second SSHRC grant that allowed us to continue this work while also conducting research in partnership along the way.

We are a group of university educators, front-line workers, people with lived experience of homelessness and sector leaders from Hamilton, Ontario. For the past two years, we have worked together as a project team leading a ‘Community University Policy Alliance’ focused on gender-based complex homelessness through McMaster School of Social Work.  

This project was established after Dr. Richard Splane (one of the founders of Canada’s social safety net) left a legacy gift to the School of Social Work at McMaster University to ‘strengthen the study of social policy.’ 

After years of research, we are excited to finally share with you the Walk the Talk toolkit - a toolkit for transforming services and systems in mental health! 

This toolkit is suitable for organisations that provide a variety of services but also have adult clientele living with mental health challenges or illnesses. By the end, organisations that follow the toolkit will have selected, planned for and implemented a new recovery-oriented innovation.

Making the Shift Youth Homelessness Social Innovation Lab’s demonstration projects (MtS DEMS) have been working to identify, develop, test, evaluate, and mobilize innovations in policy and practice that support the prevention and facilitation of sustainable exits from homelessness.

The COVID-19 pandemic coupled with the destruction of encampments has brought inadequate shelter services to the forefront of public conversation. During the pandemic, I worked in a gender-specific low barrier drop-in program in Hamilton, Ontario.

I have always viewed Black History Month as both a time to take stock of Black communities’ collective struggles for visibility as well as to celebrate their contributions to the advancement of Canada. However, the prevalence of homelessness among Black youth suggests that there is still work to be done. At the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness (COH), we believe that to address homelessness, we must understand the roots of racial disparities and take meaningful action to reverse structural inequities.