ekaplan's blog

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.

Background:

The United Nations’ International Day of Education began on January 24^th, 2019 to celebrate the importance of education.

Status Quo

What do we know about how young people become homeless? While the answer to this question may sound simple, in reality, it’s very complex. This blog aims to explore the root causes of youth homelessness based on past and emerging research.  

This month we are featuring training to showcase research on housing and homelessness among multiply marginalized women (cis and trans) and gender-diverse people (including non-binary and trans men).