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Publication Date: 2019
With over 200 delegates in attendance in Victoria in 2019, participation numbers at Caucus Days have continually increased since its inception six years ago, serving to highlight the importance of Indigenous housing and homelessness issues in Canada. Caucus Day 2019 was focused on this growth, mapping the journey of the Caucus and asking crucial questions about its future in both the short and long term. This Caucus works on incredibly important...
Publication Date: 2019
Welfare states are built upon three central social policy pillars: (1) income programs, including an assortment of income maintenance and security benefits; (2) social services, comprising a diverse constellation of provisions, which furnish care such as health care and education, and “in kind” benefits; and (3) protective legislation, encompassing a dense web of proactive and preventative laws, rights, and entitlements, such as health and safety...
Organization: Employment and Social Development Canada
Publication Date: 2019
The National Shelter Study is an ongoing analysis of homelessness shelter use trends in Canada. This report is the third analysis of national emergency shelter data collected over time. The first study was published in 2013 and covered the period from 2005 to 2009. This information was updated in 2016 and extended the timeframe of the analysis from 2005 to 2014. The current report updates and extends findings to include data from 2015 and 2016.
T...
Organization: Employment and Social Development Canada
Publication Date: 2019
Between March 1 and April 30, 2018, 61 communities participated in Everyone Counts, the second nationally coordinated Point-in-Time (PiT) count of homelessness in Canadian Communities. The first count took place in 2016 with 32 participating communities. Everyone Counts 2020 will be the third nationally-coordinated PiT count and is planned for March and April 2020.
The findings highlighted in this report are the result of the enumeration and surv...
Publication Date: 2019
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (DTES) neighbourhood is commonly associated with stigmatized and criminalized activities and attendant risks and harms. Many spaces/places in this urban neighbourhood are customarily portrayed and experienced as risky and harmful, and are implicated in experiences of structural (and physical) violence and marginalization. Drawing on 50 qualitative interviews, this paper explores how spaces/places frequently used by s...
Publication Date: 2019
There is a vast literature on organizational change, but research on a key aspect of organizational change, the tactics used by change leaders, is limited. To address this gap, a questionnaire assessing the use of organizational change tactics has been used to allow an organization's staff to describe an organizational change initiative they had experienced. This study also included an interview with the agency's director of programs, an intervie...
Organization: Maytree
Publication Date: 2019
Housing advocates have long been calling for governments to recognize the right to housing, but for policy-makers, bureaucrats, and private sector partners the concept is less familiar. Through HousingTO, the City has an opportunity to be explicit about what the right to housing is and what a human rights-based approach means. This will help ensure that the ideas underpinning the right to housing are understood by everyone, and that all partners...
Publication Date: 2019
The Urban Indigenous Action Plan (the plan) is a policy framework that was co-developed by the government of Ontario (Ontario), the Ontario Federation of Indigenous Friendship Centres (OFIFC), the Métis Nation of Ontario (MNO), and the Ontario Native Women’s Association (ONWA). The plan is a guidance document to assist Ontario in its approach to developing policies, programs and practices for urban Indigenous issues and needs in this province. Th...
Publication Date: 2019
Rates of homelessness and poor mental health present significant challenges across the globe. In this article, we explore how these intersecting issues have been addressed in Wales through Part 2 of the Housing (Wales) Act 2014 through a paradigm shift towards a prevention model. This article reports findings from a study (conducted between 2016 and 2018) which evaluated the processes and impacts of the Act against the backdrop of welfare reform...
Publication Date: 2019
This study examines the impacts of structural violence on women and how this can influence their trajectory into and their sustainable exits from homelessness.
The research is qualitative and community-based, including 15 interviews with mothers living in emergency shelters and a group interview with nine professionals. An advisory group was formed through partnership with community services to provide project oversight and guide and interpret th...
Publication Date: 2019
A high percentage of young people experiencing homelessness have been in foster care. However, not all of these are young people who “aged out.” Rather, some are young people who exited foster care through reunification and adoption. This brief highlights actions that child welfare systems can take to prevent young people who have experienced foster care from becoming homeless, regardless of how they exited. This is the seventh in a series of bri...
Organization: Wabi Sabi Planning Laboratories
Publication Date: 2019
On April 1 and April 3, 2019, nine speakers from the community housing sectors in large urban areas of British Columbia and Quebec shared the stage in Victoria B.C. and collectively told a story. They told a story of community organizing and housing innovation in Canada for a more socially inclusive society that they hope to build. The theme of community equity building weaved through their individual stories, highlighting how they are incrementa...
Organization: Homeward Trust
Publication Date: 2019
Through the research project described in this report, we (a research group and two community organizations) explored how a supportive housing program, designed to serve teen families in Edmonton (the Successful Families Program), is starting to impact participants, the research field, and organizational/program policy of the partnering community organizations. Teen families are referred to the Successful Families Program and undergo a screening...
Publication Date: 2019
Homelessness is a complex but solvable problem. Working from a rights-based approach to housing, Hamilton will end chronic homelessness by 2025. The City of Hamilton serves an important role in the coordination and delivery of services and benefits as Service Manager and Community Entity on behalf of the Governments of Ontario and Canada respectively. Serving as the lead systems planning organization on homelessness at a local level, the City has...
Publication Date: 2019
This study reviews collective evidence on the longitudinal impact of housing disadvantage (based on tenure, precarity, and physical characteristics) on mental health. It is focused on temporally ordered studies where exposures preceded outcomes, a key criterion to establishing causal evidence. This systematic review confirms that prior exposure to housing disadvantage may impact mental health later in life.
Publication Date: 2019
Health utility assessments are important for economic evaluations but few instruments have been validated in homeless people with mental illness. We examined the convergent validity of the EuroQol-5 Dimension 3-level questionnaire (EQ-5D-3L) as a measure of quality of life in homeless adults with mental illness.
Organization: Heartland Alliance
Publication Date: 2019
For a housing provider, translating the desire to improve housing opportunity for people with records into concrete policies and practices can be a challenge. For providers who are putting out fires each and every day at their properties, slowing down to develop new approaches may be difficult. The purpose of Win-Win is to recommend a number of policies and practices—ranging from small changes to the more robust—that housing providers can adopt a...
Publication Date: 2019
The Canadian Coalition for the Rights of Children and A Way Home Canada created this fact sheet to shed light on how a rights-based system approach can be used to prevent and end youth homelessness.
Publication Date: 2019
Community Progress Indicators (CPI) Reports use a standard set of indicators to produce a detailed portrait of homelessness in the community, and document the impact of a community’s efforts to reduce and prevent homelessness. Shelter data provided by the community’s emergency shelters (e.g., through the Homeless Individuals and Families Information System-HIFIS), is supplemented by contextual data drawn from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporati...
Publication Date: 2019
This brief proposes tangible mechanisms for shared decision-making with respect to the case files and plans of care for young people growing up in Canada’s child welfare systems. Grounded in a review of best and promising practices, with respect to rights-based data collection and oversight in child protection settings as well as shared decision-making with respect to electronic health records, we propose a rights-based and custodial approach to...