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Publication Date: 2020
There is a high prevalence of Indigenous youth experiencing either precarious housing or homelessness in northwestern Ontario. Given that Indigenous pathways to homelessness can differ from non-Indigenous youth, interventions that address homelessness must also adapt to meet diverse needs. The Housing Outreach Program Collaborative (HOP-C) is a tertiary prevention intervention designed to provide congruent housing and peer and mental health suppo...
Trialing the feasibility of a critical time intervention for youth transitioning out of homelessness
Publication Date: 2020
Little is known regarding the specific types of service models and collaborations that are necessary to support diverse populations of youth in transition out of homelessness. Transitional supports addressing the complex needs of this population are needed to stabilize the array of housing arrangements that youth access. This study was a pilot randomized controlled trial of one such critical time intervention, called the Housing Outreach Program—...
Publisher: Wilfred Laurier University Press
Publication Date: 2018
Youth are one of the fastest growing segments of the homeless population. Although there has been much research on how youth become homeless and survive on the streets, we know very little about their pathways off the street and the many challenges that present during this process.
This book relates the lived experiences of homeless youth as they negotiate the individual, sociocultural, and economic tensions of transitioning out of homeless and s...
Publication Date: 2018
Purpose: People experiencing homelessness are high-users of hospital care in Canada. To better understand the scope of the issue, and how these patients are discharged from hospital, a national survey of key stakeholders was conducted in 2017. The paper aims to discuss this issue.
Design/methodology/approach: The Canadian Observatory on Homelessness distributed an online survey to their network of members through e-mail and social media. A sample...
Publication Date: 2019
Peer support has a lengthy history in health and community services with particular prominence in areas such as addictions and mental health services. This growth in emphasis and evidence has not been mirrored in the area of youth peer support broadly nor peer support among homeless youth specifically. This situation has persisted despite the growing emphasis on youth lived experience engagement—including peer support. This paucity of literature...
Publisher: Canadian Observatory on Homelessness Press
Publication Date: 2018
Evaluation research involves gathering a wide variety of indicators in order to better understand how a program is operating, its impact, and what can be done to improve it. The performance indicators that many organizations collect routinely as part of their daily operations can provide important information for a program evaluation (e.g., attendance, client demographics), but are not themselves considered evaluation research. Evaluation involve...
Publisher: Canadian Observatory on Homelessness Press
Publication Date: 2018
Across contexts, peer workers and peer mentors are becoming an increasingly important resource in delivering youth-focused programming for young people who are homeless or street involved. Peer work has been established across a number of practice areas, including public health, addictions, education, and community-based research. The most considerable development in the role has been within the mental health sector, where peer work is gaining in...
Publisher: Canadian Observatory on Homelessness Press
Publication Date: 2018
Young people who are homeless experience converging and amplified risk due to their developmental stage, as well as the stress, risk behaviours, and associated trauma that often accompany becoming or being homeless. They tend to be immersed in environments characterized by multiple adversities over their lifetime and it is generally agreed that the mental health of these youth is poorer than that of youth who are housed. Most youth report that the...
Publisher: Canadian Observatory on Homelessness Press
Publication Date: 2018
The book contains four sections covering a range of topics that service providers inquire about most often. Part 1: Approaches and Interventions describes specific approaches to addressing the mental health and substance use challenges of youth experiencing homelessness. Topics include the community reinforcement approach and motivational enhancement therapy, dialectical behaviour therapy, mindfulness approaches, trauma-informed care, ecologicall...
Publication Date: 2016
Youth without housing experience more regulation and conflict with criminal justice than their housed counterparts. Using in-depth qualitative interviews with fifty-one young people, we focus on how efforts to move away from homelessness towards long-term housing stability are impacted by conflict with law, a term referring to a broad range of experiences with various authorities in the legal system, social services, shelters, etc. Our paper come...
Publication Date: 2016
This paper explores the lives of formerly homeless young people as they transitioned towards housing stability. The study employed a longitudinal design involving 51 street youth in Halifax, N.S. (n = 21) and Toronto, ON (n = 30). This paper sheds light upon the pathways through which young people transitioned away from homelessness using the developmental lens of emerging adulthood: a stage involving numerous developmental struggles (identity, i...
Publication Date: 2016
This study examined the process of establishing post homeless lives among 51 recently homeless youth in two major urban centers in Canada. A mixed methods strategy was employed to characterize this process. Quantitatively, a range of mental health, community integration, and quality of life measures were employed four times over the course of 1 year to describe how these indicators of wellbeing shifted in this period. It was found that over the c...
Publication Date: 2013
While there exists an extensive body of knowledge regarding the risks associated with youth homelessness, very little work has addressed the process of exiting street contexts. This paper reports baseline findings from an ongoing longitudinal study assessing factors associated with a successful transition out of homelessness. Fifty-one formerly homeless youth who obtained stable housing in the past 2 months to 2 years participated in this study wh...
Publication Date: 2011
Among marginalized populations, homeless adults are known to have elevated rates of mental health and substance use problems compared to the general population, but less is known about their youthful homeless counterparts. While few studies currently exist, what research has been conducted among street-involved youth has confirmed high rates of comorbidity among this population. However, few of these studies explore predictors of concurrent menta...