Canadian Observatory on Homelessness
The Canadian Observatory on Homelessness is the largest national research institute devoted to homelessness in Canada. The COH is the curator of the Homeless Hub.
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The Canadian Observatory on Homelessness is the largest national research institute devoted to homelessness in Canada. The COH is the curator of the Homeless Hub.
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Author(s): Laurie Monsebraaten
Publication Date: 2012
Ontario is dead last in Canada when it comes to growing poverty, increasing income inequality and financial support for public services, says a coalition of labour and community groups formed last spring to oppose the province’s austerity budget. The report by the Ontario Common Front released at Queen’s Park Wednesday, aims to inform Ontarians about the social and economic issues at stake as the province begins drafting next spring’s budget,...
Author(s): Laurie Monsebraaten
Publication Date: 2012
It was the champion of the homeless. Born in the late 1990s, when a combination of deep cuts to welfare and affordable housing were pushing hundreds of destitute Torontonians onto the streets, the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee firmly established itself as the voice of the most vulnerable. The social activists, academics and business people who made up the TDRC — as it was also called — took up the cause with evangelistic fervour. In...
Author(s): Laurie Monsebraaten
Publication Date: 2012
A slight dip in food-bank use across the province in 2011 may be short-lived, says the Ontario Association of Food Banks. Although the number of food-bank users in March 2011 was down slightly from March 2010, food banks collecting data this month for next year’s report say demand is up again, the association said. “It is a real concern,” said Bill Laidlaw, executive director of the association, a network of 20 regional food banks and more...
Author(s): Laurie Monsebraaten
Publication Date: 2012
Tiffany McDowell was thrilled to land a customer service position at an Oshawa technology firm last January, several months after her daughter’s first birthday. The job, which required no night work and was located on a bus route near her daughter’s babysitter, seemed like a perfect fit for the financially strapped single mom who had worked in a book store and a call centre before Alexandra was born. But her hopes of climbing out of poverty...
Author(s): Laurie Monsebraaten
Publication Date: 2011
When it comes to helping Canada’s 639,000 children living in poverty, the more things change, the more they stay the same. That is the sobering message from Campaign 2000, a national coalition of more than 120 groups and individuals that has been lobbying for federal action on the issue for two decades. “Neither the promised poverty elimination or plans have materialized,” the group says in its 20th anniversary progress report on Ottawa’s 1...
Author(s): Laurie Monsebraaten
Publication Date: 2011
It would have taken $12.6 billion to give the 3.5 million Canadians living in poverty enough income to live above the poverty line in 2007. And yet Canadians spent at least double that amount treating the consequences of poverty that year, says the National Council of Welfare. Clearly, this spending pattern doesn’t make good economic or social sense, the council says in its report “The Dollars and Sense of Solving Poverty,” being released W...
Author(s): Laurie Monsebraaten
Publication Date: 2011
Food bank use in the Greater Toronto Area has eased slightly to less than 1.1 million visits in the past year, says the Daily Bread Food Bank in its annual profile of area hunger. But those numbers remain “unacceptably high” and are still 14 per cent above food bank use in 2008, before the recession hit, says the report released Wednesday. The report calls on the province’s social assistance review commission to transform Ontario’s income s...
Author(s): Laurie Monsebraaten
Publication Date: 2011
A record 19,817 Toronto children are waiting for daycare subsidies while the city scrambles to keep its chronically underfunded system afloat with unused money from all-day kindergarten. It is a situation akin to “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,” said Jane Mercer of the Toronto Coalition for Better Child Care. The city’s recovering economy, high cost of living and a new generation of young educated women entering the workforce a...
Author(s): Laurie Monsebraaten
Publication Date: 2011
Pat O’Brien’s life work is to find parents for teenagers in foster care. But the straight-talking founder of You Gotta Believe, a New York child welfare agency, doesn’t say he is in the adoption business. He calls it homelessness prevention. That’s because although just 2 per cent of North Americans grow up in foster care, surveys show they make up between 40 and 60 per cent of the homeless population. “The single greatest cause of ho...
Author(s): Laurie Monsebraaten
Publication Date: 2011
Waiting lists for affordable housing in Ontario surged to more than 152,000 households in January, despite modest economic growth in the province, according to a report to be released Monday.
This year’s increase is a 7.4 per cent jump over last year and almost 18 per cent more than in 2009 when 129,000 families were waiting, says the Ontario Non-Profit Housing Association in its 2011 waiting list survey, obtained by the Star.
Of the 10,000 new h...
Author(s): Laurie Monsebraaten
Publication Date: 2011
They rise up among the postwar bungalows of Toronto's inner suburbs. Towering buildings that house hundreds of thousands of the city's poorest people. These apartments are often the first home for those who came to this country looking for a better life. Once built to house modest-income and middle-class families, these aging highrises have increasingly fallen into disrepair and become rife with problems — drug dealing, vandalism, bug infestat...
Author(s): Laurie Monsebraaten
Publication Date: 2010
Ottawa needs a comprehensive plan and dedicated funding to ease the plight of 3.1 million Canadians living in poverty, including more than 600,000 children and 700,000 working poor households, says a landmark parliamentary report. The 300-page report, tabled in the House of Commons Wednesday, calls on Ottawa to start work immediately on a federal poverty reduction plan in consultation with provinces, municipalities and Aboriginal governments....
Author(s): Laurie Monsebraaten
Publication Date: 2010
For years, Fred Greene cycled through a series of temporary jobs and troublesome roommates. His financial plan consisted of stuffing his wages into his back pocket. But everything changed in 2005, when Greene wound up in Toronto’s Fort York Residence shelter and enrolled in an innovative money management and savings program that rewards shelter residents with $3 for every $1 they save up to a maximum personal savings of $400. The money mus...
Author(s): Laurie Monsebraaten
Publication Date: 2010
The Harper government has refused to adopt any of the 74 poverty-fighting recommendations that were part of a sweeping Senate report on homelessness and poverty. Instead, the government’s response Monday night to the Senate’s 300-page report was a 20-page list of Ottawa’s current programs and a commitment to “take the committee’s recommendations under advisement as it continues to find ways to help Canadians succeed.” Liberal Senator Art Eg...
Author(s): Laurie Monsebraaten
Publication Date: 2008
Homeless women in Toronto are 10 times more likely to be sexually assaulted and twice as likely to have a mental illness as homeless men, according to a new report to be released today. Yet despite their poor health and extreme vulnerability, they aren't getting the health care and social support they urgently need, says the report, the first of its kind to document the health needs of homeless women.
Author(s): Laurie Monsebraaten
Publication Date: 2010
"We were nearly homeless. But there are so many different levels before you become truly homeless," says Richards, whose family was featured in a documentary film about homelessness in Toronto released last month by the Sky Works Charitable Foundation. "What is so troubling, is that ours is not a unique story."
Author(s): Laurie Monsebraaten
Publication Date: 2010
Ontario's social services minister is tweaking four welfare rules in the wake of outrage over the elimination of a Special Diet Allowance in last Thursday's budget, the Star has learned.
Author(s): Laurie Monsebraaten
Publication Date: 2009
The snide remarks and put-downs were bad enough. But when his mother's live-in boyfriend sent him to a psychiatrist to be "fixed," 17-year-old Solomon Christiansen moved out.
Author(s): Laurie Monsebraaten
Publication Date: 2009
Ontario has appointed the head of Toronto's Daily Bread Food Bank to head a panel of anti-poverty advocates to advise the government on a long-awaited review of its welfare system, the Star has learned. "If this group can't make the proper recommendations, then nobody can," said food bank executive director Gail Nyberg. Almost 800,000 Ontarians – including about 236,000 children and about 260,000 disabled people – live on...