A Data Infrastructure Roadmap for Preventing Youth Homelessness
Overview
About forty percent of individuals in Canada who face homelessness say that their first experience happened before age 16.
They are stuck early in a pattern of repeated homelessness that could be avoidable by ‘making the shift’ from current crisis-oriented responses to one emphasizing prevention.
To better support youth while preventing homelessness, we designed a plan to build and use information across Canada. We sought to connect governments, community organizations, and researchers to information. This information can help create better policies and research. And most importantly, it can help reduce homelessness.
We led activities in partnership with Dr. Yale Belanger and Making the Shift. Learning from previous practices, we co-designed the plan with interest holders across the homelessness sector. Youth with lived experiences of homelessness, Indigenous communities, and front-line organizations are central to our process.
Together, we are making the shift to prevent youth homelessness in Canada.
Roadmap Resources
Summary Report: A Roadmap for Youth Homelessness Data Infrastructure (Feb 2025)
The Summary Report reflects three years of community engagement in developing our co-created roadmap for youth homelessness data infrastructure. The roadmap includes four recommendations for interest holders:
- Build quality community engagement
- Support better data collection and use
- Support collaboration around prevention
- Build up data for youth homelessness prevention
For each recommendation, we also provide immediate and long-term actions interest holders can take to prevent youth homelessness.
Final Report: A Roadmap for Youth Homelessness Data Infrastructure (Feb. 2025)
The Final Report provides our fully detailed roadmap for data infrastructure to support youth homelessness prevention in Canada. In the report, you will find:
- The seven principles that represent how interest holders wanted the roadmap’s work to be done.
- Details on our four recommendations for interest holders to prevent youth homelessness:
- Build quality community engagement
- Support better data collection and use
- Support collaboration around prevention
- Build up data for youth homelessness prevention
- A comprehensive list of suggested actions interest holders can take immediately and in the long term to implement our recommendations.
Interest Holder Briefs (Feb 2025)
These five Interest Holder Briefs discuss immediate actions each interest holder can take to improve data infrastructure to support youth homelessness prevention.
These actions are based on our recommendations found in our Summary and Final Reports above.
There are briefs linked below to five interest holder groups:
Supplementary Reports
This supplementary report shares what we learned about the state of existing Canadian administrative data infrastructure that could support our roadmap for data infrastructure to inform Canadian youth homelessness prevention.
Administrative data is information collected by organizations for their operations. It can be linked to other information to help predict and prevent homelessness.
Canadian Data Infrastructure
This supplementary report shares our analysis of interviews with current Making the Shift project team members.
We focused on their projects that contained administrative data infrastructure. We also looked at other projects that covered a range of methods that inform the prevention of youth homelessness.
Project Interviews
This supplementary report shares our literature review on promising practices for administrative data to help prevent youth homelessness. We reviewed literature that used homelessness-related health and social data from:
- Academia
- Federal, provincial, and municipal governments
- Non-profit organizations
- Social-serving organizations
Our focus extended to literature from Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe.
Promising Practices Literature Review
This supplementary report shares our analysis of interviews with community service providers supporting youth facing homelessness.
Through these interviews, we sought to learn about how they use information to support youth experiencing or at risk of homelessness or housing instability.
Community Service Provider Interviews
This supplementary report shares our analysis of focus groups with youth who have lived experience of homelessness.
We held these youth focus groups to learn their thoughts on information collection, use, and sharing when seeking housing supports.
Youth Focus Groups
This supplementary report shares what we learned about recent Canadian policies and how they relate to project findings.
We sought to understand Canadian policies on homelessness and housing instability, looking at:
- Key guiding principles
- Approaches to youth homelessness prevention and intervention
- Connections to data
- Strategies for sectoral relations and collaborations
Canadian Policy Scan
Related Resources
Our partner, Making the Shift, sat down with Dr. Yale Belenager, a Professor of Political Science at Lethbridge University, and Robyn Blackadar, the former President & CEO of PolicyWise for Children & Families, to discuss our project.
Read the article here.
Designing Data Infrastructure to Prevent Youth Homelessness in Canada (Nov. 2023)
The homelessness sector spans jurisdictions, disciplines, and a variety of other dimensions.
In this video, learn about a project that seeks to enable all stakeholders, from funders and policy makers to program staff and service users, to visualize, interrogate, and improve the functioning of the homelessness system by identifying and connecting existing data assets.
PolicyWise’s Matthew Russell shares how this project is designing data infrastructure with youth in mind.
Acknowledgments
We thank the individuals and organizations who collaborated with us and contributed their wisdom, experience, and perspectives to this project. Specifically, we would like to acknowledge the advisory team members, the youth with lived experience, other interest holders, and leaders in data use who generously shared their experiences with us.
Project Team
Matthew Russell, PhD, Senior Research & Policy Associate, PolicyWise for Children & Families
Sakiko Yamaguchi, PhD, Mitacs Intern & Postdoctoral Fellow, PolicyWise for Children & Families
Shiva Zarezadeh Kheibari, PhD, Research & Policy Associate, PolicyWise for Children & Families
Falynn Bilyk, MPH, Research & Policy Associate, PolicyWise for Children & Families
Fatima Mustafa, PhD, Data Management Analyst, PolicyWise for Children & Families
Troy Rhoades, PhD, Communications & Government Relations Specialist, PolicyWise for Children & Families
Mardi Daley, Founder, Lived Experience Lab
Investigator Team
Yale Belanger, PhD, Professor, University of Lethbridge
Liana Urichuk, PhD, Chief Operating Officer, PolicyWise for Children & Families
Janice Victor, PhD, Associate Professor, University of Lethbridge
Naomi Nichols, PhD, Associate Professor, Trent University
Project Sponsors
The project was funded by Making the Shift: Youth Homelessness Social Innovation Lab.
Making the Shift is funded by the Government of Canada through the Networks of Centres of Excellence program. The opinions and interpretations in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Government of Canada.
