A Data Infrustructure Roadmap for Preventing Youth Homelessness
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 emphasising prevention.
To better support youth and prevent homelessness, we are designing a plan to build and use information across Canada. We are connecting 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 are leading activities in partnership with Dr. Yale Belanger and Making the Shift. Learning from previous practices, we are co-designing the plan with stakeholders 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.
Project Team
Mattew Russell, Sakiko Yamaguchi, Shiva Zarezadeh Kheibari, Fatima Mustafa, and Mardi Daley
Inverstigator Team
Yale Belanger (University of Lethbridge), Liana Urichuk (PolicyWise for Children & Families), Janice Victor (University of Lethbridge), and Naomi Nichols (Trent University)
Project Resources
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 policymakers 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.
