Building Youth Homelessness Data Collaboration
Overview
Homelessness affects thousands of young people every day in Canada. For many of them, homelessness is a cycle. They use services from many agencies and programs, often moving between different systems and supports.
When youth experiencing homelessness seek support, they are often asked to repeat their story and give the same personal information. This is because many service organizations and programs work independently of one another. This makes it hard for these service providers to follow a young person’s journey. It also makes it difficult to provide consistent, coordinated care.
Data collaboration can help address this challenge. Sharing the right information, in the right way, can support more informed referrals. This approach provides faster access to resources and reduces duplication of efforts. Data collaboration can also identify young people at risk earlier to strengthen prevention efforts.
PolicyWise for Children & Families is addressing this issue in two ways. First, our project team is studying patterns in the use of childhood services to better predict youth homelessness. Second, our team is designing and testing a simple data collaboration initiative.
Using these two approaches, we are looking to improve how services are coordinated for youth who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. They explore how collaborative data use can:
- Strengthen policy and research
- Coordinate approaches to youth homelessness prevention
We are basing this work on existing data, emerging practices, and real-world community experience. We are also engaging with community partners and youth. Our hope is that this work will help inform other youth homelessness prevention efforts across Canada.
Project Resources
How to Build a Collaborative Approach to Data Sharing (Report – Jan 2026)
Meaningful data collaboration takes time. Organizations come to this work with different goals, capabilities, and levels of readiness. There’s no single pathway, definitive answer, or standardized approach to this work.
For this reason, we created this report. It provides five key considerations for building a collaborative approach to data sharing in the social sector.
The key considerations are:
- Establishing Purpose and Intention
- Identifying and Mitigating Risk
- Promoting Client-Centred Design
- Understanding and Navigating Capacity
- Prioritizing Sustainability
For many young people, homelessness is part of a cycle of moving between systems. Breaking the cycle requires coordinated, youth-centred solutions to avoid inconsistent services, repeated assessments, and gaps in care. A key component is responsible data sharing.
To support coordinated services access for youth, we built and piloted a data collaboration initiative alongside two community-based, social-serving agencies in Calgary, Alberta. The experience, lessons learned, and recommendations are summarized in this community report. Agencies embarking on collaborative initiatives involving data sharing can use this report as a starting point to help with early conversations and build a sustainable and secure partnership.
Building Data Infrastructure Needed to Prevent Youth Homelessness (Webinar – Feb 2026)
Youth experiencing homelessness often navigate multiple support systems, yet key data remains siloed by organizations and agencies. When governments, community organizations, and researchers cannot easily share and connect information, coordination suffers and prevention falls short.
In this webinar, we show how collaborative and linked data can support earlier identification and more coordinated action. Drawing on pilot projects in British Columbia and Calgary, we illustrate what collaboration looks like in practice and what communities can build now.
The pilots demonstrate how cross-system data use can strengthen policy, research, and coordinated service delivery for youth who are homeless or at risk. The webinar closes with clear, practical steps to start and sustain collaboration across systems.
BC Youth Homelessness Prevention Project: Final Report (Report – March 2026)
For many young people in British Columbia, homelessness doesn’t happen without warning. The childhood roots of youth homelessness often reach back years. They may be involved with one or many different systems like child welfare, mental health, income support, school support, or justice.
In this report, we used the Data Innovation Program data to look at the childhood experiences of youth ages 13 to 18, and what happened to them from ages 19 to 27. We sought to understand what systems they used before becoming homeless.
The project team shared these key insights in the report:
- Youth homelessness affects many young people in BC.
- Homelessness is not only a housing issue and often involves multiple support systems.
- Difficult childhood experiences are linked to a higher risk of homelessness later in life.
- Deeper systems involvement increases risk.
The team shares which youth can benefit from prevention efforts, ways to support youth, and how data can inform prevention efforts.
Related Resources
Building Data Infrastructure Needed to Prevent Youth Homelessness (Article – Feb 2026)
The Homeless Hub’s C.L. Michel shares their thoughts on the project teams’ webinar and how the team’s projects show “the powerful impact of data linking and sharing in the lives of young people experiencing homelessness.”
Read the article here.
Project Team
Rachel Carr, MSc, Manager, Strategic Initiatives
Callie Prichard, MPH, Senior Research & Policy Associate
Matthew Russell, PhD, Senior Research & Policy Associate
Kiran Gurm, MSc, MPP Senior Research & Policy Associate
Emilie Bassi, MSc, Research & Policy Associate
Kalya Blackadar, MPH, Research & Policy Associate
Project Partners
PolicyWise for Children & Families is proud to be collaborating with the Trellis Society, The Alex, and Dr. Carla Hilario, PhD from the University of British Columbia – Okanagan on this project.
Project Funding
This project was funded in part by the Government of Canada and the Government of British Columbia.
