Youth homelessness is a pressing issue in Canada. Nearly 40% of homeless youth have experienced homelessness before the age of 16. Traditional responses focus on crisis intervention. But what if we could use data to prevent homelessness before it happens?
PolicyWise for Children & Families, collaborating with the University of Lethbridge, has created a roadmap to guide how we collect, use, and share data to prevent youth homelessness in Canada. This initiative is part of Making the Shift, a Youth Homelessness Social Innovation Lab, dedicated to fostering systemic change.
Why do we need better data?
Preventing youth homelessness requires us to understand its root causes. Many youth who experience homelessness have faced challenges such as child welfare involvement, justice system interactions, mental health struggles, and poverty.
Marginalized youth, including Indigenous, 2SLGBTQIA+, and newcomer youth, are overrepresented in homelessness statistics. Yet, current data often fails to identify at-risk youth early enough to intervene effectively.
The roadmap seeks to create information that brings light to effective prevention strategies through research and evaluation. It also informs different levels of prevention, such as:
- Primary prevention, before youth are homeless
- Secondary prevention, before youth become homeless long-term
- Tertiary prevention, helping youth exit long-term homelessness
It also proposes ways to strengthen data collection and ensure that information is used ethically and collaboratively to prevent youth from slipping through the cracks.
Four key recommendations
The roadmap reflects three years of community engagement about data that informs youth homelessness prevention. It presents interest holders’ ideas for improving this data, provides examples from across Canada and the world, and offers a path forward.
Based on our research and engagement, we have provided four recommendations:
- Build Quality Community Engagement
- Support Better Data Collection and Use
- Support Collaboration Around Prevention
- Build Up Data for Youth Homelessness Prevention
The first three recommendations support how the work is done, as valuable information is built on strong practices, relationships, and connections. The final recommendation addresses the data needed for prevention.
For each recommendation, the roadmap lists immediate and long-term actions interest holders can take.
The path forward
As we journey forward in this complex and evolving landscape, more engagement is needed. This roadmap is just the beginning. It is a call to action for governments, service providers, and communities to come together and use data as a tool for preventing youth homelessness.
By prioritizing ethical, community-driven approaches, we can create a future where fewer young people experience homelessness in the first place.
Project resources
Summary Report: A Roadmap for Youth Homelessness Data Infrastructure (Feb. 2025)
This report summarizes three years of community engagement in developing our co-created roadmap for youth homelessness data infrastructure.
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.
Interest Holder Briefs (Feb. 2025)
We created briefs for five interest holder groups to discuss immediate actions each can take to improve data infrastructure to support youth homelessness prevention.
Project sponsor
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.
