Towards the Prevention of Youth Homelessness
1
Faculty of Education, York University, Toronto, ON M3J 1P3, Canada
2
Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, York University, Toronto, ON M3J 1P3, Canada
3
Department of Criminology, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON N2L 3C5, Canada
4
Department of Family Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90007, USA
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Youth 2024, 4(4), 1694-1725; https://doi.org/10.3390/youth4040108
Submission received: 17 July 2024
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Revised: 4 November 2024
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Accepted: 22 November 2024
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Published: 5 December 2024
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Youth Homelessness Prevention)
Abstract
:Historically, the prevention of youth homelessness has not been a priority in Canada or the United States. In recent years, this has begun to change. While there is growing recognition that a shift by preventing homelessness is required to bring a substantive end to homelessness, a common and shared understanding of what prevention is and what it involves has remained largely absent or obscured in both policy and practice. In this paper, we focus specifically on the prevention of youth homelessness and set out to provide conceptual clarity through presenting a clear definition of what prevention is and what it is not. Accompanying the definition is a five-point typology that includes (1) structural prevention; (2) systems prevention; (3) early intervention; (4) crisis intervention, and (5) housing stabilization. Each of the five elements of the typology is defined, identifying who is responsible for implementation. In addition, the typology is populated with examples of different approaches to the prevention of youth homelessness. We conclude with some key considerations to guide the implementation of preventive interventions and present core principles designed to support the development of effective and quality prevention interventions.
1. Introduction
Despite efforts over the past 25 years to address homelessness in Canada, the problem continues to increase [1], leading many to view homelessness as an intractable problem. It is imperative to challenge the acceptance of homelessness as an inherent part of our social reality by exploring alternative ways of thinking and acting that help us reimagine social practices, systems, and structures. Currently, the bulk of the investment and activity responding to homelessness is based on crisis management, which typically includes the provision of emergency shelters, soup kitchens, and day programs [2,3]. The use of law enforcement and the criminalization of homelessness is also shamefully common practice, which perpetuates stigma and discrimination and retrenches emergency responses to homelessness [4,5,6].
The move to prevention involves changing the orientation of policy and practice from being primarily reactive to proactive. While there is growing recognition that a shift toward preventing homelessness is required to bring a substantive end to homelessness [7], awareness of the role of and approaches to prevention remains largely absent or obscured in both policy and practice. Prevention demands significant system-level transformations in policy, funding, and practice, as well as the deeply held beliefs and mindsets of decision-makers, service providers, and community members. It involves broadening our understanding of the historical, structural, and systemic factors that cause homelessness and keep people trapped in homelessness and how these situations can be mitigated. It also means expanding the range of sectors responsible for preventing homelessness. Underlying this transformation is the need for both conceptual and practical clarity on prevention.
This paper aims to provide comprehensive and shared language on prevention by introducing its theoretical and practical underpinnings and presenting a definition and companion typology that updates definitions from earlier works; A New Direction: A Framework for Homelessness Prevention [8] and The Roadmap for the Prevention of Youth Homelessness [9]. We address what prevention is and what it is not and outline what the implications of prevention are for addressing homelessness in Canada and internationally. Our goal is to create greater coherence in the way prevention is understood and taken up in policy, practice, and research, thereby enhancing our collective ability to effectively advocate for and implement this critical approach to homelessness.
While all forms of homelessness can benefit from the application of preventive policies and practices, this article focuses on the prevention of youth homelessness. We argue that not only is the prevention of youth homelessness important but it must also be prioritized. Our analysis of available evidence suggests that if we effectively target and implement youth homelessness prevention, not only will we produce better outcomes for youth, their families, and communities, but we could also have a significant long-term impact on chronic homelessness.
Preventing youth homelessness means foregrounding a focus on health and well-being throughout the life course, as improving access to housing alone is not enough [10,11]. Preventing youth homelessness means working to keep families and communities intact, ensuring all young people have meaningful and supportive adults [kin and non-kin] in their lives to help them transition to adulthood. Additionally, prevention policy and practice should support youth who are homeless or at-risk through the provision of individualized, choice-based, and necessary services and resources that enable them to sustain their housing, remain in school, obtain, secure employment, and maintain healthy relationships with friends and family. In addition to providing conceptual clarity to youth homelessness prevention, this paper provides guiding principles for prevention and points to effective and evidence-based policies and interventions.
Methods
This paper provides a conceptual contribution to the field of homelessness research, policy, and practice by building on the focal theory of prevention that was originally developed in public health policy. Research evidence and inquiry into the definition of homelessness prevention, and youth homelessness prevention in particular, is nascent. Therefore, the paper draws on previous reviews of available scholarly literature [citation for the previous prevention review], as well as the latest academic and gray literature focusing on the development and implementation of preventive interventions in homelessness policy and practice. The latest research evidence in the Canadian context has emerged primarily from within a network of research and demonstration projects funded by Making the Shift Youth Homelessness Social Innovation Lab (https://makingtheshiftinc.ca/ accessed on 23 August 2024). Projects have been selected and led by a diverse team of scholars and people with lived expertise for their potential knowledge contributions to youth homelessness prevention. The inclusion of gray (or community) literature, such as program evaluations and community reports, is also important for this space of innovation, where new ideas and interventions regarding preventing homelessness are being tested but for which there may not yet be scholarly literature available.
2. Shifting to the Prevention of Youth Homelessness
All orders of government have struggled with what to do about modern mass homelessness since it emerged in Canada in the late 1980s with the erosion of the welfare state and rise in neoliberal policies [12]. The bulk of resources and activities have focused on emergency services such as shelters, soup kitchens, and day programs in response to people’s immediate needs, as well as the use of law enforcement to criminalize activities associated with homelessness. This over-dependence on emergency services has not reduced homelessness, with the population continuing to grow and diversity in the ensuing decades. Moreover, as Culhane et al. [13] have pointed out, because our crisis response to homelessness has, for the most part, focused on helping people only after they have already lost their housing, it has “led to a situation that Lindblom [14] warned about nearly 20 years ago, one in which an absence of a prevention-oriented policy framework would lead to the institutionalization of homelessness” [13] (p. 295). Lindbolm’s prediction has become the current status quo, as the explosion of shelters and targeted services for people experiencing homelessness became an informal ‘system’ of institutionalized homelessness services, running parallel to and generally separate from other social welfare benefits and services.
The emergence and institutionalization of the response to youth homelessness was modeled after the crisis response to adult homelessness, with the only notable difference being the age mandate. In general, the response to youth homelessness was not designed to meet the diverse needs of developing adolescents and young adults, which has driven significant growth in the number of young people experiencing long-term or chronic homelessness, with a resultant decline in health, mental health, and well-being [15,16,17].
Over the past 25 years, there have been some promising strategic shifts away from simply focusing on emergency services, including the emergence of the evidence-based intervention Housing First. Housing First is based on the notion that rather than expecting people who experience homelessness to make life changes before they will be supported to exit homelessness, chronically homeless individuals with acute mental health and substance use disorders should first be offered housing with no preconditions and wrap-around supports to enhance their recovery and reduce the risk that they might return to homeless [18,19,20]. The At Home/Chez Soi project in Canada has greatly contributed to the evidence base for the efficacy of the intervention with over 100 published scholarly papers (i.e., [21,22,23,24]).
While the application of Housing First promised to lead to a radical transformation of how we respond to homelessness, there have unfortunately been significant challenges in taking Housing First to scale, particularly in a context where the cost of housing continues to skyrocket [25]. Additionally, Housing First has been successful in supporting the needs of chronically homeless adults [aged 18 and above] rather than youth. Analyzing At Home-Chez Soi data, Kozloff et al. [23] identified that while the intervention had a positive impact on youth participants, the outcomes for youth were not as strong and that there might be merit in “considering modifications of “Housing First” to maintain fidelity to core principles while better meeting the needs of youth” [23] (p. 8). The emergence of Housing First for Youth in 2014 demonstrated how Housing First could be successfully adapted when designed to meet the needs of developing adolescents and young adults [26,27].
Housing First has undergone further adaptation to support the needs of young people leaving care and Indigenous youth. In a recent study exploring an Indigenous-led adaptation of the Housing First for Youth program in Hamilton, Ontario, it was found that offering Indigenous-led, culturally based programming that helps youth (re)connect to their Indigenous identity and provides access to Elders and ceremony better meets their needs and helps provide youth with wholistic care that helps strengthen their resiliency and keep them housed, thus preventing homelessness [27,28].
Prevention has historically been given only nominal recognition with little substantive action or investment in national strategies to end homelessness in Canada and the United States. Homelessness prevention has been positioned within public policy as an optional and/or separate goal from addressing the more visible and politicized issues of chronic homelessness and more recently encampments. This framing of prevention is disconcerting, considering the continued investment in emergency responses and implementation of Housing First in the last decade have not resulted in dramatic reductions in homelessness, chronic or otherwise [29]. This approach to homelessness policy, intentionally or incidentally, has depoliticized the work of ‘ending homelessness’ through managerial tasks that call on the homelessness sector to improve its own practice rather than unpack the broader systems and structures that perpetuate homelessness. Indeed, focusing almost exclusively on chronic homelessness at the expense of developing robust homelessness prevention policies ignores the profound structural and systemic changes needed to address the root causes of homelessness, which go well beyond the scope of the ‘homeless-serving sector’.
However, it seems there is greater recognition of the need to change the status quo response to homelessness. Today we are seeing positive shifts toward the inclusion of prevention in national policy and community-level practice. In Canada, the federal government’s homelessness strategy, Reaching Home, identifies prevention as a priority by mandating communities to report on five outcome areas, two of which are preventive in nature: New inflows into homelessness are to be reduced as are returns to homelessness [30]. In the United States, the federal government’s homelessness strategy embraces prevention, with a commitment to “(Do) more than any previous plan to set a strategic and equitable path toward the systematic prevention of homelessness”. [31] (p. 5). At the community level, a national survey of youth homelessness service providers in Canada involving over 150 respondents identified a majority (89.5%) as believing that “prevention was necessary to solve youth homelessness” and three quarters reported that they had “seen a growth in interest in youth homeless prevention over the past five years” [7]. They also identified factors getting in the way of going in the direction of prevention, including lack of support from their local community entity (in Canada, funding from the national homelessness strategy, Reaching Home, flows directly to 67 designated communities. Funds are distributed locally by a “Community Entity” [typically a not-for-profit service organization or the municipal/regional government] under the direction of a Community Advisory Board made up of representatives from local service providers, policymakers, and people with lived expertise. These community entities are responsible for working with the Community Advisory Board to develop a plan for federal funds and make decisions on funding local supports they believe will help them achieve the community-level outcomes the Government of Canada requires they report on each year), the need for a dedicated funding stream, and the desire for implementation support through training and technical assistance.
The growth of interest in the prevention of homelessness raises important questions: What exactly is homelessness prevention [and what is it not]? What is the role of the homelessness sector in implementing preventive interventions? What are applicable examples of prevention that can be taken to scale? In this paper, these issues will be explored with a specific focus on youth homelessness prevention.
Indigenous Conceptions of Homelessness Prevention
It is well understood that Indigenous Peoples, while making up 4.5% of the Canadian population, are greatly overrepresented within the homeless population, making up about a third. This is true of Indigenous youth as well [15]. Research shows that compared to settler youth, Indigenous youth are more likely to have early experiences of homelessness, including multiple episodes [15,32], greater mental health and substance use challenges [33,34], and involvement with child protection services [35], largely a result of the impacts of colonization over generations. Understanding these factors requires us to consider Indigenous perspectives not only when addressing homelessness but also its prevention.
Indigenous and other scholars are making major contributions to how homelessness, youth homelessness, and their prevention are conceptualized and defined [27,28,32,33,36,37,38,39,40,41,42]. Central to this work is the assertion that we cannot easily understand Indigenous experiences of homelessness without considering and acknowledging the legacy of Canada’s history of colonialism going back to the 1400s. This includes powerful governing policies and actions set forth through the Doctrine of Discovery, which paved the way for the forced removal of Indigenous Peoples from their ancestral homelands, followed by the Indian Act, residential schools, and the Sixties Scoop. It is also important to note here that Western or colonial definitions of homelessness do not always fit with the particular histories and current experiences of Indigenous Peoples [37]. As such, Indigenous ‘homelessness’ is increasingly being referred to as ‘houselessness’, as for many Indigenous Peoples, “homelessness” is not merely defined as lacking a physical structure to live in. Rather, when understood through a broader cultural lens, Indigenous houselessness acknowledges severed connections to ancestral homelands, water, language, culture, identities, and community [37,41].
Indigenous Peoples experiencing these kinds of homelessness/houselessness struggle to culturally, spiritually, emotionally, or physically [re]connect with their Indigeneity or lost relationships, making it hard to find their way back home [37,43,44]. This has a major impact on their spiritual, mental, physical, and emotional health, which in turn impacts their overall health and wellbeing. These factors need to be accounted for in Indigenous homelessness/houselessness prevention initiatives. This would include prevention that focuses on honoring treaties, recognizing land rights, and ancestral homelands, something Indigenous Peoples have been fighting for for centuries, fostering community building, connection to Elders, and strengthening cultural identity, for example [27].
Fournier et al. [27] and others (see Sanchez-Pimienta [42]) argue that mainstream organizations in Canada can be most effective at developing Indigenous homelessness prevention interventions and programming for Indigenous Peoples by following the leadership of Indigenous communities, organizations, and leaders and ensuring approaches and programming are Indigenous-led and culturally based.
3. Why Focus on Youth Homelessness?
The experience of youth homelessness is generally distinct from adult homelessness, with implications for both policy and practice. In Canada, youth homelessness refers to “the situation and experience of young people between the ages of 13 and 24 who are living independently of parents and/or caregivers, but do not have the means or ability to acquire a stable, safe or consistent residence” [45]. It is estimated that between 12% and 20% of people experiencing homelessness are youth [1,46], but this is likely an underestimate as youth are more likely to experience hidden homelessness, making it difficult to enumerate.
In the most recent national point-in-time count report on homelessness [1], the primary reason youth (13–24) cited for their homelessness was “conflict with parent or guardian”, whereas most adults cited “insufficient income for housing” as their primary reason [1] (p. 15). This is consistent with a large body of research affirming that family conflict is the primary cause of youth homelessness [15,47,48,49]. In the Without a Home study, 75% of participants cited the fact they could not get along with their parents as the key reason they became homeless [15] (p. 40). Moreover, those who first left home at an early age were much more likely to identify physical, sexual, and other forms of abuse and violence as a significant factor in leaving home. [ibid]. Strained family relations may also be an outcome of other challenges young people face, including personal substance use, mental health problems, learning disabilities, disengagement with the education system and dropping out, criminal behavior, and involvement with the justice system [47,50,51]. While there are certainly some commonalities between the experience of homelessness of young people and adults, there are important factors unique to the experiences and circumstances of youth that justify a youth-specific response to homelessness.
Research consistently shows that prolonged exposure to homelessness undermines young people’s physical and mental health, and well-being over the life course [15,16,17,52]. This makes them much more likely than housed youth to experience trauma and be victims of crime [53]. Additionally, approximately 20% of youth who experience homelessness will be exploited through human trafficking [54]. Expectations that youth can easily make their way out of homelessness ignore the fact that many young people wind up in this situation before they are legally or practically able to obtain and maintain housing on their own [55,56,57,58].
Young people are also in the throes of adolescent development, and the transition to adulthood brings unique challenges that undermine housing stability, including underdeveloped problem-solving, decision-making, and planning skills that undermine housing stability. When considering the causes, characteristics, and conditions of homelessness, then, age matters.
3.1. Age of First Experience of Homelessness
The age at which one first becomes homeless can have a major impact on a person’s life course. For instance, we know from research that over 40% of young people who are currently homeless had their first experience before the age of 16 [15] (p. 38). The characteristics of this group are unique when compared to youth who had their first experience at 16 years of age or older. Those with early experiences of being homeless are more likely to report the following:
- Physical, sexual and emotional abuse, and neglect;
- Involvement with child protection;
- Multiple episodes of homelessness;
- Being bullied at school;
- Being tested for learning disabilities;
- Being victims of crime;
- Being targeted for human trafficking;
- Experiencing mental health problems and addictions;
- Having attempted suicide [15] (p. 7).
Of those with a history of child protection involvement, three quarters had their first experience of homelessness before the age of 16.
However, in their response to the broader problem of homelessness, many communities do not prioritize youth at all, and in most jurisdictions in Canada there is virtually no homelessness infrastructure or interventions in place to support youth who are under 16 and have high needs (some mistakenly believe that the child protection systems are designed to intervene to support these youth, but in many jurisdictions the experience of homelessness on its own is not recognized as a protection issue. Moreover, child protection services are generally not well designed to meet the complex needs of these youth, with large caseloads making wrap-around supports difficult to manage). Making matters worse, the age it is considered appropriate to begin providing services to young people is inconsistent with some communities providing homelessness support to youth beginning at age 16, and other jurisdictions starting at 18 or 21. The absence of a response and infrastructure for youth under 16 these ages can be mistaken for evidence of a lack of a youth homelessness problem since no services means there are no data on this age group. No data means no measurable record of who is experiencing homelessness, and, voila, the problem of youth homelessness is obscured from view. However, the reality is that while youths’ experiences of homelessness are made invisible as they fall outside of the age mandates of homelessness services, we are only delaying the recognition of their need for support.
3.2. Youth Homelessness and Chronicity (Chronic Homelessness Amongst Shelter Users Is Defined by the Government of Canada as “(I)ndividuals Who Are Currently Experiencing Homelessness and Who Meet at Least One of the Following Criteria:
- They Have a Total of at Least Six Months (180 Days) of Homelessness Over the Past Year; or
- They Have a Total of at Least 18 Months (546 Days) of Homelessness Over the Past Three Years”)
In many places, including Canada, the response to homelessness has focused on the goal of ending chronic homelessness [59]. A question to be explored is whether there is a connection between early experiences of homelessness and chronic homelessness. While the Government of Canada’s stated goal is to end chronic homelessness, the connections between early experiences of homelessness and later chronicity are largely ignored, as are the connections between youth homelessness and later experiences of homelessness, including chronicity.
Many young people who experience homelessness can escape the situation and avoid returning to the streets. Others—particularly those with adverse childhood experiences, early first experiences of homelessness, and a history of housing instability—may become mired in homelessness with negative and long-lasting consequences. Data from the 2020–2022 Point in Time count identified that between 69% and 72% of adults 25 and older were considered chronically homeless [1]. The percentage of unaccompanied youth between the ages of 13 and 24 who were deemed to be chronically homeless was 58%, which, while lower than the rate for adults, is still a troubling figure with implications for increases in adult homelessness as they age [1] (p. 13). The most recent point-in-time counts also found that between 43 and 50% of all respondents had their first experience of homelessness before the age of 25 [1,60].
What are the implications of this information for prevention? First, we are waiting far too long to intervene and assist young people at risk of or experiencing homelessness, particularly when their first experience occurs before age 16. Second, efforts to stabilize housing for youth should include enhancing community, family, and natural supports, given the extent to which youth identify family conflict as the main reason they become homeless. Third, a high percentage of adults who are homeless had their first experiences of homelessness as youth, suggesting that for many the road to chronicity begins at a relatively young age and that the chronically homeless youth of today may become chronically homeless adults in the future. Fourth, the response to youth homelessness should not mimic intervention models for adults but must focus on preventing their homelessness through measures that support youth development with the goals of enhancing their well-being, attachment to school, social inclusion, and connection to meaningful adults in their lives [42]. Finally, the fact that youth homelessness is currently not prioritized in many communities means the opportunity to address and end a young person’s homelessness at an early age is forfeited.
No young person should ever have to endure any type of homelessness, especially long-term. The argument we put forward is that if we can effectively prevent youth homelessness in the first place or address it at an early stage, not only will we produce better outcomes for young people, their families, and their communities, we will likely have a longer-term impact on adult homelessness and chronicity.
4. Towards a Definition of the Prevention of Homelessness
Tackling the complex problem of preventing youth homelessness requires a clear definition of prevention that can be effectively implemented and clarifies whose responsibility it is. Government and service providers need conceptual clarity about what prevention is [and is not], which policies and interventions qualify as preventive, and which outcomes can be claimed as the result of our prevention efforts. Dej et al. [61] have argued that
“The purpose of designing a consistent definition of homelessness prevention is to collectively orient the various elements of prevention to ensure our response is driven towards a common purpose and to make clear previously opaque connections between diverse policies and practices that can and should be understood as prevention. It is also a critical step in providing a common language and nomenclature in a sector where prevention is not broadly embraced and where consistency in it’s application is necessary”.[61] (p. 402)
Over the years there have been several efforts to define the prevention of homelessness, in many cases through adapting the public health model, and our thinking in this area continues to evolve [13,61,62,63,64]. In more recent years, there have been renewed efforts to build consensus on a definition of homelessness prevention [8,9,59,65,66,67,68]. This includes a European definition that builds upon Gordon’s model of prevention (universal, selective, and indicated prevention) [69] as well as a five-part typology [66].
In Canada, the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness [COH] released A New Direction: A Framework for Homelessness Prevention in 2017, which provided a clear prevention definition and typology [8]. A year later, the COH, in partnership with A Way Home Canada, released The Roadmap for the Prevention of Youth Homelessness [9], which built on the definition and typology to develop a more focused way of thinking about the prevention of youth homelessness. This report was both conceptual and practical, helping communities, service providers, and governments define prevention and providing them with a strong justification for prioritizing youth homelessness prevention based on the needs of developing adolescents and young adults.
Taking a human-rights-based approach, the Roadmap presented a range of examples of preventive interventions embedded within the typology to inspire and guide those interested in making the shift to prevention. Since that time, a range of Canadian researchers have weighed in with scholarly articles refining the definition [61,64,67]. This current paper updates and builds on our thinking about how to prevent youth homelessness.
A key starting place for the definition of youth homelessness prevention is the public health model of prevention, which focuses on the prevention of illness and injury and is organized into three levels: primary, secondary, and tertiary [70], as follows:
- Primary prevention means working upstream in order to increase population health and help people avoid illness or injury in the first place.
- Secondary prevention identifies and addresses illness and injury at earlier stages and involves working quickly to ensure the condition does not worsen but rather improves.
- Tertiary prevention involves helping people to manage long-term complicated health problems or to avoid the recurrence of illness and injury. It seeks to “soften the impact caused by the disease on the patient’s function, longevity, and quality of life” [71].
This definition has since been applied to a wide range of social issues, including the prevention of crime, school dropouts, etc. However, we see advocating for the adaptation of the public health model of prevention as only a starting point. In further developing our thinking about the prevention of youth homelessness, we are mindful to consider that public health efforts are not always neutral and may in fact discriminate against and be harmful to certain sub-populations [e.g., Indigenous peoples, newcomers, racialized peoples, 2SLGBTQ+, women, and gender diverse people], resulting in negative health outcomes [72,73,74]. While suggesting that prevention can be viewed as positive in a commonsense way forward, Nichols et al. make the point that “specific technologies of prevention that are employed—the specific ways we seek to prevent harm—are often materially and politically fraught” [71] (p. 173). They use the example of the recent pandemic to highlight some of the ways that preventive interventions were designed and delivered that “posed problems for people who are homeless and experience intersecting health and socio-political disparities” [71] (p. 171).
Recognizing that the delivery of public health and social services may unintentionally harm and disempower marginalized people, Oudshoorn has also focused on the need to ensure our preventive efforts are inclusive and empowering [64].
“Designing services to facilitate true social integration means that systems should be designed to move beyond the basic provision of housing to deep, long-term outcomes. If services provide housing but disconnect participants from choice, voice, control and integration, then short-term outcomes are achieved at the cost of long-term losses”.[64] (p. 8)
With this in mind, we suggest that the conceptualization, interventions, and delivery of youth homelessness prevention must actively take up a lens of intersectionality, decolonization, equity, diversity, and inclusion by meaningfully and deeply engaging with and being accountable to people who experience[d] youth homelessness. Advancing prevention interventions that are disconnected from the meaningful changes to the systems, structures, and practices that shape the day-to-day experiences of people may only cause and obscure further harm under the guise of offering help. Prevention work, therefore, must involve openness to and active engagement in continuous reflection, critique, learning, and change to bring about increasingly more just social arrangements that rectify the specific structural and systemic injustices experienced by groups who are overrepresented in and often underserved by the current homelessness-serving system.
The Definition of the Prevention of Youth Homelessness
The definition of youth homelessness prevention presented here is meant to provide language that is clear, concise, and usable in the field. Additionally, it is intended to help clarify whose responsibility it is to address homelessness through prevention. The definition is as follows:
The prevention of youth homelessness refers to housing-led policies, practices, and interventions that provide developmentally appropriate supports designed to stabilize housing, enhance well-being, keep young people connected to their communities, increase attachment to education and employment, and enhance social inclusion through strengthening relationships between youth and family members as well as other meaningful adults in their lives.
This is achieved through the following areas of focus:
- Primary prevention. Reducing inflows into homelessness by taking upstream proactive steps to stop young people from becoming homeless in the first place.
- Secondary prevention. Intervening early to reduce the risk that youth who experience homelessness for the first time will transition to long-term or chronic homelessness.
- Tertiary prevention. Providing appropriate support to reduce the likelihood that youth who exit homelessness will return to it.
Primary prevention means working upstream to reduce inflows into homelessness by taking proactive steps to stop people from becoming homeless in the first place. This includes addressing broad structural or societal factors that contribute to the production of homelessness, such as a lack of affordable housing, deep poverty, racism, discrimination, colonialism and its consequences, and interpersonal violence [37]. Prevention at this level can include interventions and policies that are universal [75]—meaning everyone benefits—as well as targeted interventions for “at risk” populations. Primary prevention has the broadest implications for who is responsible, calling on a wide range of actors, sectors, and systems to take accountability for their roles in both perpetuating and preventing homelessness. This level of prevention goes well beyond the homeless-serving sector to include systems that may not view preventing homelessness as part of their mandate. From the perspective of primary prevention, more systems and policy areas should be tracking whether homelessness is an outcome of their services and care, and if so, must take responsibility to address those negative outcomes.
There are several primary prevention interventions that can specifically prevent youth homelessness. First, primary prevention strategies must focus on the well-being of young people and have as their goal enhancing protective factors and building assets through strengthening and supporting families and communities, stabilizing housing and living arrangements, increasing access to necessary support, and social inclusion, all with the goal of reducing the likelihood that a young person becomes homeless in the first place. In the Indigenous context, this also means going further upstream to change child welfare policies and to work to keep children with their families or in their home communities rather than being placed with non-Indigenous families [76,77,78].
Primary prevention can involve addressing the failure of public systems to help young people avoid homelessness when they are exiting public systems such as child protection, prison, or in-patient hospital care [37,79,80,81]. Without adequate transitional planning and support [including housing], many people in these situations fall into homelessness.
Finally, primary prevention can refer to a range of targeted strategies and interventions directed at individuals and/or families at imminent risk of homelessness. This can include youth who experience housing precarity because of ongoing and unresolved family conflict and/or experience abuse and neglect. It also includes those who lack sufficient funds to pay the rent and may be facing eviction [legal/illegal]. In the Indigenous context, this also means going further upstream to change child welfare policies and to work to keep children with their families or in their home communities rather than being placed with non-Indigenous families; for example, effective early intervention strategies identify those who are vulnerable and precariously housed in order to provide support to identify and address a problem or situation at an early stage.
Secondary prevention means intervening early to reduce the risk that those who experience homelessness for the first time do not transition to long-term or chronic homelessness. This level of intervention has implications for homelessness policy and the homelessness sector/system, requiring greater responsibility for people’s experiences when they first encounter homelessness services. Research suggests that the majority of people who are new to homelessness and show up at a shelter are able to resolve their homelessness within several months, often with little support [13,82,83,84,85]. Culhane estimates that
“On average, across a wide variety of geographies, about 10 to 15 percent of people entering homelessness will fall into the category of chronic homelessness. Most of these are individuals on their own, rather than members of a family with children, and they are much more likely to be staying in unsheltered locations such as cars or abandoned buildings than in shelters. Most people with chronic patterns of homelessness can be found in major cities (57%) or smaller cities or counties (33%), rather than rural areas”.[83]
Secondary prevention requires transforming our response to homelessness by focusing on helping young people to exit homelessness as quickly as possible. Youth experiencing homelessness are even more likely than adults to avoid shelters and experience “hidden homelessness”, often couch surfing with their friend’s families [35]. Key to the success of secondary prevention is implementing outreach strategies to identify and make contact with youth who are not accessing shelters, a universal approach to case management, and finding alternatives to taking youth into shelters. Secondary prevention also means proactive efforts to identify and determine which young people will be among the 10–15% who transition from first-time shelter use to chronic homelessness. Once identified, these youth must be provided with wrap-around support and aftercare once they leave the shelter system to raise the likelihood that their experience of homelessness is ended rather than merely postponed. Youth homelessness service providers must be supported to take on this task of reducing the inflow into chronic homelessness through robust early intervention.
Tertiary prevention means providing appropriate support to ensure that those who exit homelessness do not return to homelessness. This level of intervention has implications for homelessness policy and the homelessness sector/system, requiring greater responsibility for people’s experiences when they first encounter homelessness services. Tertiary prevention can involve supporting a person to exit homelessness and, more importantly continuing to provide support after the individual or family has been housed to ensure stability and mitigate against future housing precarity.
The research on what happens when youth exit homelessness is compelling, but not in a positive way, suggesting that access to housing is not sufficient nor a positive indicator of well-being recovery, safety, healthy living, attachment to education or employment, nor overcoming social exclusion [54,55,56,57]. The accumulation of challenges in other areas of young people’s lives may then lead them to lose their housing and return to homelessness.
Therefore, tertiary prevention is designed not only to help young people exit homelessness but to help them progress on the road to adulthood by addressing their challenges and needs through the provision of appropriate and client-driven support. Promising practices such as Housing First for Youth [86,87] and HOP-C [88] are housing-led interventions with a developing evidence base that focuses on not simply exiting homelessness but on enhancing well-being, thriving, and supporting intellectual, emotional, and physical development [11,19,26,27]. Additionally, an emphasis on enhancing family and natural supports is just as crucial for tertiary prevention as it is at all other levels of prevention.
5. A Typology of Homelessness Prevention
In policy and practice, what does the prevention of youth homelessness actually involve? The definition presented here provides an orientation towards understanding what the prevention of youth homelessness is. The following typology (Figure 1) is complementary to the definition by outlining the range, scope, and temporality of youth homelessness prevention, all the while heightening our understanding of who is responsible for prevention and why. The typology consists of five interlocking elements of prevention that align with the definition of primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention: structural, systems, early intervention, crisis intervention, and housing stabilization.
Ideally, the five categories of the homelessness prevention typology work in concert to prevent youth homelessness. As such, the typology reinforces the message that solving youth homelessness is a cross-systems responsibility requiring widespread involvement from various public bodies and institutions rather than being the homelessness sector’s responsibility alone.
5.1. Structural Prevention: Working Upstream to Address the Causes of Homelessness
Some of the key drivers of youth homelessness are embedded within the broader arrangement of society’s structures and institutions, which result in the widespread and disproportionate experiences of poverty, housing precarity, discrimination, and social exclusion. These structures can perpetuate historic political and social norms, values, and beliefs, such as colonialism and white supremacy, which have shaped how and to whom resources and power are allocated in Canadian society. For example, societal structures shape who benefits [and how much] from housing market functions and regulations, wealth [re]distribution, and resource allocation. Structural factors impact the service-level experiences and outcomes of individuals and specific groups who have faced long-standing structural barriers to support and well-being, such as Indigenous, racialized, newcomer, gender diverse, and 2SLGBTQ+ people. These factors can also contribute to the individual, community, and interpersonal dynamics that increase risk factors for homelessness, among some more than others, including experiences of family breakdown, trauma, neglect and abuse, mental health challenges, and addictions.
Structural prevention involves legislation, policy, and actions designed to redress structural inequities and, as a result, are intended to reduce the broader risk of youth homelessness. Structural factors that drive homelessness often intersect and are mutually reinforcing; therefore, structural prevention can be most effective if multiple forms are deployed simultaneously. Examples of structural prevention include the following:
- Increasing the supply and access to deeply affordable housing that is safe, in good repair, and appropriate for youth.
- Providing benefits to strengthen families’ resilience to economic challenges.
- Poverty reduction and income equity.
- Address structural factors that perpetuate race-based inequities, racism, and discrimination.
- Addressing the impact of colonialism, the Indian Act, and ongoing structural racism against Indigenous Peoples.
- Breaking the link between migration, displacement, and homelessness.
- Promoting social inclusion for all.
- Preventing adverse childhood experiences.
- Implementing homelessness prevention legislation, policy, and practice.
Gordon’s prevention typology of universal, selective, and indicated prevention [69] helps us identify who is responsible for structural prevention and in what ways. Higher orders of government [federal, provincial, and territorial] have the responsibility to fund and implement universal prevention strategies that are targeted to the population as a whole and benefit almost everyone (e.g., the Canada Health Act) as well as selective prevention strategies that target key populations that are at elevated risk (e.g., the Canada Housing Benefit). Indicated prevention strategies selectively target individuals and families who are at higher risk of homelessness, often through screening. Such preventive strategies necessarily require higher orders of government to be funders, provide policy and legislative support, and ensure accountability. Community-based organizations with knowledge, skills and practice expertise within and beyond the homelessness sector are a key component of the delivery network to implement structural prevention interventions.
A good example of structural prevention is to consider homelessness amongst Indigenous Peoples, which should be understood as a consequence of Canada’s brutal colonial history and ongoing structural issues and policies that keep Indigenous people marginalized. Historical factors include the forced removal of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral homelands in order to exploit the land for profit. Federal policies of forced removal, the noxious Indian Act, residential schools, and the Sixties Scoop have rendered Indigenous people homeless and having experiences similar to those of refugees in their own homelands. These historical systems and policies continue to impact Indigenous Peoples as they are embedded in all government policies and planning [27] and require comprehensive redress.
Structural prevention, at its core, is a process of activities to carefully assess, redesign, and strengthen Canada’s social safety net. It requires broadly and meaningfully addressing the economic, cultural, social, and political factors that contribute to housing precarity and social exclusion in the first place, while working to ensure people who are precariously housed or homeless do indeed receive access to the resources, services, and supports in ways informed by decolonization, equity, diversity, and inclusion. This includes the need to address colonization and its specific impact on Indigenous youth homelessness/houselessness. By doing so, we reduce the risk that any young person will become homeless, and when they are housed, young people are supported in appropriate, effective, and culturally informed ways to remain housed.
A key example of structural youth homelessness prevention includes:
1a] Addressing Structural Causes of Indigenous Youth Homelessness: A good example of structural prevention is to consider homelessness/houselessness amongst Indigenous Peoples, which, as discussed earlier, should be understood as a consequence of Canada’s brutal colonial history and ongoing structures and policies that keep Indigenous peoples marginalized. Indigenous scholars have identified that structural prevention is key to addressing Indigenous homelessness [27,37,38]. Ansloos has argued that in generating preventive interventions to address Indigenous youth homelessness, “the assumptions about why Indigenous youth may experience homelessness are disrupted and resituated within structural realities” [38] (p. 1923). Addressing the historical and ongoing impact of colonialism, racism, and structural violence must not only be acknowledged but must be foregrounded in thinking about any efforts to prevent youth homelessness [89]. This suggests that structural preventive solutions must necessarily incorporate Indigenous community needs and epistemologies in their development.
5.2. Systems Prevention: Transforming Public Systems to Support Homelessness Prevention
Many public systems are implicated in the production of youth homelessness, and hence its prevention. This includes, but is not limited to, child protection, health care, the criminal justice system, family support, and education. Negative experiences, system gaps, silos, barriers to support, and insufficient or underfunded services can all increase a young person’s risk of homelessness. Moreover, many young people who are in the care of public systems such as child protection are not adequately supported when they transition out of care. In fact, many young people in Canada trace their homelessness back to system failures and identify system change as the most effective form of youth homelessness prevention [90]. In order to be effective, youth homelessness prevention must address the “institutional and systems failures that either indirectly or directly contribute to the risk of homelessness” [8] (p. 44). This is the work of systems prevention.
5.2.1. Addressing Systems Barriers and Failures
Systems prevention begins with identifying and addressing policies, programs, and practices within public systems that create barriers to accessing support, operate in a discriminatory way, and/or expose people to the risk of homelessness. Preventive efforts must necessarily involve increasing accountability and restructuring our systems to decrease a young person’s likelihood of becoming homeless and increase their chances of enhancing well-being, health, safety, self-determination, education, meaningful employment, belonging, and housing stability. In addition, “the silos between government funding agencies, communities, and non-profit organizations create an incredibly complicated system to access and navigate where the most vulnerable are likely to fall through the cracks” [60] (p. 405). In some cases, policies and procedures are designed in ways that undermine the ability of individuals and communities to obtain access support that would stabilize their housing. When not enough funding is provided for adequate services and support to help all who need them, people fall through the cracks. Systemic discrimination, language barriers, transportation issues, a lack of access to technology, and citizenship requirements are all examples of limitations that can make it difficult for people to gain access to the support they need to stay housed.
The prevention of Indigenous homelessness invariably involves addressing systemic discrimination within public services. Ansloos [8] describes how for young people participating in their research project on Indigenous youth homelessness prevention
“the disconnection and bureaucracy of various public service systems is a key factor in housing precarity. Young peoples’ movement between health and social service systems into educational contexts were particularly challenging. For example, some young people in our study experienced upwards of a dozen or more child welfare placements, and each time they transitioned they needed to navigate changes to medical providers, educational systems, and social services. They described the challenge of coordinating records and ensuring follow through of communications between various systems”.[38] (p.11)
Reliance on public systems that perpetuate colonial violence and do not reflect Indigenous cultures and ways of knowing means Indigenous Peoples often do not access care or receive substandard or culturally inappropriate care [89,91]. For example, it is known that many Indigenous Peoples avoid accessing health care systems because of discrimination and neglect experienced personally or by family and friends [90,92,93]. Indigenous People are then left in a situation where they must seek out and rely on support within public systems that may perpetuate colonial violence and discrimination, or that do not reflect Indigenous cultural practices and ways of knowing, being and doing.
Age is also a factor in systemic discrimination. Across many public systems, age thresholds are key determinants of which services, support, programs, and entitlements are available to youth. Being under 16 can mean a young person is unable to access homelessness services, mental health and substance use supports, get on a waitlist for youth housing, sign a lease, or access rent subsidies. Similarly, once a youth in care turns 18, they may be quickly removed from foster care and transitioned into a world in which they have drastically different legal, financial, and personal rights and responsibilities. For instance, the youth criminal justice system treats children and youth under 18 in ways dramatically different from adult systems [18+]. While these age markers are socially constructed and largely arbitrary, they profoundly shape what supports and programs young people can access, how they access them, and what entitlements and rights they have within them. This means that systems prevention for youth not only differs from adults; it may also look very different between youth depending on age and other factors.
Compared to adults, young people often experience more limited self-determination when engaging with public systems. This is, in part, due to dominant social and cultural beliefs about youths’ capacity, maturity, or abilities. In many systems, youth are given fewer opportunities to exert personal choice, e.g., when making medical decisions, or are unable to access services or supports without the permission of others (e.g., addiction services that require parental permission). As Oudshoorn et al. advocate, foregrounding empowerment requires ensuring public systems implement client-centered approaches to working with youth where participation and client choice are integrated into policy and practice [64]. In light of this, it is crucial to ensure that young people can access support in a way that works for them. Services and institutions should prioritize youth self-determination. This means providing age- and developmentally appropriate information and opportunities to empower youth to feel safe and comfortable in determining how they access services and not to be obliged to interact with services that do not work for them [64]. This includes being mindful of how power is shared and being cognizant of a diversity of worldviews. The best way to ensure that services are developmentally and culturally appropriate, trauma-informed, and self-empowering is to have people with lived experience of homelessness actively participate in decision-making tables where systems and services are developed and rolled out.
5.2.2. Transition Supports for Youth Exiting Public Systems
A key driver of homelessness in Canada is the lack of transitional planning and support for individuals exiting public systems. Research has consistently shown that transitions from public institutions or systems are common pathways into homelessness for young people [9,94]. Young people are typically not in charge of when they exit such systems, and this timing is often arbitrary and does not take account of individual developmental needs, life skills, and assets, as well as structural factors such as the cost of housing, low-paid and part-time work, and age discrimination. As a result, many young people in these situations will experience housing precarity, poverty, nutritional vulnerability, and lack of safety. They may also struggle to reintegrate into the community, reconnect with social supports, and re-engage with education, employment, or training and are not adequately supported to live on their own.
While youth can experience great challenges when exiting in-patient health/mental health care or corrections, here we will focus on perhaps the biggest challenge: youth leaving child protection. Young people who are removed from their families by child protection services and are taken into care as wards of the state [including foster care, group home placements, or youth custodial centers] will all eventually leave care. Most wind up “aging out” when they surpass the maximum cutoff age for support from child protection services (18 or 19 depending on the jurisdiction), although it is becoming more common to offer ongoing financial assistance. However, the world has changed dramatically from the time child protection systems were put in place. Currently, housing costs have gone through the roof at the same time that well-paying jobs for young adults without higher education have all but disappeared, meaning that few youths at this age have the resources or experience to live independently.
Failure to adequately prepare and support youth to exit state care becomes a major pipeline into homelessness [91,95,96,97,98,99]. While it is estimated that 0.3% percent of Canadian youth have had some involvement with child protection, research from Canada demonstrates that 57.8% of youth experiencing homelessness have had such involvement, with and 47.1% having a history of placements in foster care or group homes [15]. Over 70% of Indigenous youth and 63% of 2SLGBTQ+ youth experiencing homelessness in Canada have been involved in the child welfare system [15].
In the face of these policy and practice challenges, there has been a growing movement to reform our child protection systems to produce better outcomes for young people and their families and to work to reduce the likelihood of transition to homelessness through prevention. These are problems for which there are many possible solutions, including raising the age at which young people leave care, redesigning exits based on readiness rather than an arbitrary age, and providing a range of “aftercare” supports, including access to housing, income supports, and free tuition [100]. In 2023, an International Transitions from Child Protection Symposium was hosted by A Way Home Canada and the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness. This symposium highlighted the underlying issues linking child protection and homelessness but also pointed to emerging solutions [96,101].
Key examples of youth homelessness systems prevention include:
2a] Equitable Standards for Transitions to Adulthood for Youth in Care. The Equitable Transitions report {101] is a collaborative effort led by the Child Welfare League of Canada, the National Council of Youth in Care Advocates, and young people with lived experience of child protection and homelessness. It sets out eight comprehensive standards that governments and service providers should follow to ensure transitions to adulthood are healthy and supported for youth in care. “Our overarching goal is to ensure that youth in care are afforded equitable supports and conditions for success, so they can thrive and not struggle to survive” [102]. This is a useful framework that can be broadly applied as a guide for the transformation of child protection in a way that reduces the risk that youth aging out of care will become homeless.
2b] Reforming child protection legislation and policy to better support youth.
One of the most promising attempts at child protection reform in Canada is led by the Province of British Columbia’s Ministry of Children and Family Development (MCFD) and Indigenous Child and Family Service [ICFS], which introduced its “Strengthening Abilities and Journeys of Empowerment” (SAJE) program in 2023. The legislation provides a broad range of support for youth leaving care up to their 27th birthday. Supports provided by SAJE navigators and guides include
- Pre- and post-19 planning supports;
- Unconditional income support of up to USD 1250 per month;
- Housing supports, including rent supplements and SAJE Support Agreements [SSA];
- Health and wellness supports, including medical benefits, enhanced dental and optical benefits, and the SAJE mental health and counseling benefit (USD 1500 annually);
- Access to Life-Skills, Training, and Cultural Connections Fund and the BC tuition waiver program (Province of British Columbia, 2024).
If well implemented, these reforms will become a model for other jurisdictions in Canada and abroad.
2c] Community-based interventions to enhance connections between young people and caring adults in their lives.
StepStones for Youth (Toronto, Canada) [101] offers a program called Building Connections, which focuses on supporting youth exiting care unconditionally “in developing a strong network of caring people that they can depend on for life” (Stepstonesforyouth.com accessed on 25 November 2024). Rather than having young people depend on professional support, this program helps them to overcome social exclusion through developing a sense of connection and belonging in a community of their choice. Young people are supported to obtain housing and to increase attachment to school. Connections are then made and supported by people who care about them. Supports can include strengthening family connections, engaging in mediation, building key relational life skills, including dealing with conflict, and improving communication and impulse control. Youth are also connected to other mentors who may or may not be -elated, including teachers, coaches, and other meaningful adults in their lives.
2d] Indigenous approaches to Transitions from Care. Prevention of youth homelessness can also include stopping youth from being apprehended by child protection in the first place, especially by settler or non-Indigenous-led child protection services. For Indigenous Peoples, this can include providing culturally appropriate family and community support, including trauma-informed support and healing for entire communities and families. A good example is the Omamoo Wango Gamik Program (https://www.niginan.ca/omamoo-wango-gamik) operated by NiGiNan Housing Ventures in Edmonton. This 42-unit, Indigenous-led housing initiative was developed to support Indigenous youth leaving care with a focus on bringing families together to create a sense of community for residents who previously lacked strong connections to family (NiGiNan Housing Ventures 2024; https://www.niginan.ca/omamoo-wango-gamik). Melissa Keith, the team lead at Omamoo, Wango Gamik states
“As part of this program, Indigenous Elders live alongside the residents and help to provide culturally appropriate supports. The programming at Omamoo Wango Gamik goes beyond providing temporary shelter. It aims to prevent youth homelessness by addressing the root causes of Indigenous homelessness and keeping Indigenous youth out of the foster care system”
5.3. Early Intervention—Preventing New Cases of Homelessness
Early intervention has been described as “policies, practices, and interventions that help individuals and families who are at extreme risk of, or who have recently experienced, homelessness obtain the supports needed to retain their current housing or rapidly access new and appropriate housing” [8] (p. 44). To best serve youth, early intervention must focus upstream on early detection followed by rapidly meeting not only the need for safe and stable housing but also addressing the physical, emotional, material, interpersonal, social, and educational needs of young people who are at imminent risk of or who have just become homeless.
There are several important aspects of early interventions, including broadening who is considered the client, early identification, working with youth at an earlier age, and taking a systems approach. First, since youth homelessness is frequently the result of unresolved conflict between young people and their family and/or caregivers [15], the client of early interventions ought to include the youth along with their family and other natural supports. Second, early interventions require consideration of how to identify youths’ early signs of distress and the need for support, which may or may not be noticed by meaningful adults in their lives [100]. Third, recognizing that many youth experience homelessness before the age of 16 and go on to have more complex support needs [15], early interventions should aim to respond much earlier when youth are 13 to 15 years old (middle school to early high school age). Finally, perhaps the biggest paradigm shift in working upstream through early interventions involves taking a cross-systems approach involving all systems that young people may be involved with (e.g., education, health care, employment services, and the criminal justice system). Youth-serving organizations within the homelessness sector need to be considered only one part of an integrated system of care. Originating in children’s mental health and addictions sectors, a ‘system of care’ is defined as “an adaptive network of structures, processes, and relationships grounded in system of care values and principles that provides children and youth with serious emotional disturbance and their families with access to and availability of necessary services and supports across administrative and funding jurisdictions” [103] (p. 3). Identifying and responding to youth and their family and natural supports’ needs in a timely and client-driven manner is only possible through the intentional integration of multiple systems addressing their diverse needs and circumstances.
In practice, early interventions should provide youth and their families with assistance to navigate systems, assert their rights, and access the support they are eligible for. Support must be housing-led, meaning they prioritize stabilizing the young person’s living situation, which may include individual and family support for young people to leave home in a safe and planned way when they are ready. A positive youth development orientation [104,105,106,107] must guide service delivery, including the use of strengths-based assessment tools. Early intervention strategies strengthen adolescents’ protective factors by enhancing engagement with school, nurturing family and natural supports, and building their problem-solving, conflict resolution, and life skills.
Key examples of youth homelessness early intervention prevention include:
3a] Family and Natural Supports [FNS]. The FNS approach begins with the idea that relationships are the basis of a person’s sense of self and well-being, which in turn provides the foundation for a person to thrive [108,109,110,111]. The FNS approach addresses the important role that family and chosen/natural supports play in all young people’s lives. Therefore, an FNS approach can be incorporated as a guiding principle across a variety of primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention interventions, from policy frameworks at the systems and structural level to tertiary programs, such as Housing First for Youth.
FNS is designed to prevent or end a young person’s experience of homelessness through strengthening their relationships with at least one adult who is important to them and who cares about them—maybe a parent, grandparent, aunt/uncle, sibling, neighbor, teacher, tutor, or elder. FNS work is carried out through client-centered case management, counseling, mediation, crisis intervention, and/or skill building for the young person and their family. For Indigenous youth, this is augmented with traditional counseling and healing ceremonies, facilitating relationships with Elders, and other community support. Finding and strengthening relationships with caring adults outside of the family unit—referred to as chosen or natural supports—can be an alternative strategy for achieving housing stabilization when staying with parents or current caregivers is not a safe or viable option. As a result of good FNS work, young people stay connected to school and their community and have an enhanced network of support to draw on into adulthood. This kind of intervention can and should be offered to every young person who is at risk of or is experiencing homelessness.
3b] Eviction Prevention. Eviction prevention includes a range of services to keep individuals and families in their homes and can be implemented in any community where there is rental housing [79,112,113,114,115,116,117]. In Canada, landlord-tenant relations are the domain of provincial and territorial governments and have legislation and policy to address when things go wrong, including policies and procedures for the legal termination of a lease. If a landlord believes a tenant has violated the terms of the lease by, for example, failing to pay rent or damaging property, they must officially file a notice of eviction. Tenants are also frequently evicted without fault, perhaps because the landlord desires to move back into the unit, to renovate or demolish and rebuild a unit[s] to increase the cost of rent (known as a ‘renoviction’ or ‘demoviction’), or they may be blatantly discriminating against or racist toward the tenant(s). It should be noted that youth often lose their housing when they are not signatory to the lease, leaving them without legal protections when they are told they need to leave. There is also evidence for the negative health impact of evictions on youth [118,119].
While notice of eviction does not require the tenant to leave immediately, many tenants who do not know their rights and eviction procedures may end up leaving their housing before due process has led to an official landlord-tenant board ruling. There is a growing body of research attesting to effective models of intervention to prevent evictions [79,112,113,114,115,116,117]. Eviction prevention works with tenants at risk of losing their housing to provide timely services, such as landlord-tenant mediation, arranging to pay rent arrears, providing legal consultation, advice, and representation at landlord-tenant tribunals, providing housing education, as well as home-making skills and crisis supports for those imminently at risk of eviction.
3c] School-Engaged Early Intervention.
A key point of entry for youth homelessness prevention is through school-community partnerships. Schools are where most young people spend much of their time, and if they are struggling with homelessness, there is often an adult—teacher, counselor, or principal—who knows something is wrong but, without support, may not know what to do. School-engaged partnerships involve community-based services with expertise in working with youth and their families, collaborating with schools to identify youth who are at risk of homelessness, dropping out, or getting involved in crime. At their best, such programs also enable the provision of support for youth between 13 and 16. The pioneering work on school-based early intervention has been achieved in Australia and is now being applied in Canada.
5.3.1. Reconnect
Reconnect is a community-based early intervention program that is designed to help young people (ages 13–19) who are at risk of or in the early stages of homelessness [120,121]. Reconnect supports are provided by a community agency that has expertise in working with developing adolescents and their families. The Reconnect program staff partners with schools to engage students through assemblies discussing youth homelessness and work to build productive relationships with teachers, counselors, coaches, and other school staff. This enables school personnel to make a warm transfer to the support of the Reconnect team when they suspect the risk of homelessness or fear the young person may disengage from school. The Reconnect worker then engages the young person and, with their permission, their family, caregivers, and other natural supports.
The goal of Reconnect is to help address the underlying factors that impact young people while at the same time addressing challenges within the family. The best outcomes are that the young person remains in place in their community, the family is stabilized and strengthened, and the youth develops stronger attachments to natural supports in order to prevent and/or reduce the risk of homelessness.
The Reconnect model has also been adopted into an Indigenous-led approach called NYA-WHE, which is operated by Niwasa Kendaaswin Teg (https://niwasa.ca/), an Indigenous multi-service organization in Hamilton. The NYA-WEH program is a ‘stay in school’ initiative to assist and support First Nation, Métis, and Inuit students in elementary and secondary education by addressing factors that can lead to school disengagement and potentially homelessness. Indigenous youth advisors work with the students, their families, and the school community to provide safe spaces and holistic programming within an inclusive Indigenous educational framework. The program aids the transition to secondary school and explores pathways to post-secondary education through academic, cultural, social, and emotional support.
5.3.2. The Upstream Project
The Upstream Project is a community-engaged early intervention program [122,123] adapted from Upstream Australia [upstreamaustralia.org.au, [122,123,124,125,126]. Upstream is a preventive approach that works to support youth between the ages of 13–18 (the ideal focus is on youth in middle school—aged 13–15) who are identified as at risk of homelessness and school disengagement. Upstream involves a Community of Schools and Social Services approach (COSS) that links local support to students and their families. What distinguishes Upstream from Reconnect is the use of a universal screening tool called the Student Needs Assessment (SNA), a strengths-based and confidential assessment filled out by all students to identify young people who need support because they face barriers to resilience and potential risks of school disengagement and/or homelessness. Parents are informed that the survey is taking place and can have their children opt out, but normally over 90% of students participate. Students flagged as at-risk are invited to a validation interview with an Upstream worker to determine with the young person what support they may need and be interested in receiving. Upstream offers an accessible, youth-led pathway to support that is especially important for students who would not otherwise show outward signs of distress or be identified by educators as being in need and who might fear stigma or other consequences related to revealing their circumstances. Upstream workers’ regular presence in the schools to build relationships with school personnel and students helps destigmatize seeking help and can increase uptake and engagement with the program.
5.4. Crisis Prevention—Helping People to Exit Homelessness as Soon as Possible
Crisis prevention includes policies, interventions, and practices that support those who are at risk of becoming trapped in long-term and/or episodic homelessness. The goal is to help individuals and families exit homelessness as quickly as possible with adequate and culturally appropriate housing and support to ensure there is no return to homelessness. By reducing the duration of and returns to homelessness, effective crisis interventions can result in “the reduction of costly emergency accommodation and the alleviation of the individual trauma associated with a spell of homelessness” [4] (p. 148). Therefore, crisis prevention differs from our existing crisis-oriented response to homelessness, which provides humanitarian support, but is frequently not housing-led and does not equip people with the resources and tools to ensure their experience of homelessness is nonrecurring.
The field of crisis prevention interventions is still nascent though promising, with some interventions, such as rapid rehousing and shelter diversion, requiring more evidence and consensus-building to clarify how they work, for whom, and in what context. Part of the challenge of implementing these interventions is the lack of a consistent and integrated data management and follow-up strategy between different organizations, public systems, and communities to confirm that homelessness has been prevented and not merely postponed or pushed elsewhere [e.g., the young person goes to another shelter or ends up experiencing unsheltered homelessness]. A recent study of two youth homelessness prevention interventions in Ontario that support youth transitioning from care, and do shelter diversion found noted a number of barriers, including the following:
- Mandated data practices that are not designed to support youth homelessness prevention;
- Structural barriers, including the scarcity of accessible and appropriate rental housing;
- Bureaucratic barriers to implementing flexible case management supports necessary to effectively implement homelessness prevention [126].
They also found front-line workers and managers in the homelessness sector were often “frustrated and disheartened that despite their best efforts, young people are still spending long periods of time homeless before a suitable unit becomes available for them” [127] (p. 578). A related challenge to effective crisis prevention is that because many of these interventions were developed for adults, they focus narrowly on private market rental options for housing. For youth and young adults, these options are not always desirable nor appropriate, especially in the current economic climate in which living with family, roommates, chosen kin, and/or other natural supports has become the norm for young people. Indeed, Statistics Canada has found that 35% of young adults aged 20–34 reported living with at least one of their parents, and an additional 15% lived with other relatives or non-related roommates [128,129].
- All of this suggests the need to consider the following elements in the design and implementation of crisis prevention initiatives:
- Incorporate a family and natural supports approach as a key competency for service provision.
- Provide access to a range of safe, affordable, appropriate, and permanent housing options, including living with [chosen] family.
- Minimize the duration of engagement with emergency services, such as shelters.
- Identify who is most likely to transition to long-term homelessness and target additional support for this group.
- Implement data systems designed to support youth homelessness prevention and to effectively track outcomes.
- Put in place accountability measures to ensure diversion efforts do not result in young people being discharged into unsheltered homelessness.
- Work with community members and young people with lived expertise to ensure models of support are culturally appropriate.
- Key examples of youth homelessness crisis prevention include:
4a] Shelter diversion [sometimes referred to simply as Diversion] is one of the most common approaches to crisis prevention and is intended to help those presenting at an emergency shelter find alternative accommodations in the community and avoid entrenchment in the homelessness system [130,131,132,133,134]. Diversion programs reframe the emergency shelter intake process so entry into the shelter is not the default. Shelter intake worker practices make reasonable efforts to work with the young person to identify alternative housing arrangements and supports [including financial] to return to permanent housing [128]. Culturally informed and broadened meanings of shelter diversion are needed, particularly for Indigenous youth, by including healing from traumas and effects of colonization across generations. This also includes having support in place when Indigenous Peoples leave their home communities to come to urban centers.
4b] Rapid rehousing is a short-term housing-led intervention designed to support individuals and families to quickly exit homelessness and return to housing in their community [135]. People are provided with a] help identifying and obtaining housing, b] short-term rent supports [usually three months] and help moving into their new place, and c] case management and support tailored to the needs of the young person. Rapid rehousing’s light touch and short-term approach is ideal for people who demonstrate stronger protective factors and assets and do not necessarily have the complex needs or vulnerability to be prioritized for more intensive interventions. An evaluation of youth-focused rapid rehousing programs was conducted by Point Source Youth [136].
4c] Host Homes. Host Homes programs provide youth who experience homelessness and have nowhere else to go with access to short-term accommodation in a safe place to stay and access support. There have been numerous evaluations of Host Homes [136,137,138,139,140] and resources for implementation [140]. The program is intended to keep youth in place in their community so they can stay connected to school, friends, and family and natural support. In a Host Homes program, youth who cannot find alternative accommodation are immediately connected with a vetted host individual or family in their community. They are escorted to the home, introduced to the host[s], and provided with food and toiletries. The level of engagement with the host(s) is up to the young person. The next day, case management begins, where young people undergo an assessment and are offered a range of supports and help to find suitable long-term accommodation in their community.
4d] Direct Cash Transfers. There have been a number of experiments in providing Direct Cash Transfers as a means of preventing homelessness both for adults and youth [141,142,143]. Direct Cash Transfers for youth (18–24) typically involve an initial one-time start-up grant of USD 2000 to USD 4500 without preconditions and/or an ongoing monthly cash payment, with the amount based on the cost of living in that community with the goal of preventing youth from entering homelessness in the first place. Alongside the unconditional cash payments is a range of services provided by a local community-based organization that might include housing navigation, financial counseling, and peer support. Young people are granted the choice of payment options and support, providing an opportunity to succeed through making their own decisions and receiving services that are tailored to their needs and experiences.
4e] Duty to Assist is an innovative approach to crisis prevention that was developed in Wales and was supported by the Housing [Wales] Act, 2014, which made access to homelessness prevention services a universal right [75,144,145,146]. The legislation requires local authorities to offer assistance to individuals or families who are currently homeless or will become homeless within 14 days. If the person accepts the offer of help, the local authority is then required to remedy the situation within 56 days, including providing accommodation that is available for the next six months that is not in a homeless shelter. Access to prevention services is a right; therefore, everyone who becomes homeless must receive the support they need, not just those who have been homeless for a long time. The successful implementation of a Duty to Assist in Wales has had a dramatic impact on the levels of homelessness in Wales, with the number of people presenting as homeless and in need of assistance dropping dramatically. In Canada, efforts have been made to adopt a Duty to Assist for the purposes of preventing youth homelessness [147,148].
5.5. Housing Stabilization—Preventing Return to Homelessness
A form of tertiary prevention, housing stabilization involves assisting young people who have already experienced homelessness and housing precarity to exit that situation quickly and with the necessary supports in place to ensure they do not cycle back into homelessness again. Housing stabilization aims to help youth avoid the detrimental health and well-being consequences of prolonged exposure to homelessness that can undermine long-term housing stability and well-being. In addition to assisting youth to achieve housing stability, housing stabilization seeks to improve outcomes in other areas of young people’s lives that have been negatively impacted by or prior to homelessness, including health, well-being, social inclusion, attachment to education, and employment.
We know from the research cited above that when young people exit homelessness on their own, many do not do well [55,56,57,58]. The path of young people out of homelessness and into housing is mired with adversity. It is incumbent upon us to design interventions that make this path as easy to traverse as possible by providing young people with meaningful supports that extend beyond the provision of four walls and a roof. This includes making connections between young people and the individuals, communities, and services outside of the homelessness sector that will support them into adulthood.
Key examples of youth homelessness housing stabilization include:
5a] Housing First for Youth. Adapted from the evidence-based practice, Housing First, Housing First for Youth (HF4Y) is a rights-based intervention for youth (age 16–24) who are experiencing or at risk of homelessness, providing immediate access to housing without preconditions and a range of wrap-around supports designed to enhance stabilization and reduce the likelihood of a return to homelessness [10,26,85,86,148,149]. Supports provided through HF4Y programs are age-appropriate and focus on health, well-being, life skills, engagement in education and employment, and social inclusion. Both a program model guide and an operations manual have been developed to assist in the implementation of HF4Y [86,87]. The Housing First for Youth program model can also be tailored to meet the needs of specific groups of youth. For example, adaptations have been made for youth leaving care [149] as well as an Indigenous-led adaptation for Indigenous youth that embeds the intervention in culture, Indigenous ways of knowing, and ceremony [27,28,150].
5b] HOP-C. The Housing Outreach Program—Collaborative [HOP-C] addresses the problem of youth not being adequately supported as they attempt to transition out of homelessness [87,151,152]. It is based on the belief that housing is necessary but insufficient to ensure flourishing in other major life domains. HOP-C was developed through an intensive study of the needs of youth in transition out of homelessness—alongside consultation and co-design with youth, practice, and policy leaders in the field. As with Housing First for Youth, HOP-C has also been adapted for Indigenous youth through a project in Thunder Bay [152]. Using a team-based approach, HOP-C operates much like a small Assertive Community Treatment interdisciplinary team. HOP-C supports are provided between 4 months and 1 year, depending on the level of needs. Key elements of the HOP-C intervention include mental health support, case management to help with life skills and system navigation, peer support, community outreach, and social inclusion.
6. Considerations and Principles for Implementing Youth Homelessness Prevention
The examples of preventive interventions presented in this typology are meant to inspire the reader to consider what is possible. Most of these interventions have an evidence base, while others can be considered promising practices, since they have not existed long enough to be rigorously researched. In this concluding section, we present some key considerations and principles that should guide the implementation of homelessness prevention interventions.
First, there needs to be consideration of what homelessness prevention is and what it is not, specifically for homelessness policies and programs. At a structural and societal level, the full realization of homelessness prevention is dependent on the widespread and maximal adoption of a prevention orientation or ethos. This means being more intentional in acknowledging the roles that a range of institutions and activities outside of the homelessness sector can play in enhancing and strengthening people’s protective factors to keep them housed. For example, poverty reduction efforts and strategies should consider the ways in which they are potentially linked to addressing homelessness. Indeed, the primary prevention of homelessness can be quite broad, with some targeted elements to support populations that are generally at greater risk of homelessness. However, the scope of what can be considered secondary and tertiary homelessness prevention activities is much more focused, with specific implications for homelessness policy, the homeless-serving system, and practices/interventions. At these levels, not all homelessness policies and interventions can be considered homelessness prevention. Within the homelessness sector and policy frameworks, homelessness prevention demands that policies and interventions be clearly linked to preventing or addressing people’s imminent or current housing loss. Without ensuring that homelessness prevention interventions directly address the housing precarity experienced by youth at risk of or experiencing homelessness, we risk diluting prevention efforts and priorities to the point of having no meaningful impact. Without careful consideration of what counts as homelessness prevention, the concept can become vulnerable to criticism that could reassert the dominance of reactive, crisis-driven responses that reinforce individual blame and obfuscate the need for structural and systemic changes.
A second consideration is the change management challenges that the shift to homelessness prevention can raise for individuals, organizations, and communities. Under our current frameworks of funding for homelessness, organizations and communities are frequently presented with an opportunity cost where if they want to pursue homelessness prevention programs and practices, they will have to remove funding and resources from elsewhere. Funders and policymakers should ensure adequate resources support existing programming while organizations and institutions shift toward a greater prevention orientation. This shift also means investing time and resources into re-tooling the staff and leadership of organizations, systems, and institutions (including funders) with the mindset and skills necessary for adopting a prevention approach to homelessness. Youth-serving organizations that are interested in implementing preventive interventions should take advantage of the knowledge and expertise of expert practitioners who have already gone down the road of prevention and can give guidance. Seeking out training and technical assistance for homeless prevention approaches and participating in communities of practice can create space for organizations to develop their prevention skills and receive professional and peer support. It is important to emphasize throughout the change management process that performing preventive work can have a positive impact on staff. With a strong focus on well-being, preventive interventions can lead to more positive outcomes for clients. The shift toward a greater emphasis on prevention holds the promise of a more hopeful and fulfilling vocation and the ability to have an earlier and more transformative impact on youth and families before they are entrenched in crisis and trauma.
Guiding Principles for Youth Homelessness Prevention
There are a series of interconnected guiding principles that should inform the underlying values and practical design, implementation, and evaluation of homelessness prevention policies, programs, and practices. Our inclusion of the principles provides useful direction for the development and implementation of intervention as well as evaluation criteria for research in youth homelessness prevention. The following eight principles presented here have been derived from years of research and practice evidence and the demands of youth with lived expertise. In presenting these guiding principles we expand upon the five Core Principles that have been developed for Housing First for Youth [26,85,86] by adding additional principles that are derived from other areas of focus that have evolved since Housing First for Youth was first developed in 2014 [26]. This includes the growing relevance of a human-rights-based approach to addressing youth homelessness [105], an integrated systems approach to addressing homelessness [29], recognizing the need to take into account equity, diversity and inclusion, and finally, the need to support youth through enhancing family and natural supports [108,109,110,111]:
- Housing stabilization with no preconditions;
- Youth choice, youth voice, and self-determination;
- Positive youth development and wellness orientation;
- Individualized, client-driven supports that are equitable and culturally appropriate;
- Social inclusion and community integration;
- Connection to family and natural supports;
- Cross-systems collaboration and accountability;
- Grounding prevention in human rights.
Each principle has implications for both individual-level interventions as well as broader systems and structural changes. The first five principles are derived from the core principles of Housing First for Youth [86], which has long been argued by some of the authors of this paper to be not only a program model but a guiding philosophy for broader organizational and systems approaches to youth homelessness [29]. The sixth principle emerged from the development of the Family and Natural Supports early intervention program model, which over time has become an essential approach to be infused across all training and technical assistance for youth homelessness prevention and intervention. The seventh principle is based on years of Collective Impact work, coalition-building, and systems thinking that have been the driving force behind the adoption and scaling of youth homelessness prevention in policy and practice in Canada and abroad. The eighth principle acknowledge the existing broad range of human rights frameworks, conventions, and legislation that should guide youth homelessness prevention policy and practice. A brief description of each principle is provided below.
6.1. Housing Stabilization with No Preconditions
Youth homelessness prevention must always be housing-led, in that interventions should focus on stabilizing existing housing or to provide youth who are experiencing homelessness assistance to obtain safe, secure, and permanent housing that meets their needs as quickly as possible. For youth, housing must be affordable and appropriate, according to the age, needs, and abilities of developing adolescents and young adults. The location of housing should not impede young people from accessing the services, support, and resources they need, nor should it disrupt existing relationships. Developmentally appropriate housing support means that young people are assisted in finding housing options that make the best sense for them and enhance the stability of their housing situation.
Key to the philosophy of Housing First for Youth is the assertion that individuals and families are not required to first demonstrate that they are “ready” for housing, and there should be no preconditions for obtaining access to housing, such as requiring sobriety or abstinence or that the young person be attending school or employed. For young people with addictions, a recovery orientation also means providing a harm reduction environment. Harm reduction aims to reduce the risks and harmful effects associated with substance use and addictive behaviors for the individual, the community, and society as a whole without requiring abstinence. However, as part of the spectrum of choices that underlies both Housing First for Youth and harm reduction, people may desire and choose “abstinence only” housing.
6.2. Youth Choice, Youth Voice, and Self-Determination
Young people must have their agency affirmed by having their input heard, taken seriously, and acted upon in matters regarding their care and options for housing and support. When decisions are made for or about youth rather than with or by them, it undermines their self-determination, even if well-meaning adults think they know better or are acting in the best interest of young people. Youth choice and voice require providing young people with accessible and appropriate resources to make informed decisions and supporting them both when their choices lead to success and opportunities for change and growth. Giving youth voice and choice helps ensure youth receive the care that best meets their varied interests and personal circumstances and increases their decision-making capacity in a safe and supported environment where they learn to deal with consequences. Having voice and choice in decisions does not mean options are unlimited or unconstrained by practical realities, but that efforts are made to have clear and open communication about the options available [85]. Therefore, prevention approaches should address policies and practices that punish imperfect decision-making by, for example, setting rigid behavioral requirements for support or threatening withdrawal of care. Prevention policies and practices at the structural, systems, community, and organizational levels should also create meaningful opportunities for young people with lived expertise to inform their design, implementation, and evaluation.
6.3. Positive Youth Development and Wellness Orientation
Youth homelessness prevention employs a “positive youth development” orientation, a strengths-based approach that focuses not just on risk and vulnerability but also youth’s assets [104,105,106,107]. A positive youth development approach includes the following:
- Identifies the youth’s personal strengths in order to build self-esteem and a positive sense of self.
- Works to improve the youth’s communication and problem-solving skills.
- Enhances and builds natural supports, including family relationships.
- Assists the youth in personal goal setting.
- It helps the youth access educational opportunities and identify personal interests.
Adopting a positive youth development approach has important implications for practice. Case management support in youth homelessness prevention must incorporate an understanding of the physical, cognitive, emotional, and social needs of developing adolescents. It must build on the strengths, talents, and dreams of young people and work towards enhancing protective factors and resilience. Importantly, a positive youth development orientation means that young people may need to be supported for a number of years. Because many young people are exposed to traumatic events (e.g., physical, mental, emotional abuse, etc.) either prior to becoming homeless or once they are on the streets, e.g., exploitation and criminal victimization, youth homelessness prevention practices and program design must adopt a culture of trauma-informed care.
All of this reminds us of the necessity of designing preventive interventions to meet the needs of developing adolescents and young adults, rather than simply replicating models developed for adults. Building on youths’ strengths and competencies and taking a trauma-informed and harm-reduction approach are foundational to enhancing their well-being and supporting their recovery. This principle has implications for systems design and outcomes frameworks, demanding that public systems and institutions connected to youth review their policies and procedures to ensure they support and do not create barriers to a positive youth development and wellness orientation.
6.4. Individualized, Client-Driven Supports That Are Equitable and Culturally Appropriate
There is no single policy or program that can adequately prevent and address youth homelessness for all. Universal programs must still be complemented with services and support that are tailored and flexible to the unique and changing circumstances of a young person. Additionally, since youth homelessness is disproportionately felt among racialized, Indigenous, and 2SLGBTQ+ youth (15), any prevention approach must ensure equity in access and outcomes, as well as provide culturally appropriate options for service and support. This includes diverting resources from mainstream service providers and institutions to ensure Indigenous self-governance of approaches to prevent Indigenous homelessness. It also includes auditing the design, implementation, and outcomes of systems to evaluate their equitability and identify opportunities for change.
6.5. Social Inclusion and Community Integration
Young people thrive when they have opportunities to form an identity outside of their experience of homelessness and when they connect to activities that bring meaning to their lives. Connection to communities of interest, faith groups, friends, education, and employment are all ways to enhance youths’ ability to exit or avoid homelessness for the long term. Prevention approaches tap into the range of social networks and holistic community supports that can wrap around young people. At the systems and structural level, policies should enhance and enable greater social inclusion and community integration rather than create parallel systems or double standards for people who are housed versus unhoused.
6.6. Connection to Family and Natural Supports
Strong, healthy relationships with meaningful adults are known protective factors for preventing youth homelessness. Therefore, all prevention approaches should actively seek to strengthen young people’s connection to family (including chosen family) and the natural support of adults that will be present beyond the involvement of paid professionals. These connections are vital to young people’s health and well-being and must be considered as essential in all areas of youth homelessness prevention policies and practice. Systemically and structurally, this principle is enacted through policies and procedures that aim to enhance family and natural supports where possible and remove systemic barriers to family reconnection and strengthening.
6.7. Cross-System Collaboration and Accountability
In the same way that no single program or policy will work for all youth, there is no single agency or sector that is capable of fully realizing youth homelessness prevention. This challenges the status quo dynamics of homelessness governance in Canada, which foist the responsibility on a siloed and piecemeal homelessness sector with minor financial input and high-level policy frameworks provided by various orders of government. However, people who experience homelessness are often connected to a wide array of systems and institutions, and as a policy problem, homelessness is a complex “fusion policy issue” [8] (p. 41). Youth are often connected to other systems before they lose their housing, such as education, physical/mental health, child protection, or juvenile/criminal justice. Deep collaboration within and beyond the homelessness sector and with systems and institutions that may both cause or prevent homelessness is necessary [29]. All systems and sectors connected to young people, and therefore all orders of government, must share the responsibility for preventing homelessness and should be held accountable when their policies and practices fail to do so. This means that governments have roles to play in developing coherent policies and frameworks and providing sufficient funding to support effective implementation and scaling prevention. While the array of public and non-profit/charitable programs and services play a crucial role in the prevention response to homelessness, the responsibility for youth homelessness is shared and should be reflected in a wider array of public systems’ and institutions’ mandates and outcomes.
6.8. Grounding Youth Homelessness Prevention in Human Rights
The experience of homelessness is a direct contravention of young people’s human rights, and this most certainly includes the right to housing. Practically, it means that all youth homelessness prevention work, including laws, policies, interventions, services, and supports, must be grounded in human rights at all stages of development, implementation, and practice. Housing instability impinges upon, and is mutually reinforced by violations of, other fundamental rights enshrined in international human rights agreements, such as the right to adequate food and standard of living, work, health, education, personal security and privacy, equal access to justice, assembly, freedom of expression, and life [153]. Canada has an obligation to uphold and protect these rights as a signatory to international rights frameworks, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights [ICCPR], the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD). The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child issued General Comment No. 21 (2017) on Children in Street Situations, which clarifies the obligations, implications, and actions set out for Member States that have signed on to the CRC. Additionally, Canada has enshrined a legislative right to adequate housing in the National Housing Strategy Act, of 2019, obligating the federal government to take action to progressively realize everyone’s right to housing. Prevention therefore demands a fundamental shift away from managing homelessness through the provision of humanitarian aid and toward addressing systemic rights violations to ensure people are protected from discrimination and are provided with the resources and capacities to have their rights (to adequate housing and otherwise) fully realized.
As more evidence becomes available and as we continue to reflect on efforts to prevent youth homelessness, more principles may emerge. Yet for this present moment, they represent the essential elements of any approach that claims to prevent youth homelessness.
7. Conclusions
For decades, the dominant response to youth homelessness has focused on emergency services and supports, for the most part, modeled on the infrastructure designed for adults. This paper aims to challenge our thinking and reimagine the current response to homelessness in Canada by focusing on youth homelessness and prevention. Here, we offer policymakers, community organizers, researchers, and frontline workers a conceptual framework for the prevention of youth homelessness, including a definition and typology with concrete examples, as well as considerations and guiding principles for putting prevention into practice.
Across Canada, youth with lived experience of homelessness have emphasized that prevention efforts could be most effective through the transformation of public systems [68]. These youth were very clear—we are waiting too long to intervene when a young person is at risk or experiencing homelessness. Young people called for a sweeping shift to rights-based prevention and early intervention. In putting forward this vision for the prevention of youth homelessness, we conclude that a collective response to youth homelessness must focus on being proactive rather than reactive, given the negative consequences of prolonged exposure to homelessness for developing adolescents and young adults. This requires communities and governments to adopt innovative models for policy, programs, and practice. Multiple public systems, sectors, and all orders of government are implicated in this shift. Effective implementation of a systems-wide prevention approach requires deep, meaningful collaboration in order to create the conditions where young people are able to receive the support they need and deserve in order to live healthy and fulfilling lives. This shift not only promises to produce better outcomes for young people, their families, and communities but also to have a significant and lasting positive impact on the prevalence of chronic and long-term homelessness.
As promising homelessness prevention interventions are pursued, researched, and scaled more deeply and widely, our understanding of the path forward grows. The systems change and transformations we are calling for go well beyond the scope of an individual program or practice shift [29]. A shift to prevention will require comprehensive and complex systems change work and the individual level to dismantle pervasive beliefs and assumptions about homelessness, which shape and constrain our ability to imagine and enact alternative approaches. Interpersonal, organizational, and institutional practices that reinforce the status quo need to be re-examined and new standards set. Yet with the full strength and capacity of multiple individuals and systems united in solidaristic and networked action to prevent youth homelessness, the changes required of us are achievable.
Author Contributions
Conceptualization, S.G., E.D., C.F. and K.S.; methodology, S.G.; formal analysis, S.G., A.B., C.F., E.D. and K.S.; resources, S.G.; writing—original draft preparation, S.G., A.B., C.F., E.D. and K.S.; writing—review and editing, S.G., A.B., C.F., E.D. and K.S.; visualization, S.G.; supervision, S.G.; project administration, S.G.; funding acquisition, S.G. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Funding
This research was funded by Research Tricouncil of Canada, Networks of Centres of Excellence Program, Government of Canada. Grant Number #900-2018-202.
Institutional Review Board Statement
Not applicable.
Informed Consent Statement
Not applicable.
Data Availability Statement
No new data were created or analyzed in this study. Data sharing is not applicable to this article.
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
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Figure 1.
Typology of youth homelessness prevention.
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Gaetz, S.; Buchnea, A.; Fournier, C.; Dej, E.; Schwan, K. Towards the Prevention of Youth Homelessness. Youth 2024, 4, 1694-1725. https://doi.org/10.3390/youth4040108
AMA Style
Gaetz S, Buchnea A, Fournier C, Dej E, Schwan K. Towards the Prevention of Youth Homelessness. Youth. 2024; 4(4):1694-1725. https://doi.org/10.3390/youth4040108
Chicago/Turabian StyleGaetz, Stephen, Amanda Buchnea, Cathy Fournier, Erin Dej, and Kaitlin Schwan. 2024. "Towards the Prevention of Youth Homelessness" Youth 4, no. 4: 1694-1725. https://doi.org/10.3390/youth4040108
APA StyleGaetz, S., Buchnea, A., Fournier, C., Dej, E., & Schwan, K. (2024). Towards the Prevention of Youth Homelessness. Youth, 4(4), 1694-1725. https://doi.org/10.3390/youth4040108