St. John's organization optimistic about preventative nature of new federal homelessness program

The federal government announced changes Monday to a national homelessness program, doubling support for communities to address the needs of people who are homeless or at risk.

“This is an exciting historic milestone towards achieving our ambitious goal of reducing chronic homelessness in Canada by 50 per cent,” Minister of Families, Children and Social Development Jean-Yves Duclos stated in a news release.

In St. John’s, Choices for Youth executive director Sheldon Pollett said he is “pleased to see the announcement.”

Choices for Youth supports at-risk and homeless youth in the province with secure and stable housing, education, and employment.

The new federal strategy, called Reaching Home, will go into effect April 1, 2019.

It’s part of a 10-year, $40-billion plan to address the housing needs of the most vulnerable Canadians by creating up to 100,000 new housing units and 300,000 repaired or renewed units.

It also includes a community-based approach that will provide funding directly to communities and local service providers.

Currently, the federal government’s Homelessness Partnering Strategy funds 61 communities, but next year additional communities will be added through an application process coming later this year.

“One of the things we’re excited about is the federal government seems to be going in a direction that’s giving communities much more flexibility in terms of identifying what the needs are, and then what the resources should go toward,” said Pollett. “One of the things we’re excited about is the notion that we can do a lot more work that’s preventive in nature.”

Pollett said a frequent challenge facing vulnerable youth is that they usually don’t meet federal definitions of what it means to be chronically homeless.

He said St. John’s sees a greater number of people who are episodically homeless — going from a friend’s couch, to a shelter, on the street, staying with family, and so on.

“Which means that all those resources don’t go towards helping the most vulnerable young people. Of course, this strategy is not just about young people — it’s all populations — but that’s an example of if we had better flexibility around how these resources are applied, then hopefully we’re much more effective in responding.

“Right now, it is very challenging. Even though research after research shows that targeted prevention strategies … is where a big part of our focus has to be — that we can prevent a young person from falling into that scenario in the first place. Right now, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to fit prevention initiatives into the existing funding model.”

There’s also a significant increase in the number of young people accessing Choices for Youth’s services over the past 10 years.

Statistics from 2008 show that over a three-year period, the organization worked with 450 young people. Last year’s report — for one year —showed that the organization worked with 1,235 young people.

In two days, Pollett said, they release their next annual report and the number has increased again, to 1,519.

“That makes an incredibly strong case that we have to start looking at serious targeted investments in prevention of youth homelessness, because we’re going in the wrong direction.”

While Pollett said he’s optimistic about the government’s new strategy, many of the details are yet to be rolled out and will come between now and the April 2019 launch date.

“It’s going to be over the next number of months where we see, do we get this right?”

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