Prioritizing Prevention: Examining Shelter Diversion as an Early Intervention Approach to Respond to Youth Homelessness
What Is Homelessness Prevention?
“Youth homelessness prevention refers to policies, practices, and interventions that either (1) reduce the likelihood that a young person will experience homelessness, or (2) provides youth experiencing homelessness with the necessary supports to stabilize their housing, improve their wellbeing, connect with community, and avoid re-entry into homelessness”
[30] p.4.
One of the strongest predictors of youth homelessness is family conflict or breakdown [31]. This means that homelessness prevention for youth requires rapid housing stabilization, in-home supports to mediate conflict, transition supports for aging out of government care and discharge from institutions, low barrier and harm reduction supports, but also supports to deal with trauma, build assets, resiliency, and improve well-being [32]. This also means, and as noted above, strategies must cross public, health and social sectors. In Canada, provinces have authority over health, education, child welfare, financial income support and homelessness funding, programs and policies. Each of these is typically overseen in distinct and separate ministries who have distinct and separate mandates. For example, in Alberta, the Ministry of Community and Social Supports has a mandate to increase housing affordability but has no oversight for discharge policies from foster care or group home care [33]. The Ministry of Children and Family Services has no mandate for homelessness prevention [34] and so, in practice, as young people turn 18, they can be discharged or “age out” of financial and housing supports directly into a homeless shelter for adults. While one Ministry is working to respond to homelessness, others are creating pathways into it.
While there are many programs meant to prevent homelessness, shelter diversion has been identified as an important practice within the emergency shelter system, and some experts have argued that every community should implement shelter diversion programs [35].
The promising results noted above were the primary reason to launch a multi-city study to examine diversion practices/models across Canada. Staff from the Trellis Society of Calgary approached researchers at the University of Calgary to partner on a research project to better understand how diversion programs for youth were operating and to understand how well they were working to prevent youth homelessness. This team then reached out to the other early adopters and invited them to be partners. This larger team designed the research project to examine risk and protective factors for effective diversion and to collect stories from diversion staff, youth, and their families about the diversion experience. The results from this study will better identify whether diversion is an effective early intervention strategy to prevent youth homelessness long-term and if so, inform the development of standardized, yet adaptable programs and staffing models, budgets, training materials and toolkits. We hope to enable youth serving organizations across Canada to move towards youth homelessness prevention more broadly, including adding shelter diversion programs in their communities.
Contributing Authors:
Kat Main
Director of Impact and Evaluation
Nicole Jackson
Strategic Lead, Impact and Evaluation