This post is the second of a three part series of resources to plan for a COVID recovery that includes ending homelessness for young people.1
Program planners, policy makers, decision makers and front line workers don’t have to wait for the end of COVID-19 to build a more robust framework for supporting young people who are homeless. Important research was completed before the pandemic arrived and can accommodate learnings from the pandemic experience.
People who experience homelessness throughout their adult lives often had their first experience of homelessness before they were 25 years old. If we want to end homelessness in the long run, this suggests a need to put extra effort into ending homelessness for young people.
Research undertaken before the pandemic showed supporting people to leave homelessness is not as effective when there is a “one size fits all” solution. And while each person has an individual path to homelessness, we have learned that there are some situations that are common across a lot of young people’s individual experiences.
We have also learned that asking the experts – those young people who have experience of homelessness – will help to shorten the time that young people are homeless. Getting the advice of young people who had been homeless has also emphasized the value of preventing homelessness from happening in the first place. A report from the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness Press draws on the experience of 100 young people in Canada.
This is a great time to review the advice from young people with lived experience of homelessness. After spending much of 2020 adapting to provide services to limit the spread of COVID, the arrival of vaccines means we can think in a more focused way about recovery. The advice from young people identifies structural and systems changes that are needed to prevent homelessness from happening. These kinds of changes will especially be needed to ensure that the COVID emergency measures do not translate to even more homelessness during recovery.
The report also discusses ways to engage young people that will help programs to adapt as conditions change going forward. Read more at the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness Press: What Would It Take? Youth Across Canada Speak Out on Youth Homelessness Prevention
Footnotes
- For the first article in this series, see Youth Homelessness Part 1: Where Are They? The third post, Youth Homelessness Part 3: Switching Gears, is in the works.
