PILOT PROJECT TO BRING LONG TERM SOLUTIONS TO TORONTO’S HOMELESSNESS CRISIS

A new three-year pilot project supported by the city of Toronto is bringing organizations together to pool resources to help with the homelessness crisis exacerbated by the ongoing pandemic.

This joint effort between the Toronto Alliance to End Homelessness (TAEH), Dixon Hall and MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions is the first of its kind and bridges data with lived experience to find stable, long-term housing solutions based on individual needs.

“People are extremely different from each other,” said Savannah Wilson, the lead project coordinator from TAEH. “We’re taking this data management software and adding a human element to providing a support plan and housing pathway.” 

People seeking help from the shelter system have their information put into a centralized database and are offered whatever solutions are available. But the solutions aren’t always long-term.

By working together the organizations remove a lot of bureaucracy and competition between organizations. 

“Homelessness is not a single entity issue, it’s a community issue,” Wilson said. “There has been a lot of manufactured competition that comes from a scarcity mindset that there’s a limited pool of funding and everybody's competing for it, so organizations have a resistance to collaborating and working together but homelessness can’t be ended if people are working in silos.” 

The care conferencing model that the project uses is basically pooling resources to offer unhoused folks the right pathway based on their needs and lived experience. 

People accustomed to living outside may struggle to suddenly be in a quiet room.

Individuals with a pet may not be welcome in group settings.

Those with partners may be split up. 

These are a few examples of why people choose not to stay within the shelter system. 

For folks moving in and out of the system, the care conference model asks the questions like, “What does this person need?” “What haven’t we tried?” “What options haven’t been exercised?” “How can we as a group find a way to support them?”

It’s a holistic and human approach to handling homelessness.

“No one organization could ever offer the services that are required to a single person to move into housing and become stabilized,” said Wilson.

The pandemic caused congregate style shelters to be unsafe and many sought shelter outside in encampments in city parks because these types of shelters lack privacy and often people are only a few feet from each other with no partition.

As a pandemic response the use of vacant hotels as shelters has seen many unhoused folks make use of the shelter system, some for the first time. 

“Because the hotel shelter offered privacy, offered a door you could close behind you…have their own space, more people started to engage in the shelter system than had in the past,” said Wilson.

This style of shelter is a drastic change from congregate shelters and offers what many unhoused people seek. Safety.

The longevity of these hotel shelters remains to be seen and many of the leases are set to run out in the Spring but those negotiations fall under the jurisdiction of the city.

“A lot of those folks will not return to a congregate setting, the typical cell shelter is not a space that is considered safe by a lot of people,” Wilson said. “It proves that…it’s not that people don’t want to sleep inside, it’s that they don’t want to sleep in a congregate setting.

The pilot projects runs for three years and aims for an outcome that is going to have a significant impact on the stability of housing for people that have typically remained unhoused.