A year in the life of the Homeless Hub and the Canadian Homelessness Research Network. 2013 has been a busy year for us.
Funding Enhancement
We received news that our new SSHRC (Social Science and Humanities Research Council) grant “Canadian Observatory on Homelessness” was approved providing us with $2.5 million over the next 7 years including the opportunity to conduct research in key areas.
Personnel
Long-time Project Manager Allyson Marsolais has been on maternity leave since the end of April and she and her partner Stacey are proud parents of little Quinn. I started in mid-April and have been doing my best to fill her big shoes. We transitioned one of our Communications staff — Oxana Roudenko — from part-time to full-time in June. In September, Naomi Nichols, who had worked with us before, came back full-time as our Post-Doctoral Visiting Fellow. Patricia LaCroix joined us in December as a part-time graphic designer and we have had lots of people passing through with short-term contracts or as students. We wrote about some of the folks who make up the Homeless Hub in our “Who is the Hub?” blog post.
Blog
The Research Matters blog was launched June 4th 2010 with a post by Allyson Marsolais entitled “Research CANNOT End Homelessness” (obviously a tongue-in-cheek title). From that date to now we have published just over 120 blogs, approximately 70% of these were published in 2013 when we made a concerted effort to focus on communications and outreach.
Starting in the late summer we instituted three weekly blogs: “Monday’s Week in Review”, “Infographic Wednesday” and Friday’s “Ask the Hub”. Beginning in January 2014, Monday’s blog will change to a feature that looks at solutions to ending homelessness. Each week we will showcase one of the pieces from our new Solutions section on our website. The Wednesday and Friday features will continue as they have been.
Our Facebook page has just about 2050 likes as I write this. We have strong interaction with our followers and get lots of likes and shares. Our most successful Facebook post was an infographic about the Real Cost of Homelessness.
As of this writing, our @HomelessHub Twitter account currently has 5,799 followers and our @CHRNetwork has 3,855 followers. We maintain an active presence on both accounts and have been very successful in getting the word out about homelessness research and issues. We also embedded tweet planning into our communications strategy so that our State of Homelessness report, our Housing First book and an upcoming Aboriginal Homelessness Literature review all had tweets prepared and shared with partners before the launch.
Website
Our current website remains the largest repository in the world of homelessness research. Traffic to the site is consistently rising. In 2013 we had a total of 234,000 visits, doubling from the year prior.
We have partnered with Vertical Wave Solutions to redesign and improve our website. The new version with its sleek design, enhanced searchability and a brand new solutions section will launch early in 2014. We are all very eager to share the new site with you. So eager, that we’re going to give you a little taste with this screenshot of the main page.
Publications
We published two books and a couple of major reports this past year. Our State of Homelessness In Canada: 2013 report which we co-created with the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness received national attention as the first ever report card on homelessness. It provides a good baseline for statistics about the homelessness crisis including:
- 200,000 people are homeless in Canada every year.
- 30,000 are homeless in Canada every night.
- Approximately 50,000 additional people fit into the hidden homeless category nightly.
- Homelessness costs the Canadian economy over $7 billion a year.
We also released, in partnership with the Homelessness Partnering Secretariat, a Promising Practices framework. In “What Works and For Whom? A Framework for Promising Practices”, there is information about the difference between best and promising practices, guidelines to developing a promising practice and several case studies from communities across the country. A webinar entitled “Promising Practices in Preventing and Reducing Homelessness” is also available to download.
In April we released our “Youth Homelessness in Canada: Implications for Policy and Practice” book and in October launched our second book “Housing First in Canada: Supporting Communities to End Homelessness” (developed with the Homelessness Partnering Secretariat). Both the books are available for free on our website or for purchase through the York University bookstore (where they remain top sellers amongst non-textbook sales).
So what’s next for the Hub?
We have two reports and a book coming out in the first quarter of 2014: an Aboriginal Homelessness Literature Review, a report on youth and the child welfare system (Coming of Age) and a book created by our Inclusion Working group which includes stories from people with lived experience of homelessness.
We look forward to the launch of the new website and the new solutions section which we hope will contribute towards the growing movement towards ending homelessness.
We will be further developing the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness work which includes new research and partnerships in several key areas including: prevention, Aboriginal Homelessness, Systems Responses to Homelessness, Housing Supports and Accommodation.
To all of our readers, partners, researchers and collaborators – we hope you enjoyed your holidays and have a Happy New Year. Our New Year’s Resolution is that all levels of government work together with communities to end homelessness in Canada once and for all.