When a young woman named Ellie arrived at Raven, she was 18 years old, six months pregnant, experiencing homelessness, and using substances daily. She had been discharged from the hospital with nowhere to go. A healthcare provider had told her that without stabilization and engagement in treatment, her baby would likely be apprehended at birth.
Today, Ellie has graduated from high school, is raising her son, lives independently, and is expecting her second child. She remains active in recovery and describes feeling hopeful about her future.
Ellie’s story is not an exception. The new outcomes report on Trellis Society’s Raven program in Calgary, Alberta, shows what becomes possible when young people with the highest needs are given stable housing, consistent relationships, and coordinated support, and when a program refuses to give up on them.
What Raven is and who it serves
Launched in 2022, Raven is a specialized supportive housing and recovery program for young adults with the most complex and overlapping needs, including mental health challenges, substance use, justice involvement, and child protection contact, often all at once. These are young people who have typically cycled through shelters, hospitals, custody, and treatment programs without achieving stability. This is not because they aren’t capable of recovery, but because no single system was designed to address all of their needs at the same time.
At intake, 96% of youth had a diagnosed mental health condition. 94% had previously spent time in the Calgary Young Offender Centre. 87% were actively using methamphetamine or fentanyl. 87% had involvement with Child Protection Services.
Raven’s response is to address housing, health, justice, and family needs together and simultaneously, with consistent relationships and enough time for stabilization to take hold, rather than managing complexity one issue at a time as youth move sequentially from one system to the next.
In doing so, Raven functions as a youth homelessness prevention program by interrupting the pathways that lead young people from system involvement into chronic homelessness, and creating the conditions for long-term stability instead.
What three years of data show
The new outcomes report examines results across all 31 youth served since Raven’s launch. The findings are consistent and meaningful across every outcome area:
- Housing: 71% of youth discharged from the program transitioned to stable housing. No youth was discharged back to unsafe situations or homelessness. At intake, seven youth had entered directly from crisis, including rough sleeping, hospital discharge, or emergency shelter. None returned to those circumstances.
- Recovery: 86% engaged with recovery supports while in the program. 79% left sober or actively engaged in recovery. These outcomes are striking when set against the national baseline. One study found that only 30% of youth experiencing homelessness had ever accessed professional support for substance use. Among youth in Raven, sustained engagement in recovery was the norm, not the exception.
- Justice: 94% of youth on probation were supported to attend court. 54% have completed their justice requirements and are out of the system entirely. 33% are on track to complete probation or parole. Rather than justice involvement ending a young person’s housing placement, Raven provided a stable point of return, allowing housing, recovery, and legal compliance to happen at the same time.
- Family: Five babies were born to youth living at Raven. Based on those young parents’ histories, all five were at high risk of entering government care. All five remained in parental or kinship care. Using provincial cost benchmarks, where an infant entering government care costs approximately $110,000 per year, the program generated an estimated $550,000 in avoided public system costs from this outcome alone.
- Employment: 69% of youth engaged in employment programming. 23% gained paid work experience or independent employment, a meaningful outcome for a population for whom consistent daily routines, let alone workforce participation, were often not possible before entering the program.
“The youth served by Raven were not beyond help; they were beyond the reach of traditional systems.” — Trellis Society, Raven Program Outcomes Report, 2026
Evidence for a better approach
The significance of these outcomes extends well beyond the 31 individuals Raven has served.
A 2025 study of youth housing-focused programs in Calgary found that approximately 39% of youth return to homelessness after program exit. Raven’s rate of positive housing outcomes at discharge is 86%, more than double the comparison benchmark, suggesting that an intensive, relationship-based model produces substantially stronger results than the alternative.
The program doesn’t just improve outcomes for individuals; it reduces pressure on the health, justice, housing, and child welfare systems that would otherwise absorb the cost of continued crisis.
What makes Raven work
The outcomes don’t stem from any single intervention. They reflect a combination of things that, taken together, create the conditions for change.
1. Stable housing provides the foundation
Raven provides stable housing unconditionally, including through periods of relapse, justice involvement, and crisis, because without it, recovery, justice compliance, family reconnection, and employment are nearly impossible to sustain.
2. Consistent relationships do the slow work
The report makes it clear that stabilization is gradual and rarely linear, and that progress is driven not by single breakthroughs but by the sustained presence of staff who show up, maintain expectations, and don’t disengage when things get hard. Leslie, who came to Raven guarded and volatile, began to open up only after months of consistent, boundaried engagement. Blossom, who had lived almost entirely in institutional placements since age six, stabilized as predictability and trust increased. Jordan, who had never managed a consistent daily routine, attended every shift of her work placement after housing and relationships gave her the scaffolding she needed. Marcus, who had been incarcerated three times as a teenager and was at high risk of long-term entrenchment in the justice system, successfully completed a Mental Health Diversion Program with Raven’s support, avoiding a criminal charge and beginning to disengage from the justice system entirely.
3. Integration across systems
The Recovery Coach, the case management team, and the partnerships with health, justice, and family services mean that a young person doesn’t have to navigate multiple disconnected systems alone. Raven navigates alongside them.
4. Time is what allows recovery to become possible
These are young people whose needs developed over years of instability and system contact. Change does not happen quickly. What Raven provides, alongside housing and relationships, is enough time for recovery to become possible.
What needs to happen next
Thirty-one young people is a start, but the need for programs like Raven is far greater. There are many more youth in Alberta and across Canada who present with this level of complexity and who are currently cycling through emergency systems. The Raven model has demonstrated that intensive, relationship-based, housing-first intervention works for this population.
The cost of not doing so is real: repeated shelter stays, detox cycles, custody placements, child apprehensions, and emergency health care, borne by public systems not designed to produce the outcomes Raven has demonstrated are achievable.
The Raven program is proof that youth homelessness prevention is the fiscally responsible approach. For young people like Ellie, Leslie, Blossom, Jordan, and Marcus, we need funders, governments, and system partners to invest in making it available to more of them.
About the Raven program
Raven is a specialized supportive housing and recovery program operated by Trellis Society for Community Impact in Calgary, Alberta. Launched in 2022, Raven serves young adults with complex and overlapping needs across mental health, substance use, justice, and child protection systems. The full Raven program Outcomes Report is available at growithtrellis.ca.
About Trellis Society
Trellis Society for Community Impact is a Calgary-based non-profit organization committed to helping children, youth, and families grow and thrive. Visit growithtrellis.ca