By the time a young person’s housing crisis becomes visible, the opportunity for early intervention may already be slipping away. The conditions that place a young person at risk often develop much earlier, for example, through extreme conflict at home, temporary stays with friends or relatives, overcrowded living conditions, declining mental health, unmet material needs, or a growing disconnection from school.
Yet these experiences are not always apparent to teachers, service providers, or even those closest to the young person. Many young people continue attending school and managing their daily lives while carrying significant challenges largely unseen. As a result, support is still too often triggered by a visible crisis rather than by the less visible circumstances that precede it.
Identifying risk earlier is only part of the challenge. There can also be considerable distance between what policies and programs are intended to provide and what young people actually experience. Policies may recognize housing instability and supports may technically exist, but young people may not know about them, may not recognize their own circumstances within conventional understandings of homelessness, or may encounter systems that are difficult to navigate and disconnected from one another.
Prevention therefore depends not only on having the right policies in place, but on whether they translate into support that young people can actually recognize, access, and trust.
Schools offer an important opportunity to help close this gap. As one of the few systems connected to most young people on a consistent basis, education can help identify emerging challenges and create earlier pathways to support. This does not mean asking schools to prevent youth homelessness on their own. It means positioning them as essential partners and trusted access points within a coordinated, community-based prevention system that can reach young people before instability becomes homelessness.
Importantly, this approach can also lift some of the considerable weight educators already carry in responding to students’ social and material needs. Connecting schools with community-based organizations means that responsibility can be shared with partners that have the expertise and capacity to provide more specialized support.
These are some of the central lessons from our newly published study, Youth-Informed Lessons for Canadian Education Policy: International Insights on School-Based Homelessness Prevention. Drawing on interviews with nine young people with lived experience of housing precarity in Australia, the United States, and Wales, we examined not only what policies and programs exist, but how young people actually experience them. Their perspectives provide important lessons about what it takes to move from responding to homelessness after it occurs toward intervening earlier.
What young people shared
Young people’s experiences showed that there can be a considerable gap between what systems intend to provide and what youth actually experience.
In the United States and Wales, legislation and policy provide protections or establish responsibilities related to youth homelessness. Yet participants described challenges accessing those protections in practice. Some did not know what support was available or where to go for help. Others encountered fragmented or under-resourced systems. Their experiences show that putting policy in place is important, but it does not necessarily mean young people will experience support in the way it was intended.
How homelessness and housing instability are understood also matters. What is recognized as a housing concern can vary across communities, and less visible forms of instability can easily be normalized or missed. One Australian participant explained that in his community it was uncommon to see someone sleeping rough, while situations such as “ten people living in a two-bedroom house” could be seen as normal rather than recognized as a sign of housing instability.
This makes proactive approaches that do not rely solely on someone recognizing or disclosing homelessness especially important.
In Australia, young people spoke positively about Upstream Australia and the Community of Schools and Services model, where the Upstream approach originated. The model uses schools as a point of connection to identify emerging needs early and link young people with coordinated community supports.
For youth who had access to Upstream, the concern was not whether the approach worked for them. It was that too many other young people did not have the same opportunity because the model was not available in their communities. Participants wanted to see its reach expanded so that their peers elsewhere could benefit from the kind of early support they had experienced.
One Australian participant captured the value of this approach by describing the model as “the safety net around the bridge before you jump,” rather than a system that tries to pull someone from the water afterward. It is a powerful description of what prevention can look like when support reaches young people early.
Across contexts, participants also saw significant potential for schools to be part of that response. They described the importance of support that is visible, easy to access, relational, and connected across housing, education, mental health, safety, and belonging. As one young person put it, schools can be community resource hubs. It is not their job to create every solution, but they can help foster spaces where solutions are built.
These experiences offer an important lesson for Canada. Strong policy matters, but so does what young people experience in practice. And when a promising prevention approach is working, access matters too. Young people should not have to live in the right community to benefit from early, coordinated support.
From youth insights to action: The Upstream Canada approach
Upstream Canada offers a practical way to translate these international lessons into the Canadian context. Adapted from Australia’s Community of Schools and Services model, Upstream is a partnership between schools and community organizations, with community-based organizations leading the intervention rather than placing responsibility solely on educators.
At its centre is a universal Student Needs Assessment offered to students within participating schools. A universal approach matters because young people experiencing housing instability are not always visibly homeless, may not identify themselves using that language, and may never come to the attention of school staff through conventional referrals.
The assessment helps to proactively flag potential concerns related to home stability, family conflict and safety, school engagement, resilience, and material hardship. Students who may benefit from support are then offered a youth centred check in and, where appropriate, connected quickly to coordinated supports.
Upstream’s case management approach emphasizes Family and Natural Supports wherever this is safe and appropriate. The goal is not to label or diagnose students. It is to open a conversation, understand what is happening in their lives, build on their strengths, and address challenges before housing instability or school disengagement deepens.
This approach reflects many of the things young people in our international study identified as important: proactive identification, trusted relationships, clear pathways to help, and support that responds to interconnected needs.
It also responds to another important lesson from the international findings. If understandings of homelessness and housing instability can differ across communities, relying primarily on visible signs, self-identification, or individual referrals means many young people are missed. A universal approach offers an important way in, creating an opportunity to identify needs that may otherwise remain unseen.
Early Canadian evidence shows why scale matters
Since 2021, Upstream Canada has been implemented in Kelowna, British Columbia, and St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, through partnerships among schools, community organizations, the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, and A Way Home Canada.
Early Canadian evidence is showing the value of this approach. Across participating schools, thousands of students have completed the Student Needs Assessment, helping local teams identify young people who may benefit from support, including many whose needs might otherwise have remained hidden.
Among youth whose risk was subsequently validated, more than half had not previously been known to their schools as needing support. Participating communities have since connected hundreds of young people and families to targeted supports, including family mediation, mental health and emotional regulation support, academic assistance, and help addressing housing instability and other basic needs.
The findings also show how closely housing risk and educational engagement are connected. Students identified as at-risk report substantially greater school disengagement than those who are not flagged. This points to the importance of looking beyond what is happening in the classroom and considering the home, family, housing, and material circumstances that can shape a young person’s ability to participate and thrive at school.
Experience in Kelowna and St. John’s also shows that the model can be implemented across distinct community and education contexts. Universal screening, rapid follow up, and coordinated case management provide a pathway to reach young people earlier rather than relying solely on conventional referral processes or waiting until challenges become visible enough to trigger a response.
These are promising implementation and outcome signals, but they are not a claim that every long-term impact has already been established. Continued evaluation will be essential as Upstream grows.
At the same time, the emerging evidence raises an important question: if we have a promising way to identify and respond to risk earlier, how do we ensure more young people can access it?
This question echoes what we heard from young people in Australia. Those who had experienced the Upstream approach recognized its value, but also saw peers in other communities who did not have the same access. Their perspectives remind us that the reach of prevention matters. An effective intervention can only benefit the young people and communities it is able to reach.
For prevention to make a difference at a systems level, access must extend well beyond a handful of communities. When a young person’s opportunity to receive early support depends on their postal code, prevention remains uneven. Scaling is therefore about more than expanding a promising program. It is about building the infrastructure for early intervention so that timely, coordinated support becomes something young people can access more consistently across communities.
Moving towards prevention infrastructure
Scaling Upstream Canada should not mean replicating an identical program in every community. The international findings themselves show why context matters. Understandings of housing instability, available services, community relationships, and the needs of young people can look different from one place to another.
Effective expansion therefore needs to allow for locally led and culturally responsive implementation while maintaining the core elements that make the model preventive. This includes universal identification, rapid follow up, youth centred and family focused support, strong school and community partnerships, and coordinated pathways to services.
Canada also needs sustained investment and policy support to build the infrastructure that allows this work to last. This includes formal partnerships among education, housing, mental health, and community services; stable funding for community-based teams that can respond quickly and provide sustained support when needs are identified; practical guidance that helps educators recognize less visible forms of housing instability and connect students to appropriate supports; and ongoing evaluation to understand outcomes, strengthen implementation, and ensure expansion is equitable and effective.
Building a stronger prevention response
School linked prevention cannot substitute for affordable housing, adequate income supports, or the broader structural changes needed to address youth homelessness. It can, however, play an important role in ensuring that young people and families receive support before housing instability becomes homelessness and before disengagement from school begins to narrow a young person’s future opportunities.
Young people in our international study showed us both where existing systems fall short and what a stronger response can look like. Policies need to translate into support that young people can actually access, and housing instability needs to be recognized even when it does not fit conventional ideas of homelessness. Knowledge mobilization has an important role to play in bridging this gap, helping build awareness and translate what we know into everyday practice. Support needs to be relational, coordinated, and available early. And when promising approaches are working, their reach needs to extend beyond the communities that currently have access to them.
Upstream Canada offers a promising foundation for putting these lessons into practice. The opportunity now is to build on what is being learned in Canadian communities and expand access thoughtfully, while continuing to evaluate and strengthen the model as it grows.
Doing so would move us closer to a system where early support is not dependent on a young person’s postal code, and where preventing youth homelessness becomes something we are equipped to do before a crisis occurs.
About the paper
This post draws on Sohn, J., Kennelly, J., & Stroud , R. (2026). Youth-Informed Lessons for Canadian Education Policy: International Insights on School-Based Homelessness Prevention . International Journal on Homelessness, 6(2), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.5206/ijoh.2026.2.24358
This exploratory study draws on interviews with nine young people from Australia, the United States, and Wales as part of a broader international study examining policy approaches to youth homelessness. The research was supported by funding from Making the Shift, a member of the Networks of Centres of Excellence Canada program.