In March 2026, a three-year journey brought me to Bournemouth, England and to a conversation with Prince William about his Royal Foundation’s Homewards program and what it actually takes to prevent youth homelessness.
What I found confirmed what the research has been telling us for years: the tools to prevent youth homelessness exist, they work, and the missing ingredient is the will to act on it at scale.
Stephen Gaetz speaking with the Prince of Wales during a visit to Bournemouth to showcase Homewards’ pioneering approach to preventing youth homelessness. Picture by Andrew Parsons / Kensington Palace
I left Bournemouth more convinced than ever that we can do the same in Canada.
International work matters more than people think
One of the things I often say is that international work is core to what we do, not peripheral.
Some of the biggest shifts in how I think about youth homelessness prevention have come not from government reports or domestic conferences, but from the right conversation with the right person at the right moment. Hearing Peter Mackie present on the ‘duty to assist’, a legal obligation for local authorities, such as governments, to make reasonable efforts to move individuals out of homelessness or to stabilize their housing, at a small gathering in Ireland. David McKenzie, describing the Geelong Project in Australia for the first time, a school-based early intervention model that we have since adapted and now call Upstream Canada. These weren’t policy briefings. They were moments where one person’s work changed how I thought about ours.
The key thing, though, is that this exchange is never one-directional. We aren’t just importing ideas. The COH has been exporting them, too. Rock Trust in Scotland and their A Way Home coalition were one of the first organizations in Europe to adopt Housing First for Youth nearly a decade ago. Now they are doing the same with Upstream, with dedicated government funding and support from the Royal Foundation. They’ve been a knowledge-sharing partner of ours ever since.
That reciprocity is the whole point. Ideas developed in one country get tested, refined, and scaled in another, and everyone moves faster for it.
What we saw in Bournemouth and Why Prince William’s Role Matters
On March 19th, Melanie Redman of A Way Home Canada and I were among an international group of delegates from Canada, Australia, Belgium, Finland, and the Netherlands invited to observe Homewards’ prevention-first model in Bournemouth. The day was structured deliberately: Bournemouth Pier, a session of the Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (BCP) Youth Homelessness Board, and then a visit to The Bourne Academy, a secondary school that has become a working example of what school-based prevention looks like when it’s properly resourced and coordinated.
At The Bourne Academy, we saw Upstream running in practice with a housing rights worker embedded in the school, Centrepoint (the UK’s leading youth homelessness charity) delivering screening across grades, and a new curriculum in development for young people at risk of disengaging from education entirely.
On the day of our visit, Bourne Academy principal Mark Avoth told a reporter that parents were already emailing the school after seeing media coverage of Prince William’s visit: “We didn’t know they were facing these issues. Raising the profile has already had an impact on prevention for certain families.” That’s a real-time signal that naming the issue publicly changes who feels able to ask for help.
We also met directly with Prince William. He is engaged with the substance of Homewards in a way that genuinely surprised me. He meets with the team, provides input on strategy, asks substantive questions, and shows up in schools with young people and teachers, not just at ribbon-cutting moments. That kind of sustained, senior commitment changes what a coalition can accomplish. It tells every partner in the room that this is serious, long-term work that matters.
For a first-hand account of the day, read Melanie Redman’s reflection on the visit here.
What Homewards has built
Homewards is a five-year programme launched in 2023 by Prince William and the Royal Foundation of the Prince and Princess of Wales. Its goal is to demonstrate that homelessness can be made rare, brief, and unrepeated. It operates across six UK locations: Aberdeen, Bournemouth/Christchurch/Poole, Lambeth, Newport, Northern Ireland, and Sheffield, each with a locally-led coalition, a dedicated lead, up to £500,000 in flexible seed funding, and an independent research partner tracking outcomes.
The Prince of Wales joins international delegates to see Homewards’ groundbreaking youth homelessness work in action. Picture by Andrew Parsons / Kensington Palace
Upstream is central to its prevention strategy, now running across multiple Homewards locations through Centrepoint. The COH and A Way Home Canada have been directly involved. We’ve been training UK partner organizations in the Family and Natural Supports (FNS) framework, an approach that strengthens the relationships and community connections around young people at risk, which we consider essential to Upstream’s effectiveness.
In Scotland, Rock Trust is scaling Housing First for Youth with dedicated government funding. In Wales, Cymorth Cymru, the national body for housing support in Wales, coordinates seven Housing First for Youth programs alongside Upstream delivery. The breadth and pace of implementation is something we simply haven’t seen in Canada.
What our own research tells us about why this works
The COH has been researching Upstream Canada at our own demonstration sites in Kelowna and St. John’s, and the evidence is clear about why school-based early intervention is so important.
Across those sites, we screened 3,133 students and found that more than a third (34.5%) showed some level of homelessness risk. That alone is striking. But the most important finding was this: schools were previously unaware of risk factors for approximately half of the high-risk students we identified. That’s not a gap in teacher effort or commitment. That’s what happens when a system is designed to wait for crisis rather than look for early warning signs.
Our qualitative research tells the same story from the other side. Students describe what universal, embedded prevention actually means in practice: “Someone doesn’t have to reach out — support’s already there.” For young people whose families can’t navigate referral systems or who won’t disclose risk until it becomes a crisis, that design choice is everything.
The economic case is equally clear. For every $1 invested in Upstream Canada, approximately $6 in future public costs are avoided, roughly $70,000 in avoided lifetime costs per student. At approximately $11,400 per student to deliver, it is one of the most cost-effective prevention investments available. The question isn’t whether we can afford to scale this, but whether we can afford not to.
The findings referenced above draw on a forthcoming series of policy briefs from the COH and A Way Home Canada, to be released later this Spring.
There’s also a broader case for why youth homelessness specifically deserves this level of focus. Nobody should be homeless for twenty years, but if you want to have the biggest impact on ending homelessness, you need to start with young people. In Canada, half of all people currently experiencing homelessness had their first experience before the age of 25. That’s where the intervention needs to happen.
The gap Canada needs to close
Canada currently has two Upstream projects running in five schools. The UK is on track to deliver six projects across approximately 40 schools. Upstream was born in Australia, adapted here in Canada, and is now being scaled in the UK faster than we’ve managed at home.
That gap is not a knowledge gap. What Homewards has demonstrated is what becomes possible when you add the missing ingredients: a clear prevention-first goal, a well-resourced coalition model, and a champion with the reach to bring everyone to the table.
Homewards provides each of its flagship locations with up to £500,000 in flexible seed funding. Lloyds Banking Group has committed an initial £50 million in lending to support housing delivery across the programme. What Homewards has understood is that homelessness cuts across sectors. Corporate partners span sectors that rarely sit at the same table around homelessness, such as retail, banking, architecture, hospitality, and real estate, each contributing funding, expertise, or in-kind support that the homelessness sector alone could never access. Prince William brings something beyond money: the ability to call a corporation, a government minister, or a university president and be taken seriously immediately.
In the United States, the Raikes Foundation, a major philanthropic investor in social systems change, has played a similar anchoring role in Washington State. What we haven’t yet seen in Canada is that kind of investment directed specifically at taking proven prevention models to scale, backed by the leadership that makes the whole coalition possible.
The question I keep coming back to is this: if the evidence is strong, the models work, and we’ve now seen what bold leadership can make possible, what are we waiting for?