Making the Shift to Prevention

Prevention requires making a paradigm shift away from merely managing the crisis to creating deeper structural and systemic change. Increasingly, governments and communities are making the shift to prevention.

In 2019, the Government of Canada signalled a shift toward prevention with the launch of Reaching Home: Canada’s Homelessness Strategy, a community-based program aimed at preventing and reducing homelessness across Canada. Through Reaching Home, funded communities are expected to reduce “inflows” into homelessness and “returns to homelessness.”

More recently, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness released All in: The Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness, putting prevention a priority on par with emergency services and Housing First for the first time and recognizing that the inflow into homelessness continues to exceed the outflow.

Prevention is not a one-size-fits-all approach. The next step is to determine the approach to take, which interventions to apply, and how to execute them effectively.

Research plays a key role in determining how we can move toward prevention. The Making the Shift: Youth Homelessness Social Innovation Lab, an initiative led by the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness and A Way Home Canada, is a centre of innovation designed to generate and mobilize preventive solutions to homelessness. Making the Shift funds over 40 research projects on the prevention of youth homelessness. Additionally, it is operating and evaluating a series of demonstration projects on Family and Natural Supports, Youth Reconnect, the Upstream Project, Housing First for Youth (HF4Y), and an Indigenous-led adaptation of HF4Y.

There are lessons to be learned from the Making the Shift projects and communities in Canada that are applying preventive interventions, as well as the efforts taking place in other countries, such as Australia and Wales.