Hundreds of thousands of young people in North America face each night without shelter. In the United States, approximately 500,000 to 1.3 million people under the age of 18 years are homeless each year. Statistics from three Canadian cities provide an approximation of the problem in Canada. In 1999, 6,000 youth used the Toronto shelter system (City of Toronto, 2001). In Vancouver, a one-night count found 296 youth in shelters and on the street (Goldberg et al., 2005). In Ottawa in 2006, 607 youth stayed in emergency shelters, an increase of 11.8 percent over the course of that one year (Alliance to End Homelessness, 2006). These numbers represent only a small portion of homeless youth. Youth are very transient and often have episodic periods of homelessness (Ringwalt, Greene, Robertson, & McPheeters, 1998). The majority of youth don’t stay in shelters but rather “couch surf” with friends (Public Health Agency of Canada, 2006; Robert, Pauzé, & Fournier, 2005). In addition, efforts to determine the extent of homelessness are hampered by the use of different defi nitions of “youth” (which may include those up to 27 years of age), the time frame over which the statistics are gathered, and the challenges of both identifying and communicating with the homeless (Frankish, Hwang, & Quantz, 2005).
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