Youth homelessness intervention shifts focus from crisis management to prevention

Ottawa's youth homelessness sector is shifting from crisis management toward prevention and early intervention, betting that catching young people before homelessness becomes part of their identity can break the cycle.

Many young people who arrive at the Youth Services Bureau's Besserer Street centre carrying backpacks or hockey bags stuffed with clothes—some sleeping on couches for months, some in cars or tents—don't see themselves as homeless at first. Kenya Fithe, YSB's shelter diversion program manager, recalls one young person who had spent seven months living out of his car after being kicked out of home. "I stayed in my car," he told Fithe, "so I wasn't homeless."

That gap between lacking adequate housing and not seeing yourself as homeless lies at the heart of how agencies like YSB are now approaching the problem. Rather than just helping young people survive homelessness, they're focusing on intervention before it occurs or, if it's already happened, keeping it brief enough that it doesn't calcify into how they see themselves.

The shift has generated hope in the sector that conditions on the street will improve. Last September, Mayor Mark Sutcliffe announced the city's goal to end youth homelessness by 2030. But the exact count of homeless youth in Ottawa remains unclear—a baseline that complicates measuring progress on that target.

Reuben Khaemba, now 23, experienced housing instability gradually. Family conflict led to his mother evicting him from their Mechanicsville home when he was 18 or 19. He bounced between temporary housing, shelters, and friends' couches, eventually sleeping under a bridge at Lebreton Flats before finding shelter at The Mission. He didn't consider himself homeless then, he says—just in a bad situation he needed to escape.