An extraordinary accomplishment: Wellington-Guelph has reduced the number of youth experiencing chronic homelessness by 76 per cent.

In August 2018, when Wellington-Guelph began collecting By-Name Data, they identified 51 people between the ages of 16 and 25 who were experiencing homelessness. Now, just over six years later, the number of young people experiencing homelessness has been reduced to 12 and Wellington-Guelph is on track to creating a system that ensures that homelessness is rare, brief, and nonrecurring for young people in their community.  

How did they do it? 

Wyndham House offers services to youth experiencing and at risk of homelessness in Wellington-Guelph. Their services include short-term and long-term housing, support with health care, food and essential needs, connecting to education, and access to showers or laundry. They have been leading the community’s efforts to halt the growth of youth homelessness and provide young people with a room they can call their own. 

Kristin Cairney, Executive Director of Wyndham House, attributes this drastic decrease to three main focuses: the diversion of youth coming into the shelter system, whole-journey support for youth experiencing homelessness, and clinical wraparound support that combines health care with a Housing First approach. 

Stopping it before it starts 

A few years ago, Wyndham House worked with a Public Health graduate student to build a comprehensive tool to help with decision-making and provide insights into client needs and opportunities. They used this in tandem with trends on subpopulations accessing services, made available through their community’s Homeless Individuals and Families Information System (HIFIS). With this data in hand, the team could identify opportunities for intervention and further prevention, collaborating with community partners for referrals of individuals and to ensure a plan is in place to support the client with their journey into permanent housing. 

These diversions from homelessness have proven to be key to stopping the rate of growth, and interrupting cycles of homelessness for those who chronically experience it. From April 2023 to March of this year, the community coordinated over 400 diversion calls with only 25% of those needing to use emergency shelter, preventing many young people from ending up on the streets or in the shelter system. 

“Diversion continues to be a core, central aspect of the work that we do. We have transitioned into having a housing- and diversion-focused shelter. It is no longer just one worker doing that work; instead, we are working as a team at the shelter all operating from that housing-focused lens,” Cairney explains. “What’s more, we work with our partners to help them understand the importance of diversion and have developed a brief screener that they can use.” 

This approach ends up lending itself to a cycle of success—as shelter users decrease due to diversions, staff have more time to focus on prevention and other upstream work. 

Creating a Home for Youth 

In May 2023 Wyndham House opened the Bellevue Project, a supportive housing option for youth—the first-of-its-kind in Canada. It offers permanent housing for as long as they need it, there is no expiration date. The goal is to ensure that youth don’t end up on the street or in the shelter system. 

Eight residents, aged 16 through 25, live in the Bellevue residence at a time. The well-thought-out, purpose-built space offers a balance between privacy and connection. Each client has their own spacious, personalized room and private bathroom. There are also communal spaces: an open concept main floor, laundry room, and a backyard with picnic tables and a basketball court. The building is supported by two on-site staff, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, who offer life skills training, harm reduction and mental health support for youth who need high levels of support. 

The building design and fully trained staff create a sense of stability for clients. The program prioritizes the individual needs of each client, supporting them on their own journey. All of this has set up residents for success—after time in Bellevue, they often express interest in independently moving into their own market rent home. 

Integration of Health Care and Housing 

Wyndham House’s clients are provided with a youth-focused healthcare team that is fully integrated with the Reaching Home-funded Housing First team. The multi-disciplinary healthcare team meets clients where they are—physically, in shelters or their new homes, and mentally, approaching health care without judgement and with no pre-conditions, using a harm reduction model.  

The flexibility of this healthcare approach has been vital to ensuring that youth are supported. Care is nimble, transitioning according to the needs of each individual. It is also consistent, following the patient as they move through different housing systems and into new homes.  

Finding Success 

Wyndham House is rewriting the playbook on how to approach youth homelessness in Wellington-Guelph. Since April of this year, Wyndham House has supported over 45 youth with short- and long-term housing solutions through diversion, rapid re-housing, family re-connect, and housing support programs.  

Wyndham House’s Concurrent Specialized Youth Hub was also a winner of the 2023 Making the Shift Youth Homelessness Prevention Awards. 

Despite the pandemic, which had a large influence on increasing the number of youths facing homelessness, despite an increase of referrals, and despite the growing housing crisis and rising cost of living, Wellington-Guelph is seeing an active decrease in the number of young people experiencing homelessness. 

It’s nothing magical, each client is simply provided with the support they need, when they need it. Individualized support, responsive health care with a Housing First focus, and prevention—it all makes sense and, what’s more, it’s successful for the community and the young people who live there.