Encampment Response Service
Across Canada, in communities large and small, people are struggling against the rising cost of living and lack of affordable housing. With limited options, more and more people are living in tents in public spaces. CAEH and OrgCode have teamed up to develop a new service to help communities respond to encampments.
Communities are facing surging homelessness and growing encampments; leaders are grappling with complex challenges, trying to figure out how to resolve them and support the peopleliving in them into housing.
We know that ending homelessness is possible, and that encampments are not only solvable, but preventable. We are your partners in helping to support encampment residents off the street and into housing.
How can we support your community?
The Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness and OrgCode Consulting have teamed up to provide encampment response and resolution for Canadian communities. Our evidence-based, housing-focused approach is informed by years of hands-on experience working in encampments and supporting communities to reduce and prevent homelessness.
We are here to support and guide your whole community—the people living in encampments, their neighbours, municipal governments, partner organizations, interest holders, and leaders. Our approach is person-centred, rights-based, trauma-informed and culturally-responsive, ensuring that encampment residents are supported through their transition into housing, and the decampment is successful for the long term.
We know your community is unique, with its own strengths, opportunities, and challenges. We offer scalable, tailored services to ensure that we are taking into account your resources, and taking advantage of the strengths your community already has. Our approach is designed to respond to the needs of the people who are living in encampments, as well as the larger community.
We know you want to find a solution that will work for the long term. We use an evidence-based model that is proven to work—and to last. We focus on increasing your capacity, helping you train and resource a local team to engage with encampment residents, understand their needs, and build housing solutions with them in collaboration with community leaders. And we don’t just stop at responding to existing encampments. We also offer assessments of your homelessness system to find the breakdowns that create encampments and help fix them.
What do we offer?
Advisory Services
Drawing on our decades of experience and deep knowledge, we can provide guidance to your community leaders as they develop their own encampment resolution plan.
Municipal Encampment Response Strategy
We can work with municipal or regional government and community leaders to develop strategies, plans, policies, and procedures for municipal or regional housing-focused encampment responses.
Training
Build your capacity and prepare for the future. We can provide a full suite of training on the skills needed to help people in your community move out of encampments and into housing solutions that work for them.
Support includes: leadership for encampment resolution; strategy and planning; housing-focused outreach including engagement, assessment, data collection, and individualized service planning; data collection and analysis; trauma-informed care; Housing with Supports and Housing First, and more.
Full-Service Encampment Resolution Response Team
We offer a full-service Encampment Resolution Response Team that can come to you and walk your community through a step-by-step approach to housing-focused encampment resolution. Our unique model builds on your local expertise, understanding and navigating your challenges, and leveraging opportunities in a way that customizes solutions to what you have, rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach.
Our team can work with your community to develop a plan, build and train a response team, mentor and advise through implementation, and build prevention and sustainability strategy.
We will also help to address encampments at the source, fixing the gaps in your homelessness system that are contributing to encampments, while providing advice on measures to monitor and prevent recurrence.
Our Encampment Resolution Response Team includes:
- A leadership coach who will work with your leadership, provide terms of reference for your local response, outline considerations in governance and decision-making, inform you on which types of leaders from which organizations and government departments to get around the table, frame the decisions to be made and accountabilities, and, when needed, develop a project plan for encampment response.
- Outreach coach who will train and model how to do street outreach to people living in encampments, and train all relevant staff on engagement, assessment, data capture, and individualized service planning.
- Data lead to provide the data and analysis infrastructure to make informed decisions based on your local context, the appropriate response, and tie in the work of the encampment response to By Name Data and coordinated homelessness responses.
- Communication support to help you engage the larger community about what you are doing, how you are doing it, and the results being achieved.
Encampment Prevention and System Improvement
Breakdowns and problems in a community’s homelessness response system often contribute to encampments. It’s about more than moving people out of tents and into housing—our team can work with you to build a more effective and coordinated homelessness response system, fix the breakdowns that lead to encampments, build proactive monitoring and prevention measures to prevent encampments from re-emerging and develop strategies for interim and longer-term solutions to homelessness in your community.
Ready to talk? Get in touch!
Free resources to get you started
Housing-Focused Approaches to Encampments
Webinar hosted by CAEH and OrgCode | April 2024
How Fort McMurray Resolved an Encampment without Enforcement
Blog by CAEH | January 2024
A partnership between a local government and public agencies in Fort McMurray has found permanent housing for people experiencing homelessness through a collaborative approach.
In August, the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo (RMWB), and partnering community organizations — including Alberta Health Services and the RCMP — peacefully transitioned 29 people from a downtown encampment into housing and other long-term accommodations….
Compassionate decampment: Lessons from Oppenheimer Park
Blog by CAEH | March 2024
Behind the encampment tarps and tents are communities comprised mostly of people trying to survive another day. And in the midst of all the political ping-pong on how to address the shameful illustrations of a housing crisis scattered across the country, camp residents are rarely part of the conversation.
Instead, they are often brutally silenced when kicked out of encampments with or without affordable and appropriate housing lined up.
About us
The Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness works to prevent and end homelessness by helping to build effective community response systems and campaigning for the policy changes needed for everyone to have a place to call home.
OrgCode Consulting Inc. is committed to working with non-profits, non-governmental organizations and government to prevent, reduce and end homelessness. OrgCode excels at strategy, planning, training, leadership development, community engagement, data analysis, and positive social change.