Beyond shelter: Youth-work program provides long-term solutions to homelessness

CrossCurrents

By Astrid Van Den Broek

Jill Pittman first started leaving her St. John's, Newfoundland, home when she was 12 years old. “It was an abusive home situation with a lot of fighting and hostility,” she says. That was when she started drinking and smoking marijuana. By the time Pittman was 15, she’d moved out for good and headed to the West Coast to follow an abusive boyfriend, who promptly kicked her out of their home. It was in Vancouver that she first literally landed on the streets, sleeping in underground parking lots.

But through most of these troubled years, she connected and stayed in touch with a youth shelter and resource centre back home called Choices for Youth. With their help, she found a place to live. The program also connected her with government financial assistance, gave her a clothing allowance, taught her how to budget and helped her into an 11-month alcohol and drug rehabilitation centre in Moncton, New Brunswick. After the program, Choices once again helped her by finding a transition house. Now, at age 19, she has graduated from Moncton High School with an adult high school diploma. She’s also looking into post-secondary education social work. “There’s a lot more to getting out of being homeless than having a roof over your head because a lot of people in these situations have other issues to deal with, whether it be mental health or addictions or family issues or whatever,” she says.

Indeed, what Jill’s story tells us is that tackling youth homelessness crisis in Canada and beyond is about much more than simply finding adequate housing for youth. It’s about providing support, such as employment training and life skills. These are the kinds of initiatives supported by a new national program called Youthworks.

Youthworks is a $1.2 million, three-year program launched early this year through Raising the Roof, a Toronto-based national organization that addresses homelessness. The program is a timely one, given that youth account for about one-third of Canada’s homeless population, according to Raising the Roof.

Under that program, three agencies in Calgary, Toronto and St. John’s were asked to participate based on their education, training and employment programs. The program will work with about 500youth.The goal at the end of the three years is to make suggestions and recommendations on what homeless youth need to move on and sustain their lives with housing and supports, as well as make funding recommendations on furthering the process of solving the issue.

The three agencies are The Back Door in Calgary, Eva’s Phoenix in Toronto and Choices for Youth in St. John’s. Although each agency maintains its own program, thanks in part to the funding, some also collaborate on projects and consult among themselves as part of their Youthworks involvement. Clovis Grant, general manager of Eva’s, believes they were picked because their program offers more than simple Band-Aid solutions to youth homelessness. Young people participate to train with computer applications, learning Excel and Word programs, for example, that they can apply to the workplace. On top of that, they receive life skills training, such as learning about the world of work, and handling conflict appropriately. The program ends with a 20-week job training program, at which point employers are encouraged to keep the youth in training on the payroll.

Grant says that while it’s important that youth receive hard skills (such as how to operate a computer program), there is also a great deal of learning involved in the program. “One youth wanted to be a dancer and at first didn’t want to participate in this program because he didn’t think computer training had anything to do with being a dancer,” Grant says. But through his placement, the teenager learned the value of computer skills in today’s wired world. “He recognized that it was good for him to have gone through that experience because he realizes the value of that program,” says Grant. “That’s a realistic outcome. People look at success in terms of whether they are housed and working. But there’s more to it than that because success can be realizing you need to show up for work regularly, not mouthing off to your employer or learning conflict management skills. All these pieces move youth from ‘I don’t care’ to ‘I want to make a change.’ And that’s huge.”

That’s a key piece that almost everyone involved in this program recognizes – that it’s so much more than simply finding a home. “We know affordable housing is key, but we also know that job training and mentoring relationships are key,” says Richard Barry, director of research and community initiatives for Raising the Roof. “We fully expect through this program that other things we haven’t thought of will come up and we’ll learn from that.”

For Jamie Leslie, project manager at The Back Door in Calgary, in addition to youth support, she’d like to see the public become educated from the findings of the program. “I’m hoping for a better understanding from the community at large as to what it means to be a young person living on the street,” she says. “That means knowing what backgrounds bring youth there in the first place, and what they actually need to get off the streets. I’d also like to see stereotypes that go along with living on the street be addressed.” With the Youthworks funding, The Back Door has been able to increase the number of youth it helps to 120, and is providing feedback from program graduates on what those needs are.

Back in St. John’s, for Sheldon Pollett, executive director of Choices for Youth, the Youthworks funding opens up possibilities. “It gives us the ability to start challenging preconceived notions of what the issue is and part of that is implementation. So whether we start offering new models of employment programs or new models of drop-in or outreach that haven’t existed yet in St. John’s, that’s what the funding means for us,” he says. “This hopefully gives us leverage to convince funders and provincial government that this is an effective way of reaching youth.”

While it’s still early in the program, feedback from participants thus far has been positive. “There’s a tremendous amount of potential on dealing with this issue, but that potential cannot be realized without everyone’s support,” says Grant. “As an agency, we have to do a significant amount of fundraising because there’s never enough money available for us to do things we would like to do.”

As for Pittman, she too hopes some learning comes from these programs, the kind that helped get her off the street. “There are other issues for homeless people that have gotten them into the place they’re in,” she says. “Those are the things that need to be worked on. If they don’t change, then youth lifestyles won’t change.”

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