SleepOUT to help homeless youth
It was snowing outside as 120 people sat around tables Monday, wrestling with how to reduce the numbers of Ottawa’s homeless youth.
One thousand young people, mostly age 16 to 24, used emergency shelters in Ottawa last year, said Joanne Lowe, executive director of the city’s Youth Services Bureau.
“YSB has the only two young women’s and young men’s shelters. We only have 30 spots, so some of those thousand young people are using adult shelters,” which aren’t always a good fit, she said.
While the first snow makes the problem look more urgent to outsiders, the reality is “There’s always urgency,” Lowe said.
Workers from child welfare groups, school boards, hospitals, Youth Services, the John Howard Society and others gathered Monday to discuss support for troubled kids in their homes, and applying a system called Housing First.
The goal is to find homes for young people fast and work on their other problems later “so that no young person stays homeless for more than a week,” said Stephen Gaetz of York University’s Canadian Observatory on Homelessness.
The conference focused on prevention — for instance, spotting problems early, often in school, before teenagers leave home. It’s also crucial to make the period of living on the street or “couchsurfing” with friends short, Gaetz said.
“The longer someone is homeless, the more they get entrenched in street life. Their health worsens. They have had problems with addictions.”
“There’s a huge difference” between adolescents and mature people who are homeless, Gaetz said.
Among teens, “They’re going through cognitive development, they have special needs, they need time to learn to be an adult.” Often they haven’t yet learned how to find a job, make a doctor’s appointment, find an apartment, cook or do their laundry.
“They are often suffering trauma” because abuse is what drives them from home in the first place, Gaetz said, “and they also suffer incredible loss when they leave their community and go to downtown Ottawa” because they lose friends and community.
“That’s where we need to do things differently and help young people stay in their communities, give them the supports that people need.
“It’s a good investment” because people who leave school early are less employable and less healthy over a lifetime and more likely to be on social assistance.
YSB’s annual SleepOUT For Youth event is this Thursday night. Teams spend the night outdoors and collect from sponsors, and last year raised $100,000. Thursday night’s forecast calls for a low of -7 C.