Canada’s New Homelessness Strategy
According to the Honourable Jean-Yves Duclos, Minister of Families, Children and Social Development, the government of Canada plans to make bold changes to the federal strategy to prevent and end homelessness. Through the Reaching Home strategy, Canada will reinforce its community-based approach to address homelessness – funding municipalities and local service providers directly. This includes helping communities develop and deliver data-driven plans with clear outcomes. The strategy will also be expanded to new communities. Participating communities will work toward a 50% homelessness reduction goal over the next 10 years. Over that 10-year span, the government will invest over $2 billion to carry out the new strategy.
Read the blog here.
Dame Louise Casey: Ending Homelessness in the United Kingdom
The Institute of Global Homelessness’s Advisory Committee Dame Louise Casey discusses a new report by Crisis UK, Everybody In: How to end homelessness in Great Britain, in The Times UK. The report presents an ambitious plan for the United Kingdom (UK) government to end homelessness over the next decade. Crisis research has reported that there are currently 236,000 people experiencing the most severe forms of homelessness in the UK. Dame Louise Casey reflects on her role in ending rough sleeping in England a year earlier than the country’s 2002 target, when she served as the lead of the government’s newly established rough sleepers unit. According to Dame Louise, history shows that with adequate political support and effective policies in place, that same goal can be achieved again.
Dame Louise says that the report “provides politicians not only with the challenge to take action, but the solutions to make lasting change.”
Read the article here.
Los Angeles County, California, USA Sees Decline in Veteran Homelessness
According to Los Angeles County, California, USA’s annual homelessness count, homelessness among veterans has declined by 18%. The announcement came at The National Coalition for Homeless Veterans conference, where hundreds of veteran advocates from across the United States convened to collaborate on ways to improve assistance to veterans experiencing homelessness. L.A. County officials give credit to work with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ National Homeless Program Office for some of this success. Over 2,100 veterans in the county were placed into permanent housing in 2017 and more than 13,000 others received some housing assistance. Local organizers say that the decrease is a positive sign for their region and the nation as a whole.
Read the article here.
Citizen Group Undertakes Street Homelessness Count in Tokyo
Data collected from a Street Homelessness Count conducted in Tokyo, Japan by Advocacy and Research Centre for Homelessness (ARCH) at the Tokyo Institute of Technology estimate that over 500 people were sleeping on the street on one night in January in 4 of 23 wards in the city. Volunteers took record of the various demographics of the people found sleeping on the streets of Tokyo, such as gender and age. The survey has been conducted by Arch for several years, with more comprehensive counts in August, across a greater number of wards.
Read the article here. (This article’s original text is in Japanese)