Together we can ensure everyone has a safe place to call home.
Our goal is simple and achievable… but not easy: ending Edmonton homelessness. It takes a community working together to ensure everyone has a home and ongoing, consistent collaboration by the entire homeless-serving sector and all orders of government.
Homeward Trust has been instrumental in providing leadership in how we address homelessness in our city. Working collaboratively with the entire sector, Homeward Trust is the community-based organization and system planner guiding day-to-day system operations and strategy work to advance efforts to prevent and end Edmonton homelessness.
We take a community- and data-informed approach to allocate funding from all orders of government to programs and projects based on potential impact and current priority needs. Guided by the Community Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness, we adapt to changing community needs while working towards our end goal of providing safe and stable housing for every unhoused individual while ensuring they have the needed supports to maintain housing.
2023/2024-The need for a new Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness
When the 2017 Community Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness was created, it was backed by solid research, robust engagement and a data-informed approach based on known and predicted realities. Since that time, much has changed, challenging our plans and efforts in preventing and ending homelessness. This includes a global pandemic, economic downturn, rising unaffordability, dual drug and mental health crises and changes in the houseless-serving sector itself. This has underscored the need for a new plan, continued sector collaboration, renewed strategies and enhanced governance and accountability frameworks to report on impact and outcomes.
Work underway on the new Plan
Homeward Trust Edmonton and the City of Edmonton have been working together since early 2023 to develop an updated Community Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness (Plan). This Plan will direct our collective approach to address homelessness within the current complex conditions Edmonton is facing. As with previous plans, it will be informed by insights gained from extensive engagement with individuals with lived and living experience, homeless-serving agencies, orders of government, Indigenous, First Nations and Metis peoples, as well as various systems actors.
The Updated Community Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness is scheduled for release in Spring/Summer 2024. The draft was discussed at the City of Edmonton City Council Meeting on Tuesday, May 21st, 2024.
Success, Challenges and Opportunities
No plan, program or response is perfect. We must continue to use a data and community informed approach to guide and measure efforts while continually trying new approaches and remaining committed to ongoing sector collaboration to adapt to current needs and priorities.
LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We recognize we are gathered, in collaboration and with joint purpose, on Treaty 6 territory. This territory is the home and gathering place for diverse Indigenous peoples. The Cree, Blackfoot, Dene, Iroquois, Anishinaabe/Saulteaux /Ojibwa, Nakota Sioux, Inuit, and Métis, among many others. We know the importance of the Treaty and our responsibility to these communities and that only in partnership can we create the social change necessary to end homelessness. It is vital we meaningfully engage and partner with Indigenous people and communities in this work while recognizing and addressing the conditions brought forth by colonialism. Displacement from traditional homelands, systemic racism, residential schools, the Sixties Scoop, and the ongoing overrepresentation of Indigenous people in child welfare, correctional systems, and homelessness are responsibilities we all share. We acknowledge ourselves as visitors living and working in this Territory.
