2020 Projects
YWCA Building Sector Resiliency to Address Housing Needs of Most Vulnerable Canadians
The lab brings housing and community leaders together to think collectively about how to best access and use capital to achieve more desirable outcomes. That is, delivering new housing at deeply subsidized rents (Social Assistance-level rates) for some of the most vulnerable populations.
A Home in a Neighbourhood Where I Belong
This Solutions Lab connects stakeholders from different sectors with people with disabilities and their families. Participants identify challenges to building inclusive housing. They share their knowledge and co-create and test solutions for creating inclusive, affordable housing.
Nunavut Condominium Corporation Insurance Solutions Lab
This Solutions Lab works with our partners to identify and engage key stakeholders exploring relevant issues and challenges with denied or expensive building insurance. It also identifies and prototypes potential solutions to this problem. The goal is to prevent loss of the structures and continue to house vulnerable populations.
Affordable Housing as a Catalyst for Social Inclusion: Advancing Options for Individuals with Developmental Disabilities and Medical Complexities
The objective of this Solutions Lab is to create innovative, inclusive housing options for individuals with developmental disabilities nationwide. Through a collaborative process, potential solutions will be piloted. A key tool to be built is a detailed journey/experience map of the process for developing new housing that could embed the principles of "reverse inclusion".
Creating Home Together: Supporting Women+ Through Housing Transitions
This Solutions Lab creates a roadmap on solutions to remove barriers to shelters and other services in the homelessness and violence against women sectors. Women and transgender people with lived expertise and nationwide partners will participate in workshops. The ideas and materials generated will help to develop adaptable housing and support solutions.
Housing Journeys Reimagined: Toward a Supportive Affordable Homeownership Opportunity
The Solutions Lab aims to introduce a new supportive, affordable ownership model that can help end chronic homelessness and generational poverty. The replication of this model across Canada would help decrease chronic homelessness by increasing options for affordable, stable housing. This approach could also reduce returns to homelessness by developing a wealth- and equity-generating opportunity for individuals experiencing homelessness.
Housing through an Autism Lens: A Pathway from Crisis to Solutions
The Solutions Lab develops a pathway to independent and affordable living for autistic adults. It includes an integrated set of flexible housing-related supports and services (based on functional ability and the spectrum of Autism Spectrum Disorder or ASD needs). It also proposes actual brick and mortar solutions.
Mobilizing Existing Resources to Provide Adaptive Housing Solutions in Canada
This Solutions Lab tries to reduce pressures on hospitals and long-term care homes by determining and addressing the causes. The key is to impact social determinants of health and creating housing based on local needs. The goal is to create a collaborative playbook by documenting insights and learnings to develop affordable and supportive housing campuses.
Developing easy-to-use community decision-making tools to help achieve National Housing Strategy Goals
This Solutions lab opens the perceived black box of housing data to be easily used by decision makers. This project will be completed through a series of online workshops. The result will be a better understanding of the initial problems that will allow us to provide and support evidence-based consensus on solutions. It will also help teams to assess end-results for accountability, and identify further innovative opportunities.
2019 Projects
Accessible, Affordable, Inclusive: Housing Solutions that Meet the Needs of People with Developmental Disabilities
The Solutions Lab will examine 3 significant barriers to housing that people with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities face: (1) availability, (2) accessibility, and (3) cost.
Fundamentally integrating environmental performance into affordable housing solutions
The Solutions Lab will examine how to integrate environmental performance into the economic model of housing projects in order to enhance the long-term livability and viability of affordable housing.
Medicine Hat Systems Transformation Solutions Lab
The Solutions Lab will examine how to co-design a Systems Transformation Initiative that results in an integrated prevention, homelessness, housing, corrections, and health systems design and transformation process.
Balanced Housing Lab
The Solutions Lab will examine the emerging housing issues facing middle-income earners to be able to live and work within the City of North Vancouver, Squamish Nation, and District of West Vancouver.
Indigenous Housing Solutions Lab
The Solutions Lab will examine solutions to answer the question: What if we could co-create Indigenous homes to be sources of health, wealth and connection in tune with culture and the environment?
Open arms across community: cross-sectoral, culturally appropriate strategies to support women’s + transition from homelessness to safe, stable housing
The Solutions Lab will examine cross-sectoral, culturally appropriate, person-centered responses to housing needs and experiences of homelessness for women+. This includes women and people of marginalized gender identities (herein: “women+”) experiencing homelessness – including women+ and children fleeing violence.
Skookum Lab: Urban Housing Solutions for Indigenous Youth and Families
The Solutions Lab will be one of the first Indigenous-led, social innovation labs in Canada. Skookum Lab utilizes an Indigenous driven and Indigenous led methodology that incorporates Indigenous ways of knowing and being throughout.
Social wellbeing in modular housing: co-creating designs to nurture health and social support for vulnerable people
The Solutions Lab will examine modular housing as a promising rapid response to homelessness.
Indigenous Housing Solutions Labs
The Solutions Lab will examine the economic development and employment opportunity related to a growing Indigenous population with legally recognized territorial assets and capital, and a need for housing.
Affordable Housing+: Solutions in an effort to shift the affordable housing baseline
The Solutions Lab will examine the important question: How does an individual or family unit move from a situation where affordable housing is required to a situation where it is no longer required?
Community Housing in Nunavut: New Approaches for Affordable, Appropriate Indigenous Housing Development
The Solutions Lab will examine the question: How can we seed and strengthen the community-housing sector’s participation in housing development and management in Nunavut?
Developing a model to leverage retail-level investments to finance affordable housing partnership for refugees
The Solutions Lab will examine the need for a replicable local investment option that is suitable for retail-level investors and is capable of financing the development of additional affordable housing for refugees and other vulnerable groups.
Reimagining Skills Training: Developing a complete housing systems approach in First Nations in Ontario
The Solutions Lab will examine the skills gaps most relevant to creating change in Ontario First Nation communities by identifying, addressing and overcoming skills barriers faced in controlling their housing systems.
Enabling Citizen-Led Housing: New Models for Seniors’ Housing Design and Development
The Solutions Lab seeks to engage seniors in co-designing a set of planning approaches and processes to enable a more balanced framework for the development of seniors’ housing between citizens, community organizations, and the private sector.
Igniting Housing Possibilities for Older Adults: Collaborative Solutions for Urban and Rural Communities in Peel Region
The Solutions Lab will examine the question: “How might we enable seniors from diverse backgrounds living in urban and rural settings and system stakeholders to participate in a design process that increases the suite of innovative and diverse affordable housing options available to seniors that promote community inclusion and proactive responses to affordability issues?”
Let’s Talk… Home and Community
The Solutions Lab will examine the Question: How might we promote social and economic inclusion through a housing model with individuals with developmental disabilities and newcomers to Canada by leveraging existing community assets and hosting conversations for each group to co-design “good community”?
Accessing Affordable Home Ownership Opportunities for Community Housing Tenants
The Solutions Lab will examine opportunities to maximize the movement into and out of Community Housing in the Waterloo Region.
From Prison to Homelessness: Ending a Perilous Trajectory
The Solutions Lab will examine how we can help increase the availability and access to suitable housing for Canadians who leave the prison system, while also providing opportunities for offenders to gain employment skills training to improve their opportunities of finding meaningful employment.
Seniors and Inter-generational Purpose-Driven Housing Solutions
The Solutions Lab will examine purpose driven housing solutions that facilitate social inclusion, education and community collaboration for seniors and newcomers.
Affordable Housing Hackathon Solutions Lab
The Solutions Lab will examine new and practical solutions to the construction of more affordable housing stock by removing barriers and opening new paths for innovation in planning, construction and regulation so that private industry and the not-for-profit industry can meet the needs of the community.
Beyond Shelter: A Relationship-Based Approach to Emergency Housing and Health Care
The Solutions Lab will examine the question: How might we bring together health care and housing supports in a responsive and relationship-based way that helps more people in Waterloo Region transition out of homelessness?
Community Studios
The Solutions Lab will examine the creation of a new model of supportive and shared modular housing.
Affordable housing and sustainable development, two compatible ideas
The Solutions Lab will examine the need for an innovative approach to address affordability issues related to sustainable community development.
Housing Financialization
In partnership with the Social Innovation Institute, this directed Solutions Lab will explore the financialization of housing.
2018 Successful Submissions
Affordable Housing Renewal
The Solutions Lab will develop net zero or net-zero ready retrofit design options and prototype 4 to 6 low-rise wood-frame multi-unit residential buildings.
Best Practices for Healthy Housing Quality in Toronto
The Solutions Lab will seek to address housing disrepair and the worsening quality of housing in older rental apartment buildings in Toronto.
Wealth and the Problem of Inequity Across Generations
In partnership with Generation Squeeze, this directed Solutions Lab will examine issues related to housing affordability, wealth and inequality.
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