Mapping the Journey Into and Out of Homelessness

Eva’s Initiatives is a youth organization conducting a Solutions Lab that is mapping youths’ journeys in and out of homelessness. Titled, Journeys In and Out, this Solutions Lab focuses on:

• how young people move into and out of homelessness and housing insecurity in large Canadian urban areas
• what might prevent homelessness

Their goal is to develop prototypes and solutions to support the youth along their journey.

How will the lab be conducted?

Eva’s Impact and Innovation Team will be using a Solutions Lab process to tackle Journeys In and Out.

The team plans to work collaboratively to build an experimental and systematic approach to gather data. What they plan to develop is a toolkit. This will help guide in-depth interviews and workshops with 25 youths, all at different stages in their journey in and out of homelessness. Using Eva’s services, they can share their experiences with us.

This will help us:

• map various housing situations that brought them to the shelter and solutions that have helped along the way
• create a road map of how current interventions can be improved and/or scaled
• prototype of new interventions to can be introduced to the system to fill in any identified gaps

This data will help develop a plan to introduce the model across Canada.

This solutions lab is ongoing. We currently have and are working on developing several products that include:

• toolkit that works as an interview model to capture best practices for resiliency among theory practitioners, front-line staff and people with lived experience
• 25 interviews with young people with lived experience, for rich qualitative data from youth interviews
• a systems map of macro trendsand a roadmap to be used as a model
• a roadmap to be used as a model
• a plan to widely introduce the model