Episode 015: Steve Gaetz
Prof. Steve Gaetz is a leader in the field of homelessness research and prevention. He talks to us about his work on preventing youth homelessness, and how to get your research read by people who need it.
Transcript
Cameron: My guest today is Professor Steve Gaetz of the Faculty of Education at York University. Steve's area of research is homelessness, and in the pursuit of understanding of this complex phenomenon, Steve has produced phenomenal research. He's the director of the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, a well-funded and far reaching research institute, and the Homeless Hub, a world class repository of homelessness data and analysis. I spoke with Steve in September at the Centre for Social Innovation on Bathurst Street in Toronto. I hope you enjoy our conversation.
Cameron: Steve, welcome to the podcast.
Steve: Thank you.
Cameron: You're a member of the Faculty of Education at York University. Your degree is in anthropology though, not education. I find our Faculty of Education is like a big tent, there's a lot of really interesting people doing work there.
Steve: That's right.
Cameron: Can you tell me a little bit about your background doing anthropology research and how you moved into a study on homelessness?
Steve: Okay. Well, I'll have to take you back a bit. It all comes down to punk rock. [laughter] When I was a teenager, I hated school. This is the first wave of punk rock. I grew up in Calgary so there was like this scene, small group of people into punk and that kind of thing.
Cameron: You're an Alberta boy?
Steve: I'm from Calgary, Alberta.
Cameron: Me too. Well, I'm from Edmonton, Alberta.
Steve: Oh, right. Okay, there we go. Hardy Western Canadians.
Cameron: Yes, very.
Steve: So one of the things that was happening then is that it was a very stigmatized kind of youth subculture. And so even at school, everyone thought we were freaks. And so I was always puzzled because I thought the things that we're doing that people are condemning are the very things that make getting through teenage-hood possible. And so, when I got to university, I was very delighted in an anthropology class. We had these papers in symbolic anthropology and said, "I want to do something on punk rock." And the prof said, "Oh, that sounds great. Why don't you do it?" And I was like, "I can do that at university? I can do that? I can do whatever I want?" And so I went from not liking school to really liking it and went all the way through with my PhD, finished my PhD doing work on marginalized youth in Cork, Ireland. And when I finished my PhD, I ran screaming from academia because I was like, "I don't want to be an academic, I want to get out and do things in the world."
I wound up working in the youth homelessness sector in Toronto, at a place called Shout Clinic. And my job was health promoter, which I had to do some research on before I did the interview, because I had no idea what that meant. But luckily, neither did the people interviewing me! So I got to work there and got to do research. And so my research background in anthropology, of course, is qualitative research. Very different, that kind of thing. And so I was able to do some really interesting work there. And then I also, at that time, learned how to do quantitative research, because at that time – this was under Mike Harris in the days when we thought we couldn't possibly get a worse premier – their first piece of legislation when they had their second mandate was the Safe Streets Act to criminalize homelessness. Having worked with young people – and this is the anthropology, knowing the geography of where young people are, and what they're doing, and what they do to make money and why – we decided we're going to confront this, but with evidence, because all the conversation at the political level is anecdotal: Mel Lastman going, "I'm afraid of these people when they come to my car," the premier calling them thugs and criminals, and everybody thinking they all came from Oakville. I don't know why Oakville. And so I was like, "No, there's something going on here. There's a relationship between the kinds of things people do."
So we did this big project with Bill O'Grady. It was quantitative and qualitative. And we designed it and had great results. And it basically showed that majority of young people, actually, who are homeless, who are doing all these things, panhandling, squeegeeing, whatever, 88% of them would rather have a regular job. They're doing it because they're excluded from the formal economy. And so we put that out there and we actually got a lot of press coverage. It got discussed in the Ontario legislature. Yet in the end, it didn't matter because policy is often ideologically driven, and evidence only sometimes matters in policy. But it was one of those aha! moments.
After that, I went to work for the city, and that was interesting, learning how government works. And then I decided, you know what, that university job isn't so bad after all, so I came to York and that's basically when things took off. It was the Faculty of Education that, as you say, is very open. A lot of outliers, fascinating faculty, because they've assembled this really interesting group of people who are all doing very cool work. And the other piece, though, is being at York University where interdisciplinarity is not just jargon, but I think people really do it – you do it, you work across disciplines! – and there's an openness to it. And I think once we do that kind of thing, we really see the power of it. I don't need to work with anthropologists necessarily, because I know how that goes. But I do need to work with somebody who's a researcher in accounting, or somebody in mathematics, or somebody in clinical psych. That's where I will get farther, we will all get farther, is through that kind of collaboration. And so that's where we set up.
Eventually we had the very first homelessness conference at York University, the first one in Canada. Research-based one. We brought together researchers, people in government, service providers and people with lived experience at this conference. Largest conference for years in Canada, it was over 800 people. And at that conference, we asked people, "What do you want from research?" Because, at that time, there was a very anti-intellectualism in the homelessness sector. We don't need research. We know what the problem is. We know what the solution is. And, of course, they were wrong in all three of those things. But there was this kind of opening where people said, "We want better access to research and we want more collaboration between researchers and the community." And so, we set up what was the precursor to the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness in about 2008. We set up the Homeless Hub as a way of helping people get access to research. And that's where you and I first met, at that time.
Cameron: Yeah. The York Homelessness Research Network.
Steve: The York Homelessness Research Network. So again, working across all the different departments and disciplines.
Cameron: But still mainly within York?
Steve: Within York, that's right. And so we had to figure out... Actually, doing that conference was good, because I got to meet a lot of researchers from elsewhere in Canada. So we had to build though, because homelessness is not a robust subject area in academia. It's not a discipline-based one. There's no journals in Canada on homelessness. There's no departments. I don't know if there's ever been a hire that was, "We want to hire somebody who's an expert in homelessness." So we had to build the subject area out as well, and that was fun and interesting.
Cameron: Yeah. So, one of the things that really distinguishes you as a researcher amongst all the researchers that I know is the connectedness. You are a person who brings people together. I've seen you bring people together and just watch what happens, as opposed to bring people together for your own agenda. And that freedom that you create, that space that you create for people is really important. But it's not just your personality trait, you've actually worked hard at creating an institutional framework for this to happen. So can you tell me about how the York Homelessness Research Network shifted into the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness? And where is the funding from? What's the goals of this kind of an institution?
Steve: We got a large SSHRC grant around 2008, a seven year grant. Then, with the COH in 2013, we got another one. And so these were about organizing. The first one was about networking and knowledge mobilization. It was to basically to do that work of connecting. And you're right about learning how to work differently, because there are often huge, often tensions, but certainly differences, in the way people work and use knowledge, or think about knowledge, in different spaces. The homelessness sector, I think the fact that I worked in the sector was very helpful, because it helped me understand what makes people tick. Likewise working in government.
And so you have to approach things very differently. You can't come in, "I'm the researcher. I'm here to do research." And just by virtue of me doing this and publishing, it's going to create impact. You have to go in with humility, with patience, with the ability to listen.
Cameron: So I'm hearing a lot of empathy and compassion being a part of that as well.
Steve: That's right. And working where people are at and finding common ground. So this is a little bit of a fast forward, but my favorite story of all of this is we started... I've done work with the youth homelessness sector for years, but about 2014 got together with what was emerging as A Way Home Canada. And they ran this National Learning Community, they still do, National Learning Community on Youth Homelessness, which involves sector leaders from across Canada, coast to coast to coast, and some people in government, some researchers, that kind of thing. And basically said, "What do we not know that we need to know, where research could play a role?"
And so we came up with this agenda with eight different items. One, we need to do a national survey. Two, we need to develop specific resources, et cetera, et cetera, right down the line. And within three years, we had checked off all of those boxes, and it was a really collaborative effort. And there was a time once where there was a National Learning Community meeting, and there was a major funder who was visiting the meeting. I was there for the first day, but I had to go back to Toronto. So it was just a meeting with the National Learning Community, with us, the Observatory, out of the room. And so the funder said, "Of all these things on the list, which one do you think is the top priority?" And the group said, "The national survey, we think, would be the most impactful thing."
And so I got a phone call on Friday from this funder, who said, "Can you give us a two-pager proposal, because we're meeting our board on Monday?" And when you get a call like that late Friday afternoon, there's only one answer. It's like, "Hell, yes."
Cameron: Yeah.
Steve: And so we did that, got it to them with a budget, threw it together the plan. And on Tuesday, got a call saying, "Your funding has been approved." And I always love that story because getting funding in academia is so torturous, and long, and complicated, and the hoops you have to go through. If only funding were always like that! But that wouldn't have been possible without all of that work. Working with and having the community drive the agenda, and having the funders be interested in that, but also the research. And so, those are the things that you could never plan for or anticipate unless you... It's about practice.
Deborah Britzman, in education, talks about “practice makes practice.” The actual doing is learning and implementation all at the same time. And so there's an iterative process there where, as you practice things and engage, you learn something, and you adjust, and you tack, and you improve the way you work over time, and you improve relationships, you build relationships.
Cameron: Yeah, but it's those relationships that are interesting, because you're not just practicing your craft as a researcher. One of the things that's really underestimated in academia is the importance of energy, because the institution of a university is... Someone once described it to me as “a thousand points of no.” And you can go tilting at windmills over issues that are bugging you, and you're trying to fix them and you're just getting nowhere, or you can get disenchanted and pull away, and try and do stuff all on your own. And for some people that works just great. Other people, they find that their energy dries up when they do that.
So you're creating a situation where people are coming together and finding what a friend of mine in academia once called your tribe. You feel like you belong when you come to these gatherings. I know when I go to a conference that's got the people in the room that I really want to meet, that I come away from that so full of energy to go back and do my research and I'm like really introverted. So going to meet people and coming away energized is a very rare phenomenon for me. So this idea that you're bringing people together, and not just creating a structure, but you're creating a network of relationships that's feeding people and people feeding each other. I think it’s really important for driving what happens. Can you talk to me about how you understand this importance of the network of disparate colleagues?
Steve: Yeah. It's interesting, because I'm introverted as well, in the proper sense of the term, which is that, I don't get my energy from other people so much and don't seek that. So I'm not driven by that. In fact, I like being alone a lot. But the work is really important and exciting. There is still a certain energy that comes from that. And so I think the... And there's different ways of engagement that matter, these relationships. So it's at convenings, it's doing a lot of public presentations with different kinds of people. So it could be community members in Toronto, it could be service providers in Calgary, it could be the Treasury Board in Ottawa, it's government. It's both across Canada but also international.
And so these convenings are energizing all the time, because of two things. One is we're on a mission that is very important, and that is to transform how we respond to homelessness. Because the way we're dealing with it is well-meaning, but it's actually a travesty. We create incredible harm for people.
Cameron: You mean the existing practices in the field?
Steve: There are existing practices, so we're trying to transform that. That's the first thing. But the second thing is, through engagement, we see the development of ideas and energy around how to do these things differently. One of the things we're working on is trying to get – in North America and globally, but especially in North America – an interest in the prevention of homelessness. Because it's so odd to me that on an issue area like this, modern mass homelessness, that's so harmful for people, the last thing that most advocates and government want to talk about is prevention. It's like, "No, first we have to house all the chronically homeless people." Which is important, we need to do that. Or, in Toronto, the debate is always, "We need more shelter beds." And it's like, "Oh my God, is it 1999 still? Are we still talking about that? Why aren't we driving down the numbers?"
Those two things combined are where the energy comes from, and meeting incredible people, it happens all the time, and then re-meeting them. This often happens more on the international context, because the opportunities are less. I was just at a conference and some of the people that we describe as part of the prevention revolution, we meet up at a conference and present together, and then the presentations are so amazing because of what's been learned since we last talked, and all that kind of stuff. And so, playing, hopefully, a key role, but being part of, in a way, a revolution in terms of how we deal with homelessness, is what drives the work.
But, to go back to what I said earlier about not necessarily being extroverted and that being my energy source, to be able to do that and maintain your energy, and integrity, and everything… as I get older, self-care becomes more important. How do I find a way that I'm not overwhelmed and all of the goodness takes over? How do I create balance on a daily basis and across the year? You have to figure those things out too, because it's not just you go out and it's like, "Wow. This is fun." I mean, it can be fun, but it also... You got to just keep healthy.
Cameron: One of the things the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness has done is to harness the results of all that energy. And you've got this one particular piece of your website called the Homeless Hub. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Steve: Well, this is an amazing thing, for me anyway. We started that 11 years ago, or so, in the mid-80s to set up... Our first thing was to create a repository, like to gather. So we did all these lit reviews, and assembled, and populated a website with all this research. Now, if we're starting it today, we would never have taken that approach, because there's this thing we like to call Google. [laughter] That's in your head and mine, too, for data. The issue [now] isn't that you can't find the research. What we've done is, on several fronts, research that I, and my team, and colleagues are directly involved in, we gather that. We mobilize it and we curate it, in a way.
We have weekly newsletters and we explain to people what's new in the research world, and highlight key things that help people. And I've heard from other researchers that they're like, "That's the best thing about it, because I don't have time." If you're a busy researcher, you aspire to being on top of things, but you don't always have time. So there's that kind of thing. We also do our own research, and publish, based on the things that we were talking about before, like community engagement. Who do we partner with? The Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, the State of Homelessness in Canada Reports, we've done all kinds of research on Housing First, lots in the youth space, a lot with A Way Home Canada. All of these research projects require us to create content and artifacts. But what we're not just doing – we do publish in peer reviewed journals, we recognize that's important – but the reach and the impact of that dissemination, in terms of policy and practice, is actually, I believe, very limited.
Cameron: The academic journal route?
Steve: Yeah. Academic journals are now behind a firewall. Most of them, they're owned by large multinational communications companies that make – I saw this report of several years ago – on average, 27% profit on academic journals. Why? Because, as academics, we're suckers, because we give them the content for free, on our knees, "Please publish this article!" We peer review the articles for free. And then we're grateful when they publish. And then our universities pay exorbitant fees to have those journals in our library. A curious thing, if you look at an article published 50 years ago, that would be 1969 or so, and then put it side-by-side with one published today – now they're online, but the layout...
Cameron: The layout is the same.
Steve: It might have a different type face, but the structure, the layout, the form is the same. Can you imagine any media form that has not evolved over 50 years?
Cameron: Yeah.
Steve: It's impossible to imagine. Television, music, comics, everything has evolved, but this hasn't. And the reason is, because they make so much money, they keep doing the same thing. But most people can't get access to it. If you're not an academic, you search for an article and it's like, "You can order this for anything from $25 to $45."
Cameron: Yeah, for one article.
Steve: For one article, which is taking a chance, because if I just think about the articles I read, one out of 10 might be ones that are really helpful, and that's me doing my own vetting. So all of that is to say, we decided, "Well, we're going to take a different approach to publication, because we want our research to matter." That means we did several things. One is – and we were an early leader around employing graphic design in the work – we wanted our reports to be something that someone would pick up. We were early leaders in the use of infographics. That was really important. We hired a director of communications, Steph Vasko, back then with that mandate. She had a background in web-based design, but also was a graphic designer. So it was like, "Let's go." It was great learning to work with her, because, early on, it would be like, "This is what I want. These are the color schemes. Here's pulled quotes. Can you make an image like this?" And we'd go back and forth on that. And then after two years, we never had to do that again, because we were in each others' heads.
Cameron: Right. You learned how to do it.
Steve: We learned how to do it, so that was really powerful. The other thing we did is this thing called layering.
Cameron: I don't want to rush past this. That's not something we teach in PhD programs.
Steve: No, it's not actually. It's not. And I think, for me, the graphic design piece is when I worked at Shout Clinic, I did all the graphic design myself for the organization, and created programs, and that kind of stuff. And so, I learned a lot about what is somebody working at an emergency shelter, what will they pick up? What will interest them? And how does that fit into the rhythm of their day? Where they don't have structured time to do research, or look at research, or do anything like that.
We came back to York, and when we were developing the Hub, it was like, "Okay, we're going to engage in what we call layering." The foundation layer is the research, solid, peer reviewed, reputable research. That's the big report, or actually, that's behind the big report. Then we have a big report with executive summary, so we borrow from what people do, so you've got a report on policing of people who are homeless. It's 81 pages. Then we do plain language summaries of the whole report. We do infographics that we can use on social media. We do blogs. We do all these different artifacts all the way down, the smallest one being a tweet.
One of my big aha! Moments – and this actually comes from that policing report – one of the things we would do is like, "Okay. This report we released eight years ago." At the time, it would be the week before releasing, "Can you do a short video?" And Steph would say okay. "And it's got to be like pop song length, no more than two and a half minutes, because no one is going to..." So I'd go into a room with a camera, and just talk off the top of my head for 10 minutes, and then she'd edit it down to two and a half minutes, and off it would go. So the production qualities weren't great, but that was at a time when things were opening up in that way.
But one of the things that I found about five years later, we were just looking at the bibliometrics of the hub, and looking at different reports, and what people were picking up on in terms of the layers. What were they interested in? And as many people looked at that video as downloaded the report. That was both exciting and also depressing. [laughter] But it was important, right? We have to understand people consume in different ways, and their ability to consume is different. Not everyone can sit down, has the time, even if they wanted to, to read an 80 page report. But as long as the messaging is clear, and under each layer there's a line that goes back to the evidence, then we have confidence. Then, in a way, it doesn't matter. Because if someone says, "Oh, policing of homeless people is the criminalization of a status," then they're getting it, and that we have to stop doing this. That's good enough. I don't need everybody to read every report. It's like, "Are people getting the message?"
Cameron: There's this huge translation effort, multi-layer translation effort, to go from the academic research through to the soundbite that somehow captures people's imagination.
Steve: That's right. That's right.
Cameron: Now, you also have done some stuff to structure things like lesson plans for primary or secondary education, and stuff like that. Is that one of those layers, or is that an offshoot?
Steve: That's an offshoot, I would say, where people can use the resources. In doing that kind of work, we thought, well, young people are in school, and we've talked with teachers, and explaining what we do, and they're like, "Well, you can do this in any class. You can do it in math class, English, history, geography." And so, we worked with teachers, but we also built out resources for teachers and students that actually got used more broadly: What is homelessness? What is youth homelessness? Why do people panhandle? All of these answer these questions. And we set it up so that teachers could do curriculum on homelessness, but also could navigate the resources that we have available, and students could as well. They could go and do their own research on the hub, and learn about it, and then... That's all important, because the point is, is that the more that people learn about this, the better. That's important.
The other piece in the layering goes back to the relational thing that you were talking about. It only occurred to me about four years ago. I thought, wow, the going to communities, having community meetings, or speaking with people in government – you could start to see direct lines between those events and then something happening. You go to Calgary to talk about this and that, and then two years later they're implementing it. Or examples in Europe: we designed Housing First for Youth, an adaptation of the Housing First model for developing adolescents and young adults. We go there and do presentations, workshops, and soon it's like, in Waterford, they're implementing our model, or Edinburgh. Or you see in government, they language starting to be taking up that we're working on.
And so, we started to really reflect that I hadn't really thought about that as dissemination. But the relational thing, again, is important. People will see you, will talk with you, and meet with you, and then you'll meet with them again. It's through those interactions, that consume a lot of time. I could say that I don't have time to do that, and that's probably true, but it actually turns out to be a key thing. I remember once looking at my CV and counting the number of presentations I did a year, and it's going through the roof. I think it was peaking, around 2015, at 150 presentations in a year. And so, that's a lot of engagement, but it's that face-to-face, the relational, the building the relationships, then people call you up, and you call them. It's like, "I hear you're doing something really cool in Kelowna. What's this Foundry mental health hub thing?” It's bidirectional, the relationship, as a relationship should be.
Cameron: It's not you just pushing?
Steve: No.
Cameron: Awesome.
Steve: Or being just this guru on a hill, which I would never want to think of myself that way, anyway. But it's about meaningful engagement with people back and forth, and learning from people, and learning where they're interests and innovation lies, and finding all these innovators out there in the world, across the world, who are taking up stuff and doing things that I would never think of in a million years, so that's exciting. That's all an important part of it, different audiences, different groups, and how do you engage government, or how do you do all these things? And, again, it's a learning thing, and it's something we don't get trained on how to do in academia.
Cameron: No.
Steve: I think, partly, because there is a large group of people who do that. It's not standard practice. We're trained, hopefully, to do really good research, and we're rewarded for publishing in very traditional forums, which is those peer reviewed academic journals that are owned by multinational companies. That's what we're trained to do. And so, all these other things are... I think, if we did train people on them, we'd have more impact from the research, because that's where I think the pathways for research having an influence lies.
Cameron: You're taking the idea of networks to a meta level here when you move into this project that's got funding recently, called Making the Shift. You describe it as a network of centres of excellence. The centres of excellence are, themselves, little networks.
Steve: That's right.
Cameron: And you're tying them all together. Tell me about Making the Shift.
Steve: Well, this is a perfect example of pulling it all together, because this is a Tri-Council funded project.
Cameron: What's a Tri-Council, for the listener?
Steve: In Canada, the research funding from the Government of Canada is organized into three councils, one is for social sciences and humanities, one is for health, and the other is for sciences and engineering. The Network of Centres of Excellence Grant was created in the late 1980s to basically support tech transfer, so getting engineers to work with the private sector, to develop things that you could commercialize, and it evolved over time. Now we put together a project idea that was unique in many ways. It was social science led, but the main thing that's key is this wasn't York University or researcher led project. It was co-led, and this is the magic of it, between the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness and A Way Home Canada, which is this amazing national coalition to prevent and end youth homelessness. We hardwired into the structure-
Cameron: So the Canadian Observatory is the academic side of it.
Steve: That's right.
Cameron: Now you've got the practitioner side?
Steve: Yeah. It's a coalition that involves the service providers, but also people in government, and other stakeholders. And so, an organization like that brings bench strength around government relations and how to engage the sector. Because what we're doing with this Youth Homelessness Social Innovation Lab is something pretty ambitious. We want to transform the response to youth homelessness. We call it Making the Shift, because we want to shift to prevention. The research we have shows that the way we do things now is so harmful to young people by just letting them stay mired in homelessness. Here's a key stat from our first national survey. I won't get too much into the detail, but it's an important one. 40% of all currently homeless youth had their first experience before they're 16. That group of young people had the most adverse childhood experiences: most likely to be bullied, to have learning disabilities, to be involved in a child protection, housing instability. It's 40%. And what did we do for that group of people? Nothing. Because the homelessness response starts when you're 16. And then our response – at its best, things like Housing First – is that if you are chronically homeless and sufficiently ill, we will help you get housing and support.
Cameron: So, in other words, we're just going to wait until you get worse and then we've got this nice solution for you.
Steve: Yeah. Which is absurd, when you think about it. It's all well meaning, and I do think, most certainly, we need to help people exit homelessness who are chronically homeless. So I'm not saying we shouldn't. But we're allowed to have more than one priority, and we don't do anything on that other end. So our whole agenda is, through collaboration, to conduct and mobilize research, to have an impact on solutions to homelessness. And that focuses on prevention. As I was saying, prevention is a dirty word in North America. So our goal is to develop the knowledge about what we can do, how to do it, and how to do it effectively. When we talk about lab, that term, social innovation lab, sometimes comes across as jargon. I've seen a lot of things called a social innovation lab, and it's just a project. But we actually consider the work we do to be a laboratory.
We look around the world and try to identify promising ideas, where it's like, "That's a very interesting approach to prevention," or areas where we don't actually have the promising ideas. We know that a big pipeline into homelessness is that young people leaving care. In Canada, 0.3% of young people have some involvement in care. Amongst youth experiencing homelessness, it's 58%. So people transition out of care.
Cameron: It's these gaps between institutions?
Steve: Gaps, but systems failures.
Cameron: Gaps between systems, yeah.
Steve: In a lab it's like, "How could we fix that? How could we create a system that would make sure that young people don't fall into homelessness when they leave child protection or leave prison," that kind of thing. Then we go from that kind of gap analysis to doing demonstration projects, which are more than pilots. A demonstration project is where we have to really do some clear work around design, intervention design – or policy design, it's also involving policy – prototyping, piloting, evaluating. Both developmental evaluation, understanding how you make this thing work, but also outcomes evaluation, is it actually having the intended results? Through that, we develop the knowledge base that will help communities, governments, to go, "Wow, rather than wait until somebody's 21, an addict, traumatized, in poor health, now we're going to help you. Let's go and help that 14 year old, who can't stay at home anymore, help them and their family.” How do we do that? How do we get at that? And so, that involves, in the laboratory sense, both figuring out interventions, but also at a policy level, what would have to change to enable us to do that? That's an area, frontier area. There is good research on homelessness prevention, but we need to build it out more, and provide the evidence. And then get back to what we've been talking about the whole time. It's not enough just to have evidence. How do we mobilize it so that communities will take it up? So that government will fund it and others will fund it, philanthropic or private funders. That there will be people who want to make a change, make that shift. That's a huge piece of work as well.
All of those different things, by the way, cannot happen unless it's that collaborative model. If we were just doing it as the observatory, we might do it okay. But because we hard wire in that co-leadership, we're going to do it really well. We have a lot of confidence that we're going to do it.
Cameron: You talk about understanding the problems. You got to have a multidisciplinary approach just to understand. You've got to understand everything from developmental psychology, to sociology, to how policy works and how policy changes. You've got to have all those people in the room to just come to an understanding. And then you've got to develop a prototype, is the word you used.
Steve: That's right.
Cameron: A prototype of a particular kind of intervention. That's got to involve, not just the university professor with the academic knowledge, but the person with the lived experience of how this actually works in practice. I mean, this is where that collaboration between the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness and A Way Home Canada is really crucial, because you're bringing both of those pieces together.
Steve: Yeah. Well, that's really interesting. I'll give you an example. One of the most exciting projects we're working on now is this thing called Duty to Assist, which is adapting a Welsh piece of legislation that basically compels people in Wales, within the local government, if they become aware that somebody's homeless, they have a duty to offer help within 14 days. And if the person wants help, they have to remedy the situation within 60 days. So it's about preventing their entering homelessness. So we thought, "How could we do that with youth homelessness?" And so, we developed the conceptual framework for how this would work, and work with different people, constitutional law experts. How would this fit within government? How would it work? All of this kind of thing, and then we thought, "Okay. If we're going to make this a go in Canada, this is a seismic shift on how we would do it."
How would be go about this? We thought, "Well, we should pilot it in a smaller scale, in a community." And we decided on Hamilton for a number of reasons. The key ingredients were there. But the other thing we did is we worked with this human-centred design firm called Bridgeable, that's amazing. They do all kinds of work, public sector, private sector. They've done work with the New York City Transit System, how to make it more effective. And so, we collaborated with all those three bodies of knowledge, and then the community. And so, the human-centred design piece is really key. To go to your question about people with lived experience, we had experience in the past, where we would do pathway mapping with young people in thinking about prevention. Tell me what happened along the way, and where they're points where there are adults in your life that knew something was wrong? And they could have helped, but nothing happened. And everyone can do it. It's like, "Yeah, I had this teacher who knew, and was really nice, and all that, but didn't know what to do, or I went to get help at this social service agency, and they were like, 'Well, you're 15. When you're 16 you can apply to go to a homeless shelter.'" This kind of stuff. And so, they are experts on that. And so, in thinking about how to structure a response that would be preventive, it means turning on its head how we currently think about homelessness, which is we create a sector that provides emergency services and we sit and wait until somebody shows up at the door.
Cameron: Crisis response.
Steve: A crisis response, and it's incumbent upon the person to go and find their way there. The reality, when you do that human-centred design and the pathway mapping, is that when a young person, that 13-year-old or 14-year-old, gets kicked out, or runs away, and stays with their friend, or an auntie, or whatever: (a) they're not saying, "I'm homeless now," they don't consider themselves to be homeless; (b) they probably know nothing about emergency shelters; and (c) they don't necessarily have an understanding that there are supports there. No 14-year-old wakes up and says, "Tomorrow, I'm going to go and find out where I can get some family meditation support for myself, my family." They don't do that.
What they do is they're embedded in this ecosystem where they have friends, hopefully, but also adults who, hopefully, are meaningful in their life. Every young person who's homeless was in school once, and knew teachers, and maybe counselors, or had a coach, or an art instructor, or someone at the community centre. When they reach out for help, if they do, that's who they're going to talk to. We, in a sense, have infrastructure in every single community that would allow us, if we mobilize it correctly, to get help to young people, but our current structure doesn't set up that way, at all. So that collaboration, a private company, a national coalition on youth homelessness, the Canadian Observatory and researchers, and then all those organizations in Hamilton, to sit down and go, "What would this look like in practical terms? How could this actually work?" That's the laboratory.
So prototyping, as Bridgeable likes to say, "When you prototype, you want to fail quick." So test things out and then move to the next idea, and adapt it, and learn. And so, that laboratory work is, for us, a relatively new way forward, and that's where this Making the Shift is really powerful. It's an applied science and learning from different practices, including industry. How to we think a chair gets designed? It's that kind of process is the same kind of thing, and then learn from that. And so, that is where... To me, that's such exciting work with the real promise of having an impact. Because, at the end of the day, everything we do, everything we do, should be to (a) contribute to the reduction in youth homelessness, but also (b) produce better outcomes for young people. Not just get them housed, but treat them like human beings who have rights and dignity, and help them live well, and help them achieve their goals, and help them grow into adults in ways that aren't permanently damaging for them.
Cameron: This notion of youth, the definition that you use is interesting, because in order to identify a particular phenomenon that you want to address, inevitably you have to draw boundaries around it. Now, you used the definition of basically “13 to 24” in this one?
Steve: That's right.
Cameron: Why those boundaries?
Steve: Well, youth is a category that is defined by these arbitrary boundaries. How old can you be when you leave school voluntarily? How old are you when you can get a driver's license? How old are you when you can go to a doctor without parental permission? How old are you when you transition from child protection? How old are you when you move from the juvenile justice system to the adult system? There are all these arbitrary dates, and so our definition is arbitrary, as well, in that we made these cut-offs on both ends. But the reason we picked 13 to 24 is important, because we have to think about, first, not 16 to 24, because, again, we can't ignore all those young people in crisis. That huge number who are under 16, so that's why we say 13.
Cameron: But why not 12?
Steve: It could be 12. It could be 12.
Cameron: The important thing was to drop it below that legal threshold of 16.
Steve: That's right.
Cameron: Okay.
Steve: And if you're going to go down to 13, you will see 12-year-olds, too.
Cameron: Yes, right.
Steve: And then on the other end, by going to 24 rather than 21, or whatever, we ensure that we work on both sides of institutions that have the child system and then adult system, like mental health.
Cameron: Where is that institutional boundary? At what age?
Steve: That's 18 years old.
Cameron: 18.
Steve: So a lot of these systems, young people drop off. They might have mental health supports through 18.
Cameron: Through to the age 17 or 18.
Steve: 17, that's right. And then when they're 18, they often don't make the transition, or we create dramatically different systems, like the youth criminal justice system and the approach we take, which is much more about community engagement, and trying to not lock up people, and the adult system, which is harsh and punitive and jail driven. At the age of 18, it's insane.
Cameron: How big a barrier to your work is it that you have such a fixation on policing homelessness?
Steve: It's huge. It's using law enforcement to address a social and economic issue. It's complex because homelessness is a stigmatized status. At it’s best, in terms of stigma, we look at people with pity and want to help them, but I think that's not good either, because it dehumanizes people. At its worst, we see them as a threat. That they're dangerous. They're dirty. I don't like to see them. It's interesting, when the Province of Ontario instituted the Safe Streets Act, Jim Flaherty, at that time, was attorney general, and came out with something along these lines, where he was like, "When people no longer feel safe to walk down the streets, or drive in their cars" – because they were very interested in cars at that time.
Cameron: Still are.
Steve: "When people are no longer able to walk down the streets, or drive in their cars, because they feel unsafe, then it's time for government to act."
Cameron: It's takes a real mental gymnastics to flip this around and say that the people who need to feel safe are the people in the cars, and the people walking down the street, in their businesses, or whatever.
Steve: Yeah. It's funny, because at first glance you go, "Well, that makes sense. Government's role is safety matters," and yet it's an absurd statement. If I'm afraid to walk down the street because someone is sitting on the sidewalk, or because of the clothes they wear, or the color of their skin, if I have an irrational fear of people, if I'm afraid of somebody who's indigenous, or who's Black, because of my own racism, the state has no obligation to come down on those people because of my fear.
Cameron: To make you feel better.
Steve: To make me feel better, and that's how we actually structure things. We've done research on young people who are homeless, looking at their experience of criminal victimization, and they're exponentially more likely to be victims of all kinds of crime.
Cameron: They are the ones who are not safe on the streets.
Steve: They're the ones not safe. Thirty-eight per cent of all young women on the streets have been raped in the last 12 months. If that was my neighborhood, there would be troops on the street. But instead we use law enforcement... And not every police officer is horrible, but we create systems to respond to things and give people tickets, and send them to jail, and lock them up, and move them on, and harass them, and nudge them rather than... You can imagine a traumatized 16 year old girl who's been raped, and now she's on the streets and, when she engages police, it's about moving her on, or this kind of thing.
Cameron: Yeah. Or getting a ticket.
Steve: Or getting a ticket, and that kind of thing, which... This has come up in the news in recent years, where people have $40,000 in tickets. It's an absurd response. We've done research on that, and people can't... Why would you give somebody, who's panhandling so that they can have change to go and buy a slice of pizza, a ticket? In fact, the Criminal Code of Canada says that law enforcement officers should use discretion in issuing fines to people who have clearly no way of paying. We actually contravene our own laws by doing this kind of thing. And it's not just the police, it's that the public are like, "I don't like this homeless person on my street. I don't want a homeless shelter in my neighborhood." It gets onto politicians and everybody can rally around how we don't want homeless people. You see Donald Trump is doing this. That they're an environmental disaster in San Francisco.
I guess, on the bright side, he's concerned about the environment. So we have those tendencies in society rather than, if we're really concerned about people sitting on the sidewalk and in dirty clothes, what if we did this? What if we resolved their homelessness as the response rather than throw them in jail, which is probably the most expensive housing program in any country.
Cameron: Bar none, yeah.
Steve: But that's not where we go, we'd rather spend money. Keeping people in the state of homelessness actually is very expensive, when they engagement with other systems. We make people really sick.
Cameron: But it keeps those systems busy.
Steve: It keeps those systems busy, and also makes us feel good that we're giving people sandwiches, and soup, and aren't we great for doing all these things. Start again with would that be okay for you or me? I'll tell you this, I've never been homeless, but I would not want to be in a homeless shelter. This isn't an knock on people who are doing that work, but imagine being in a room with 35 people, 15 of whom you know, the rest you don't know, five of whom you're totally afraid of, many who are really loud, many who are coughing. It's hard enough to live with people when you choose them, then to be thrust into situations where you're put in these congregate settings that aren't necessarily safe, and you're, in many ways, infantilized. You have curfews. Some places, they won't let you in if you have the smell of alcohol on your breath. Which, if that was true in my house, I'd probably spend a lot of nights kicked out. We create these weird rules for people rather than say, "We should do this very differently." And, as a society, all of us are responsible. When we walk by, or we just think it's okay, I gave some money to a charity, I did my bit. This is a crisis response, but it's not helpful in the end. The carnage is huge. The damage to people is massive. And we can do things differently. To circle it back to the work we're doing, our job is to give people the knowledge and evidence about how to do it differently, in ways that are going to have an impact.
I'll tell you one stat that suggests why doing prevention with youth should be such a priority. Last year, this year, actually, Canada did a national point in time count, so in every community did a one night count of who's homeless. And so they found that 13% of the people who were on the streets, or in shelters, are between the ages of 16 and 24. That's not a non-representative [statistic]. It's 13%, but we're talking about a 10 year age span. But the stat that really stood out was, "When did you first experience homelessness," across everybody who's homeless, and 50% of people, who are homeless today, said their first experience was before they're 24. If we were to do a really good job on preventing youth homelessness, and helping young people and their families, and addressing the trauma, and making sure people stay connected to community and meaningful adults, and stay in school, and help them avoid homelessness, and all the harms that come with that. We'd not only impact on all those people's lives, but we'd probably have a huge impact on the homelessness problem in Canada. Because the homeless youth of today is very possibly the chronically homeless adult of tomorrow.
Cameron: It's an amazingly comprehensive project that you're leading, and I'm filled with admiration for the work that you're doing, Steve. I really appreciate your being on the podcast today and talking to me.
Steve: Thank you, pleasure.
Cameron: Great.
Links
Faculty page for Steve Gaetz at York University
The Homeless Hub, a repository of information and research on homelessness, such as this critique of the Safe Streets Act.
Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness
Credits
Host: Cameron Graham
Producer: Bertland Imai
Photos: York University, Toronto Star
Music: Musicbed
Recorded: September 25, 2019
Location: Centre for Social Innovation
