CALL FOR PAPERS – International Journal on Homelessness

A Transformation Agenda: Mobilizing Social Innovation to Support the Prevention of Youth Homelessness

Deadline for Submission Updated to September 30, 2025 – 11:59 pm (EST)

Special issue in partnership with

Canadian Observatory On Homelessness Logo

About IJOH

IJOH (ISSN 2564-310X) is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal focused on promoting and advancing scholarly communications and academic discourse among all sectors regarding preventing and ending homelessness locally and globally.

Special Issue: Aim and Scope

In Canada, there is a deepening understanding of the need for a robust body of evidence to bolster the implementation, efficacy and enhancement of social innovation programs to address youth homelessness. Social innovation describes an approach to designing, developing and testing solutions to complex and persistent issues such as youth homelessness. The goal is to provide more effective, sustainable, and compassionate solutions to prevent and end youth homelessness. This imperative groundwork is key to expanding these initiatives on a larger scale.

This special issue brings together an evidence base for innovative preventive initiatives that have emerged to combat youth homelessness in Canada and around the world. We are inviting contributions to the following streams:

Policies and practices targeting youth that are designed to: a) reduce inflows into homelessness, b) prevent youth from transitioning to chronicity c) reduce returns to homelessness for those who have exited homelessness.

Many public systems, including child protection, the criminal justice system, health and education often contribute to the production and perpetuation of youth homelessness. Research that focuses on whether and how these same public systems can be transformed to support the prevention of youth homelessness will be explored.

This topic emphasizes the significance of incorporating traditional indigenous knowledge, values, and cultural perspectives as well as Indigenous leadership and sovereignty in efforts to address the complex issue of preventing Indigenous youth homelessness.

This theme highlights the crucial effort to prevent youth from experiencing homelessness in the first place and ensuring that once they secure stable housing, they don’t fall back into homelessness. The focus is on identifying early interventions and long-term support systems to disrupt cycles of homelessness for young people.

This track centers on data-backed innovative approaches to ending homelessness, and on how service providers and policymakers can incorporate data-informed decisions into policymaking and designing program interventions.

This theme underscores the role of youth-centered policies, legislation and regulation, and funding allocation led by all levels of the government.

Special Issue Editors

Stephen Gaetz

Professor and Research Chair in Homelessness and Research Impact, York University, Toronto, ON

Research interests

youth homelessness, prevention, infectious diseases and pandemics; adolescence, youth culture and resistance, street youth, their economic strategies, legal and justice issues, strategies for mobilizing homelessness research.

Kaitlin Schwan

Associate Professor of Family Medicine, University of Southern California; Research Advisor at the Women’s National Housing & Homelessness Network

Research interests

human rights, gendered homelessness, encampments, street medicine, structural and systems homelessness prevention

Peter Mackie

Professor School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University, UK

Research interests

homelessness prevention, homelessness law

Cathy Fournier

Sr. Scholar on Indigenous Homelessness, Canadian Observatory on Homelessness

Research interests

Indigenous homelessness, Indigenous concepts of home and homelessness/houselessness

Daniel Farrell

HELP USA; Chief Operating Officer; Hunter College School of Social Work, Homeless Services United

Research interests

homelessness prevention, street homelessness, best practices for people living in emergency shelter or transitional housing, long-term housing stability

Ahmad Bonakdar

Senior Director of Research, Canadian Observatory on Homelessness

Research interests

pathways to homelessness, prevention, social equity, data-informed decision-making, housing affordability, community-engaged studies

Submission Guidelines

Deadline for Submission: September 30, 2025 – 11:59 pm (EST)

We accept original research articles, systematic reviews, and discussion pieces. The submission must not have been previously published, nor should it be under consideration by another journal. Manuscripts should be submitted online by registering and logging in through the IJOH portal. Please ensure you review the Guidelines for Authors before submitting. All submissions will undergo a double-blind peer-review process. Please include a note in your cover letter indicating that your submission is intended for the special issue on youth homelessness prevention. If the submission is not a good fit for the special issue, the guest editors may recommend it as a regular submission to IJOH. As IJOH is an international journal, please ensure your article recommendations and conclusions are relevant to an international audience, and please explain any local terminology or short-forms.

IJOH is a fully open-access publication. All articles accepted for publication are published open access and free of charge. We are committed to the free and open exchange of scholarship from all disciplines, perspectives, and methodologies. Content published in the journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Because of this license, the special edition may also be considered for publication as a text in partnership with the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness.

If you have any questions before submitting your paper, feel free to contact us. We look forward to receiving your contributions!