Building Data Infrastructure Needed to Prevent Youth Homelessness in Canada: Learnings from BC and Calgary

Youth experiencing homelessness often move through multiple systems of support — but the data needed to develop strong cross-system services and effective  prevention policies remains siloed and scattered across organizations and sectors. When governments, community organizations, and researchers cannot easily share and connect data, service coordination suffers and prevention efforts fall short. 

PolicyWise for Children and Families is tackling this challenge by designing and testing new ways to coordinate service delivery through collaborative data and linked data from different sources. Through pilot projects in British Columbia and Calgary (funded by Making the Shift, and in part by the Government of Canada and the Government of British Columbia) this work explores how collaborative data use can strengthen policy, research, and coordinated approaches to youth homelessness prevention.

We sat down for a conversation with the PolicyWise team to chat about learnings from these projects, what collaborative data approaches look like in practice, and how communities across Canada can begin building data infrastructure needed to better prevent youth homelessness.

Who is this episode for?

This episode was designed for policymakers, funders, researchers, and community leaders who want practical guidance on developing data collaboration infrastructure to support coordinated services, inform policy and research, and strengthen youth homelessness prevention efforts.

What you will learn

• Key findings from cross-ministry administrative data work in BC, including how collaboration strengthens policy decision-making and where limits remain
• Early insights from a community-based data collaboration pilot in Calgary, with lessons from initial development, planning, and early implementation
• Practical recommendations and considerations for initiating and sustaining data collaboration across systems
• What Canada already has in place that can support prevention, and what still needs to be built

What we covered

• An introduction to the Roadmap for Data to Prevent Youth Homelessness that shaped this work
• Demonstration projects focused on two critical areas:
  • BC cross-ministry data to inform prevention policy: what data was used, why it matters, key findings, and implications for prevention policy
  • Calgary community collaboration to support coordinated service access: how partners built foundations for collaboration, , selected and designed pilot activities, and navigated early implementation
• Guidance for communities and organizations interested in launching their own data collaborations

PANELISTS:

Matthew Russell, PhD 

Dr. Matthew Russell is a Senior Research and Policy Associate with PolicyWise for Children & Families. His current work seeks to provide governments and nonprofits with information to increase the power of their important work. Matt has led many projects using program and governmental data to show the impact of services aimed at children, young adults, and vulnerable populations. He has extensive experience using administrative data to understand the trajectories of children and youth. 

Matt is currently leading a project funded by the Governments of British Columbia and Canada to use cross-ministry provincial administrative data on child-youth system use to predict later adult-youth homelessness in BC. This project helps build system-level knowledge on how to prevent youth homelessness. It was identified as a priority project in Matt’s previous work co-designing a roadmap forinformation to support the prevention of youth homelessness across Canada. 

Caillie Pritchard, MPH 

Caillie Pritchard (she/her) is a public health professional with experience evaluating community-based mental health programs. She specializes in engagement of community members, with an emphasison collaborative approaches and lived experience. In her role as a Senior Research and Policy Associate with PolicyWise for Children & Families, Caillie is currently leading a developmental evaluation of a pilot program of data collaboration to improve services for youth experiencing homelessness.  

Kiran Gurm, MSc, MPP 

Kiran Gurm is a Senior Research and Policy Associate with PolicyWise for Children & Families. She is a community-based research professional with a background in public policy, community engagement, and program evaluation. Her previous experience spans a wide array of topics including wildlife conservation planning, youth financial empowerment, and community development for older adults. She is currently leading a project aimed at building and piloting a community-based collaborative data sharing approach to enhance coordinated service access among organizations supporting youth that are homeless or at risk of being homeless. 

HOST:

Stephen Gaetz

Stephen Gaetz is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at York University, in Toronto Canada.  He is the President of the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness and the Homeless Hub at York University as well as co-Director of Making the Shift – Youth Homelessness Social Innovation Lab  and the United Nations Centre of Excellence on Youth Homelessness Prevention (Toronto). Dr. Gaetz works in collaboration with partners to conduct research and mobilize this knowledge so as to have a greater impact on solutions to homelessness, and in particular the prevention of homelessness. In 2017 Dr. Gaetz was awarded the Member of the Order of Canada.