Youth homelessness prevention in Dublin and Belfast

La version française de ce billet se trouve ici.

I recently helped organize a study tour of Dublin and Belfast, in partnership with A Way Home Canada. The tour’s focus was youth homelessness prevention, and my summary notes from the tour are available here.

Here are 10 things to know:

1. Ireland and Northern Ireland were not accidental choices. Canada currently lacks a national strategy on youth homelessness, and each of the countries we visited already has one.

2. The study tour featured a fantastic mix of participants. Our group included practitioners, funders, and researchers from both Canada and the United States, allowing for some important professional networking.

3. Ireland has a Youth Family Mediation (YFM) service, operated by a non-profit called Focus Ireland. YFM began in 2016, having been inspired by both the Geelong Project (Australia) and by Upstream Cymru (Wales). A recent evaluation found that YFM helps with communication between young people and their families, while also preventing some young people from leaving home and school prematurely.

4. Headquartered in Dublin, Focus Ireland is a non-profit that leverages family and natural supports. This can involve supporting a youth in reaching out to a friend or family member with whom the youth has previously had a close, healthy relationship. Staff from Focus Ireland can assist, in part by giving the youth the reassurance that this is an OK thing to do. All residents at Greenhill (a Focus Ireland site visited during the study tour) now have at least 2-3 people on their list of natural supports (often it’s a sibling with whom they’d lost contact). 

5. In Northern Ireland, the Northern Ireland Housing Executive leads homelessness planning. This is a non-departmental public body established by federal legislation. The Housing Executive consists of a 10-member board and is supported by staff. While the Executive has the statutory responsibility to respond, it relies on partners such as Simon Community Northern Ireland to deliver on its mission. The Housing Executive is also a landlord and administers Northern Ireland’s social housing waiting list.

6. Simon Community Northern Ireland is the largest charity in Northern Ireland focusing on homelessness. Their services include emergency shelter, financial assistance directly to households, and housing (including Housing First).

7. Simon Community Northern Ireland also operates Housing First for Youth (HF4Y). Offered in scattered site housing, 20 young people aged 16-21 are supported by staff around the clock (even if they’re not physically with the youth at all times). With this HF4Y initiative, young people under 18 have a minimum of four engagements per day with staff.

8. Unfortunately, policy responses in both countries are not meeting the scale of the problem. In Ireland, the number of homeless youth (aged 18-24) has grown since the pandemic. And across Northern Ireland, 8,000 young people are currently experiencing homelessness.

9. Migrants experiencing homelessness are a very underserved group. New arrivals in Dublin (some of whom claim refugee status) have had a major impact on the local profile of persons experiencing homelessness, contributing to xenophobia and fuelling support for the far right. Meanwhile, a backlog in Ireland’s refugee determination system compounds the present-day challenge. It is also common for migrant youth to arrive in Ireland without a parent; and when a status refugee sends for their family, the family often ends up homeless upon arrival in Ireland.

10. Lived experience was central to our study tour experience. Our walking tour of Dublin was led by two people with lived experience with homelessness. Also in Dublin, we learned that funders are noticeably affected when confronted directly by persons with lived experience. In the words of one young person we met: “You have to experience it in order to identify the ‘small gaps.’ Such ‘small gaps’ can be life changing for people with lived experience.”

In sum. A Way Home Canada partnered with Nick Falvo Consulting to deliver a five-day study tour on youth homelessness prevention. Consisting of 30 participants, study tour participants visited sites, listened to guest speakers, and engaged in professional networking.

I wish to thank Katie Davies Jorgensen, Jenny Morrow, Annick Torfs, and Heidi Walter for assistance with this blog post.