EXPLORING EFFECTIVE SYSTEMS RESPONSES TO HOMELESSNESS

INTER-SECTORAL COLLABORATIONS
DISCUSSION
Cross-sectoral thinking, learning, planning and
working are essential to the development of a
preventative solutions-oriented approach to youth
homelessness. While it is essential to improve servicedelivery
coordination within the homeless-serving
sector, a failure to identify and collaboratively repair
inter-sectoral cracks means that this important work
will not have the desired effect on the numbers of
youth experiencing homelessness.
An active and coordinated prevention- and
intervention-oriented approach is needed to effectively
ensure all youth in Ontario have access to safe and
appropriate housing. A systems-level reform agenda
begins by shifting professional culture and practice
such that collaboration and joint-working are valued
and supported. Inter-professional collaboration
begins with opportunities to compare differences
and similarities in practice, policy, terminology and
mandate across the various sectors where youth are
active. Later, opportunities for inter-professional
learning and training will support the identification of
shared language and mutually desirable goals.
Once shared language, goals and targets have been
established across institutions/sectors, an integrated
policy and accountability framework is necessary to
support the implementation of this shared agenda. Of
course, for individual organizations to work collectively
on a shared agenda, approaches to monitoring and
reporting administrative data will need to shift.
Protectionist approaches to the production and sharing
of administrative data should be eschewed in favour
of an approach to monitoring and reporting that
reflects an integrated service delivery model – that is,
where service impacts are measured across (rather than
within) the individual service delivery contexts where
youth are active. Shared budget-lines, staffing positions
and/or multi-sectoral funding opportunities are also
important facilitators of collaboration. Homeless
youth-serving organizations should consider taking
the lead in developing collaborative funding proposals
that seek to address the interrelated determinants and
symptoms of homelessness.
There is also a role for research to play in supporting
inter-professional learning and collaboration. Two
theoretical orientations stand out as particularly useful
in this regard: complex adaptive systems theories
and developmental systems or ecological approaches
to youth well-being. Human development is the
result of complex interactions between our biological,
emotional, social and physical worlds (Lerner, 2005).
A systems response to youth homelessness requires
that we understand how an intervention in one
sector influences and is influenced by interventions
taking place elsewhere and that we recognize how
the experiences of individual youth are shaped by
their relations with family, their communities, and
various inter-related social-structural phenomena (e.g.,
housing, health, education, nutrition, poverty, stress).
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