Improving Housing Outcomes for Aboriginal People Through the Assessment and Development of Practices, Policies and Procedures
Description:
Homelessness is a continuing concern throughout Canada. Recent literature explicates the need and the historical and cultural reasons for fundamentally different approaches to address Aboriginal homelessness.
In response to the priorities set out in our previous work, Developing and Setting a Research Agenda for Aboriginal Homelessness, we undertook to investigate improving housing outcomes through the assessment and development of practices, policies and procedures.
Our study looked at organizations that provided services addressing homelessness among Aboriginal peoples in seven census metropolitan areas in the four Western Canada provinces: Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Regina, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, and Victoria.
Objectives of the Project - Describe current policies and procedures and the resulting practices of housing services in large Western Canadian Census Metropolitan Areas (CMA, as defined by Statistics Canada) as they pertain to Aboriginal peoples who are homeless;
- Identify examples of best practices in Western Canadian CMAs;
- Assess the strengths of current policies, procedures, and practices in services in Calgary as they pertain to meeting the housing needs of Aboriginal people who are homeless;
- Determine the opportunities for collaboration among community partners and funding agencies to implement positive changes in current policies, procedures, and practices in Calgary;
- Identify services and organizations that have the most potential to benefit from interventions that promote cultural safety in the delivery of services to the Aboriginal homeless people;
- Evaluate the short term success of cultural safety development in promoting positive changes in policies, procedures, and practices in select services and organizations; and
- Produce guidelines for the collaborative development of Aboriginal housing service best practices and cultural safety programs for urban settings.
Phases of the Project - Phase 1: Creation of a database of organizations that provided housing services to Aboriginal people.
- Phase 2: Description of the policies, procedures, and practices that were currently used by these organizations in serving homeless people.
- Phase 3: Case studies of organizations viewed by their peers as effective in serving Aboriginal people who are homeless and/or that were identified in interviews in Phase 2.
- Phase 4: A study of the capacity for organizations in an urban setting, specifically Calgary, to collaborate on an initiative to improve housing outcomes for Aboriginal people was conducted.
Outcome of the Project
As the intent of the study was to identify the most effective policies, procedures, and practices for working with Aboriginal peoples who experience homelessness, the end result was the creation of a framework for best practices in ending Aboriginal homeless.
Research Report
Improving Housing Outcomes for Aboriginal People in Western Canada: National, regional, community and individual perspectives on changing the future of homelessness
Type of Resource:
Report
Publication Date:
2011
Location:
Canada