How a simple question could help reduce youth homelessness | Canada Voices

For years, the young man came and went from the youth shelter in St. Catharines, Ont. He was a difficult case: addicted to meth, diagnosed with schizophrenia, sometimes talking about people with eight heads and snakes for hair, wearing six pairs of pants in layers, for fear they’d be stolen.

This cycle might have continued, making it harder and harder for him to escape life on the street.

But one day, he arrived calmer than usual, and Amber Dougherty, a shelter manager, grabbed her chance.

It was 2019, the first year of a highly successful program that changed everything at Raft, a 15-bed shelter for young people, ages 16 to 24.

The new program aimed to divert youth away from the shelter as soon as they stepped inside. It required asking a new question, the same query that Ms. Dougherty had raised with the 20 year old in their most recent conversations: Can you think of a positive, caring person in your life who might help you out?

This time, he gave Ms. Dougherty permission to call his father.

“I didn’t know if he was dead or alive,” Ms. Dougherty recalls the father saying, when he answered the phone. He insisted his son promised to take his medication. “But I want him home.”

The young man went to live with his father the same day, Ms. Dougherty says. A few years later, she heard he was still at home, doing well. He’s not returned to the shelter since.

“We used to think that if youth came here, they had nowhere else to go,” says Raft’s executive director Michael Lethby. In fact, most of their clients do have a trusted adult, ready to step up if asked.

A homeless shelter is high-risk refuge for young people, Mr. Lethby says. Stay too long, and they are inevitably exposed to street life, more likely to drop out of school, increasingly vulnerable to drug dealers and human trafficking. What if an early brainstorming session could get them somewhere safer?

This idea has been adopted by a growing number of youth and adult shelters across Canada. The programs differ, but the principle is the same. Workers explore other housing options as soon as people ask for a bed. At Raft, if clients offer a name but are reluctant to reach out themselves, workers facilitate the phone call. If finances at home are the issue, they provide grocery gift cards and guide social assistance applications. Staff also stay in touch, helping to resolve conflicts that may arise.

The early results of an upcoming national study of diversion programs at five Canadian shelters suggest the program could significantly reduce youth homelessness. According to lead researcher Katrina Milaney at the University of Calgary, the shelters were able to successfully find alternative housing for between 40 to 60 per cent of young people if it was their first shelter visit. For youth who had been homeless longer or repeatedly, the success rate was about 27 per cent.

“In the old system, those phone calls never would have even been made,” says Dr. Milaney. “Young people would have come to shelter and they would have languished there.”

In 2019, Raft already had a successful diversion-style program operating in high schools in the area. Teachers and guidance counsellors identified students at risk of becoming homeless, and a shelter worker would intervene early to keep them at school, socially supported and housed in their own community. Last year, the program had a success rate of about 80 per cent, according to Raft data.

In 2013, when the program expanded to all schools in the Niagara Region, annual shelter visits at Raft fell to about 160 young people a year from the previous average of 500.

But Mr. Lethby wanted that number even lower – “our goal,” he says, “is to close the shelter.” At a meeting, he learned about an interesting pilot project at a shelter in Cambridge, Ont., and the new conversation they were having with their clients seeking a place to stay. Five months later, he and Ms. Dougherty started a similar approach at Raft.

The shelter has carefully tracked their impressive results. In 2025, according to those statistics, 71 per cent of first-time youth and 40 per cent of repeat clients were successfully diverted, which means they stay at the shelter for less than 48 hours. Of that group, about one-third return to the shelter – half of them are housed again within 48 hours. The annual number of young people needing beds has fallen to 144 – even with the closing of another local youth shelter – and average stays are much shorter.

In about 25 per cent of the positive diversion cases, workers help young people find an independent-living situation, such as their own apartment. For the rest, family and friends provide housing.

“If somebody actually has the courage to call or go to a shelter, they are experiencing all the emotions,” says Ms. Dougherty, who oversees the shelter diversion program. “Mad, sad, angry, scared, all of them at once. And sometimes when you’re so heightened, you’re not really thinking about who’s around you.”

She’s counselled young people who were too ashamed to call their parents after being kicked out of university. Mothers have wept on the phone, hoping their children would come home; other parents have ranted at length about why they can’t.

Even when living with family isn’t a welcoming or secure option, staff suggest that relatives can still offer support with homemade meals, a coffee date, a drive to an appointment. Loneliness, Ms. Dougherty suggests, will often bring young people back to the shelter, especially if they are living alone.

Like many shelters, Raft previously made an effort to feel homey, offering workshops and recreation. Today, most of those extra services have been cut, so programs and staff can prioritize getting shelter clients into better housing with the right social support as quickly as possible.

Keanna Schuster, a homeless outreach worker in St. Catharines and a Raft relief staffer, spent a month at the shelter when she was 18, the year before the diversion program started.

A shelter “is not something you wish on a youth,” Ms. Schuster says. Diversion programs “open the ground for communication,” she suggests, especially when people know that if nothing else works, they won’t be turned away.

Madison Martin, 20, a second-year microbiology student at the University of Guelph who moved out of her dysfunctional home when she was 15, sat on the advisory committee for the University of Calgary diversion study. She expressed concern that misguided shelter staff might divert young people somewhere unsafe – the same way she recalls feeling pressured to return home by her own case workers.

Even if family or friends take them in, Ms. Martin says, workers need to monitor the situation to make sure they’ve found a healthy, stable solution.

But if diversion programs can keep a large number of young people out of shelters and housed with a trusted adult, the benefits, says Dr. Milaney, outweigh the risks. Part of her research explores how to improve the programs, with clear policies, data collection and well-trained, experienced staff.

Asking a new question at the shelter door may sound simple, even obvious. But it reveals the value in challenging long-standing beliefs about homelessness. “It isn’t hopeless,” Dr. Milaney says. “We just have to be innovative.”

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