By Melanie Redman, President & CEO, A Way Home Canada
How can it already be December, 2019? If you’re like me, you’re amazed at just how fast time flies, but milestones like the turn of a decade provide the opportunity to take a breath and reflect. Over the last few months we’ve been working with Hub Solutions at the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness to develop A Way Home’s new website. Today, we’re happy to publicly launch the site and once again share the A Way Home story with our coalition partners and those working to support young people at risk of or experiencing homelessness in Canada and around the world.
Four years ago we launched the very first A Way Home website, but our collective efforts began long before. Our new website reminds us of the A Way Home story, and just how much has happened since our launch. It also sets the stage for all of the important work we’ve yet to do.
“A Way Home Canada launched as a national coalition in late 2015. It is the result of years of collective efforts by founding coalition members (the National Learning Community on Youth Homelessness, the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, Raising the Roof, Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, Canadian Housing & Renewal Association, Egale Human Rights Trust, the Government of Alberta and the A Way Home Funders Table co-led with the Catherine Donnelly Foundation) to put youth homelessness and prevention on the map. Alongside these dedicated service providers, funders, researchers, policy makers, advocates and people with lived experience of youth homelessness we have worked to establish a shared vision for what it would take to prevent and end youth homelessness in Canada, and we’ve been driving toward that vision since then.
A Way Home has been invited into communities across Canada and countries around the world to share the story of this emerging coalition and our collective vision for change. In the spring of 2016, A Way Home America launched at an event at the White House. Since that time, Canadian communities such as (but not limited to) Ottawa, Kelowna and Peterborough have taken on the A Way Home brand as a way to signify commitment to this growing movement for change. In 2018 we supported the launch of A Way Home Europe, an initiative with FEANTSA, at a community-based event in Antwerp, Belgium, following the previous launch of A Way Home Scotland. The most recent A Way Home to coalesce is A Way Home Australia.”
Browse the website to read what some of our national and international partners have to say about the A Way Home movement, and stay tuned for 2020!