Announcing the 2026 Making the Shift Youth Homelessness Prevention Awards
By Melanie Redman
As we launch the 6th annual Making the Shift Youth Homelessness Prevention Awards, presented by Canada Life, I find myself reflecting on just how far this program has come and how much the sector has taught us along the way.
Co-led by A Way Home Canada and the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, the MtS Awards were created because we believe the youth homelessness sector deserves more opportunities to celebrate the remarkable, innovative work happening in communities across Canada. I’ve seen firsthand what recognition can do: it unearths innovation that might otherwise go unnoticed, shines a spotlight for funders and governments on what’s working, and brings practitioners together into a national learning community.
Now in our sixth year, we’ve awarded ten programs across Canada, and I am endlessly inspired by what our winners and honourable mentions have shown us is possible.
A Look Back at the 2025 Winners
The fifth year of the MtS Awards brought us two outstanding programs that beautifully illustrate what prevention looks like in practice.
SACHSS – Youth Resilience and Housing Stability Program (Brampton, ON) is a culturally responsive program delivering housing support, counselling, and foster care for South Asian youth experiencing or at risk of homelessness. It’s built on individualized care, patience, and a deep commitment to filling the gaps left by other services.
Carrefour Jeunesse Emploi – Maison Umune Uniashuk (MYCASA) (Montréal, QC) was founded by Black and Indigenous youth in care alumni and uses a peer-led model to provide housing, mentorship, and community support for youth aging out of the child welfare system. Their approach is rooted in lived expertise, dignity, and cultural responsiveness and is a powerful example of what it looks like when programs are built by the people they serve.
We also recognized the Youth Futures Education Fund (United Way BC) with an Honourable Mention for its work removing financial barriers to post-secondary education for youth leaving government care across British Columbia.
To celebrate all of our previous winners going back to 2021, take a look at last year’s blog.
So, what are we looking for?
At the heart of the awards is a simple question: Does your intervention stop young people from becoming homeless?
Every submission must demonstrate alignment with our definition of homelessness prevention from the Roadmap for the Prevention of Youth Homelessness. This means your program needs to either prevent young people from becoming homeless in the first place, rapidly resolve their homelessness, or help youth who have exited homelessness to stay stably housed. Programs serving young people who are at risk of many things — dropping out of school, involvement with the justice system, and so on — are doing important work, but they only qualify if they specifically identify young people at significant risk of homelessness and intervene in a targeted way to address that risk.
Programs must also serve youth between the ages of 13 and 24. That lower age of 13 is intentional: research tells us that 44% of currently homeless youth had their first experience of homelessness before age 16, and in many jurisdictions, supports for those under 16 are nearly nonexistent. We want this program to encourage intervention before a young person ends up at a shelter door.
What makes a submission stand out?
Beyond meeting the definition of prevention and demonstrating evidence of positive impact for youth aged 13 to 24, our adjudication panel looks for a number of qualities that we believe reflect the best of this sector:
A rights-based approach. Programs that treat young people as rights-holders, not just service recipients, and that are grounded in dignity and equity stand out to our reviewers.
Intentionality around reconciliation. We look for submissions that show genuine, thoughtful engagement with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action. This is a signal that an organization is doing the deeper work.
Innovation. What’s new, bold, or different about your approach? Some of the most exciting submissions we’ve received have taken familiar problems and found creative new pathways through them.
Collaboration. Youth homelessness prevention cannot be achieved by the homelessness sector alone. The systems that often contribute to young people losing their housing — child welfare, corrections, healthcare, education — also need to be part of the solution. We love to see submissions that reflect meaningful collaboration across sectors. And yes, we would be thrilled to receive a submission from a community-wide response that’s demonstrating systems-level change.
Lived experience. The inclusion of people with lived experience of youth homelessness in the design, delivery, or governance of a program is something we care deeply about.
Replicability and sustainability. We ask ourselves: could this work somewhere else? And is it built to last? Programs that think carefully about both questions leave a stronger impression.
Your program doesn’t need to check every single one of these boxes, but these are the lenses our panel brings to every submission.
Why does this matter?
One of the goals of the awards program that I’m particularly proud of is its role in further disseminating the definition of prevention. When we first started these awards, there was no shared framework for what homelessness prevention actually meant. That’s changed significantly, and the awards have played a small but meaningful role in spreading that understanding to more communities across the country.
We’re also using what we learn from applicants, including about the barriers you face in building prevention programs, to inform our advocacy and future research. If you’ve struggled to get a prevention program off the ground, we want to hear about that too.
Two winners will each receive a $10,000 cash prize presented by Canada Life, along with national recognition through case studies published on Homeless Hub, conference presentation opportunities, and a feature in future COH and A Way Home Canada publications. And new this year, each winner will also receive a free A Way Home Canada training.
If your organization is working to prevent youth homelessness in Canada, or if you know one that is, I’d encourage you to apply or nominate. This field is full of people doing extraordinary work, and we want to celebrate it.
Find out more and submit your application here.