By Melanie Redman
On May 26, 2026, community leaders, youth advocates, frontline organizations, and partners from across Canada gathered on Parliament Hill in Ottawa for the Home Depot Canada Foundation and A Way Home Canada 2026 “Opening Doors for Youth” National Advocacy Day for youth homelessness prevention. They came with powerful stories and data, all pointing to the reality that the pathway to preventing youth homelessness already exists. What’s needed now is federal leadership and investment to take it to scale.
Why we went to Parliament Hill
At A Way Home Canada, we talk a lot about opening doors for youth: doors to housing, supports, and opportunities. Advocacy Day was about making sure the people who hold the keys to those doors in government understand what’s at stake: that behind every statistic is a young person whose trajectory can be changed by the right support at the right moment, and that without federal leadership and investment, communities simply don’t have the tools to provide it.
It’s also a chance for the people doing this work on the ground, including the young people who have lived it, to bring their experience directly to the decision-makers who shape the policies and programs that determine young people’s futures.
Our call to action
At the heart of our message was a call for the federal government to renew and strengthen Reaching Home, Canada’s homelessness strategy, and to do so with intention.
Specifically, we are calling for the creation of a dedicated youth-focused funding stream that equips communities across the country to work together to end youth homelessness using evidence-informed approaches. This means building the conditions for lasting impact, ensuring that the progress communities are making today continues for years to come, and that no community is left without the tools and support to prevent youth homelessness before it takes hold.
What we heard
What struck me most about the day was the genuine openness from officials who wanted to understand, not just listen.
Throughout the day, our delegations met with Ministers and Ministers’ offices, Parliamentary Secretaries, Secretaries of State, Members of Parliament, the Liberal Youth Caucus, and the civil service. They participated in roundtable discussions with federal public servants and policy leaders from Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada, Employment and Social Development Canada, Public Safety, Health Canada and Statistics Canada — the people directly responsible for developing and implementing the very programs that community organizations depend on.
Being in those rooms alongside young people who had lived experience of homelessness, who travelled to Ottawa and walked those halls and told their stories to the people with the power to act, was something I won’t forget. That takes courage, and it made every conversation more real and more urgent.
What I heard in those rooms gave me real reason for optimism. There is genuine interest at multiple orders of government in understanding what prevention looks like in practice and exploring how federal systems can better support it. They wanted to know what was working, what wasn’t, and what it would take to further our collective efforts.
One of the most substantive conversations centred on what it would actually take to bring youth homelessness prevention to scale. A critical data point grounded that discussion: only 17% of communities currently have youth-designated shelters, underscoring the limited availability of youth-tailored crisis responses nationally. That means the vast majority of communities across the country simply aren’t equipped to respond to youth homelessness, let alone prevent it. We can’t wait for those communities to find their way to prevention funding on their own. Intentional federal leadership is what gets them to the table, and that’s exactly what we’re asking for.
One day doesn’t change everything. But it builds the relationships and shared understanding that policy change depends on — and that matters more than people realize.
The partnership that made this possible
Advocacy Day could not have happened without The Home Depot Canada Foundation.
A Way Home Canada and The Home Depot Canada Foundation have been partners in this work for years, and it is a partnership I am deeply grateful for. The Foundation brings something that is genuinely rare in this sector: a long-standing, strategic commitment to youth homelessness prevention that combines national reach with deep community investment, backed by a pledge of $125 million by 2030 focused on expanding stable housing, wraparound supports, and youth employment readiness. They not only fund programs; they fund the conditions that let prevention work and they stay in it for the long haul.
Together, we bring national expertise in prevention research, policy, and implementation alongside the community-level investment and relationships that turn evidence into practice. We are helping communities test, strengthen, and scale proven models — from Housing First for Youth to Family and Natural Supports to shelter diversion — demonstrating that Canada can move beyond crisis response and invest in approaches that keep young people housed, supported, and on a path toward opportunity.
What prevention actually means
When we invest in young people before homelessness becomes entrenched, something wonderful happens: we can change their life trajectories. We keep young people from entering a system that is far more expensive to operate and far harder to exit than the prevention approaches that could have helped them in the first place.
In Canada, half of all people currently experiencing homelessness had their first experience before the age of 25. That is a signal about where our investment needs to go. Turn the tap off into chronic homelessness by getting to young people first.
The communities doing this work are proving it’s possible. From Housing First for Youth programs delivering stable housing and wraparound supports, to Family and Natural Supports strengthening the relationships around young people at risk, to shelter diversion keeping youth housed, the evidence is clear, and the outcomes are real.
Young people in Canada deserve to thrive, and the evidence, the models, and the community expertise to make that possible already exist. What Advocacy Day revealed is that the political will to use them is growing, too. There is so much more work to do, and I couldn’t be more excited about what comes next.
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A heartfelt thank you to The Home Depot Canada Foundation for their partnership and commitment, and to StrategyCorp for organizing this day of action. To every delegate who travelled to Ottawa, shared their story, and opened a door: thank you. This is your work as much as anyone else’s.