Project Overview

Black youth experience social and economic exclusion, as well as systemic racism including through public institutions, including the justice system, child protection and education, for example.  We know less about Black youth experiences of homelessness and their interactions with homelessness services, and this represents not only a huge gap in the literature, but also impedes our understanding of the causes and conditions of their homelessness, and how we might effectively target preventive interventions to effectively meet their needs.  Using the Without a Home national survey on youth homelessness, Gaetz, O’Grady & Schwan (2016), found that 14% of respondents identified as black, which is a significant over-representation (3.5% of Canadians are Black). We hypothesize that in the context of systemic racism, the experiences of homelessness amongst Black youth will differ from non-racialized youth, and thus the approach to the prevention of their homelessness must reflect this.