Housing workers from different communities participate in the March 2023 Built for Zero Canada learning session, in Toronto. (Photo by Built for Zero Canada)
July 2023 marked five years of sobriety for Vanessa, after years of living in a haze of trauma and drug use. She credits her persistence largely to having stable housing—for three years, between 2019 and 2022, Vanessa lived on the streets in Edmonton, the capital city of Alberta, Canada.
Vanessa is one of 2,700 people each year who experience chronic homelessness—defined as being homeless for at least one year and/or repeatedly—in Edmonton. An additional 8,600 annually experience transitional homelessness, which is a state of homelessness resulting from a major life change or catastrophic event. In Canada, 25,000 to 35,000 people are estimated to experience homelessness at any given time. People struggling with poverty, addiction, legal issues, and mental- or physical-health issues are more likely to experience homelessness. The compounding, intergenerational effects of colonialism also have resulted in disproportionately high rates of homelessness for Indigenous people: While they make up only 8 percent of Edmonton’s population, they are 58 percent of the city’s homeless.
In 2022, a social worker connected Vanessa, who had become pregnant, to the Edmonton City Centre Church Corporation (E4C), a social-services and housing nonprofit. E4C partnered with the nonprofit Built for Zero Canada (BFZC) in 2019 to help people, like Vanessa, in need of immediate housing. Within two weeks of making that connection, Vanessa was provided housing through Civida, an Edmonton-based subsidized housing organization that works with BFZC and E4C.
BFZC was founded in March 2019 by the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness (CAEH), an organization that believes all Canadians should have safe, decent, and affordable housing with the support necessary to sustain it. CAEH created BFZC as a leadership initiative to educate and train community leaders and organizations on how to secure housing for their unhoused populations, especially vulnerable populations like youth, women, veterans, and Indigenous people. BFZC operates on a housing-first philosophy, meaning it prioritizes securing housing for people before addressing any other issue, from addiction to unemployment. It uses a data-driven approach to identify and document unhoused people by name—called a “by-names list”—who struggle to find permanent housing. Its goal is functional zero chronic homelessness, defined as fewer than three people within a community who experience chronic homelessness for a period of three months or longer.
BFZC currently works with 58 communities across Canada and has achieved functional zero veteran homelessness in three communities. It has also dramatically reduced chronic homelessness in 11 communities and achieved functional zero chronic homelessness in one. In Edmonton, BFZC’s training and coaching of homeless-serving workers and agencies, funded by government and philanthropic sources, resulted in more than 8,500 move-ins of chronically homeless people, including Vanessa.
“It’s great to be housed,” Vanessa says while gazing starry-eyed at her baby. “It gives me hope.”
Real-Time Data in Action
The inspiration for BFZC came from across the border, in the United States. In 2011, Community Solutions, a US-based nonprofit, launched its 100,000 Homes Campaign to house 100,000 people and raise awareness about homelessness. By 2014, Community Solutions had housed more than 100,000 people. Its success galvanized CAEH, in 2015, to create a similar initiative—the 20,000 Homes Campaign—with the goal of housing 20,000 people in three years with assistance from Canada’s federal government.
“At the end of our 20,000 Homes Campaign in March of 2019, we had housed 21,254 people,” CAEH’s CEO Tim Richter says, “but the homelessness numbers weren’t going down.” CAEH housed people based on point-in-time counts—a data-collection method consisting of a single round of counting homeless people at one moment in time. The method doesn’t include any personal information, even people’s names. People are merely numbers.
Built for Zero Canada remains committed to making homelessness rare, brief, and nonrecurring.
From the campaign, CAEH learned that point-in-time counts made it impossible to account for and attend to new cases of homelessness and to track people systemically overlooked by housing services. It also learned that unhoused people preferred housing in areas where they could easily access health and social services. CAEH envisioned BFZC with these lessons in mind. BFZC operates using real-time data and a by-names list, whereby information on homeless people is updated from different sources—such as agencies, shelters, and soup kitchens—on an ongoing basis. BFZC director Marie Morrison says this combination of real-time data and individual information will help lead to “a measurable and equitable end to homelessness.”
BFZC has 11 full-time staff: Morrison, seven coaches, and three data advisors. Each coach is responsible for seven to eight communities. The coaches conduct monthly meetings and two biannual conferences (one virtual, one in Ontario), where they educate their community members about new on-the-ground insights and how to create new action plans based on the latest data-collection efforts.
BFZC also created an online tool kit for communities interested in becoming members. The tool kit is a collection of adaptable resources and guidelines, including information on team building (“How to Recruit Volunteers”) and data collecting (“Mapping Survey Locations”).
Communities that want to pursue an official membership with BFZC sign a two-year agreement, and the membership is free for towns and small cities but costs a nominal fee for larger cities like Edmonton and Calgary. BFZC assigns each community a coach and a data advisor from its staff. Decisions on which plans to implement, which strategies to adopt, and which ones to discontinue are made based on BFZC data advisors’ analyses of data trends.
BFZC is funded by Veterans Affairs Canada, the Ontario government, and philanthropic organizations such as The Ottawa Community Foundation and Porticus—the latter of which invested in BFZC specifically because of its community-focused, data-driven approach.
“Porticus believes in strengthening the resilience of communities, and BFZC is a program which gives community-based organizations the agency and resources to collaborate in responding to the issues of homelessness in their community,” says Daisy Vazquez, a grant manager at Porticus. “Prior to BFZC, there was no evidence-based, coordinated system in place.”
Hope in Medicine Hat
In June 2021, Medicine Hat, Alberta, became the first city in Canada to achieve functional zero chronic homelessness. The Medicine Hat Community Housing Society (MHCHS) had worked with CAEH prior to BFZC’s founding and had participated in strategy meetings for the 20,000 Homes Campaign in June 2015. In December 2017, they partnered with CAEH to work toward functional zero chronic homelessness in Medicine Hat and, after BFZC’s launch, became a BFZC community member. With BFZC, MHCHS created a five-year plan to achieve functional zero chronic homelessness using real-time data and a by-names list as part of the process.
Jaime Rogers, MHCHS’ manager of homeless and housing development, was eager to partner with BFZC because it values cross-sector collaboration. In the case of Medicine Hat, this collaboration consisted of local stakeholders—government representatives, health experts, police, shelter workers, Indigenous community leaders, and unhoused people—who all had decision-making power over goal setting and the action plan. They prioritized need based on the by-names list, with housing provided by the government, charities, nonprofits, and private sources.
“BFZC has a structured way of determining how to collectively make communities and BFZC better,” Rogers explains. “With the help of BFZC, we were able to build a really robust and expansive system that was not only able to weather the COVID-19 pandemic, but also to achieve functional zero chronic homelessness during the pandemic in July 2021.”
Indeed, Medicine Hat was able to achieve functional zero chronic homelessness during this time because it remained committed to the housing-first, five-year plan it developed with BFZC. However, Medicine Hat, with 63,000 residents, is smaller than many BFZC members, and functional zero did not translate to every homeless person being housed permanently. As Rogers observes, “We still have some people rough sleeping,” or living outside without any shelter other than a makeshift one or tent, and “some are dealing with opioid addiction, and some are living with untreated mental-health issues.”
Yet, Medicine Hat was an exception during the pandemic. The movement lost significant ground in housing people during this time because BFZC communities had to shift their focus to public-health crisis response, diverting funds they were using to house the homeless to caring for their health. Similarly, homeless-serving agencies quickly morphed into health-care agencies, taking on responsibilities that the publicly funded Canadian health system was unable to provide. The consequence was palpable: In a sample of 13 BFZC communities, chronic homelessness increased by 50 percent from February 2020 to February 2023.
The media attention that BFZC garnered from Medicine Hat’s success has boosted its recruitment efforts across Canada and, in turn, raised the movement’s stakes. “Our aim in three years,” Richter says, “is to have 80 cities in BFZC and to have 15 cities with functional zero chronic homelessness.”
To accomplish this lofty goal, BFZC has set its sights on building awareness and, more critically, convincing the public and community leaders that homelessness is a national emergency that requires urgent attention and that zero functional chronic homelessness is possible. While Richter acknowledges that homelessness is not a static data point but a dynamic problem, BFZC remains committed to making homelessness rare, brief, and nonrecurring.
Read more stories by Leif Gregersen.