to yours .. Sylvester Adam Wardega, applause! .. top video .. much more practical and generous than the champagne, sandwiches and Christmas cake i and a couple of friends distributed for about 5 years .. those were among the best ever Christmas days
"Homelessness and Hunger effects both sexes, all ages, all nationalities, all religions, all political parties, the healthy, the challenged and is one society's dirty little secrets, along with modern day slavery and human trafficking. Be part of the solution, not part of the problem. Rob McConnell - 2013"
Despite sporadic success in addressing homelessness in Canada, little progress has been made toward a permanent cross-country solution, says a national report into the extent of the problem.
The report's initial numbers tell a grim story. Among the report's findings:
• At least 200,000 Canadians experience homelessness in any given year.
• At least 150,000 Canadians a year use a homeless shelter at some point.
• At least 30,000 Canadians are homeless on any given night.
• At least 50,000 Canadians are part of the "hidden homeless" on any given night — staying with friends or relatives on a temporary basis as they have nowhere else to go.
Those numbers come from the Canadian Homelessness Research Network (CHRN) and the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, the groups behind what they call the first extensive national report card on homelessness.
Their look at the state of homelessness in Canada found that annual shelter use did not change substantially from 2005 to 2009, while the average stay grew longer.
As a result, the report's authors say, it's time the country shifted its focus from crisis management — from things like emergency shelter beds and soup kitchens — to more permanent solutions.
"When we start warehousing people, it can lead to a sense of complacency: well, it isn't the best situation to be sleeping with 50 other strangers in a room but it's a best we can do," said Stephen Gaetz, the lead author of the report and the director of the CHRN.
"The reality is it isn't the best we can do at all."
Who is homeless?
While the homeless can come from any group, the report found that certain populations are over-represented:
• Single adult males between the ages of 25 and 55 account for almost half the homeless population (47.5 per cent).
• Youth between the ages of 16 and 24 account for 20 per cent of the homeless. An estimated 25 to 40 per cent of homeless youth are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual or transgender.
• Aboriginal people are over-represented among the homeless in almost every urban centre in Canada, with the over-representation growing dramatically the more one heads west and north.
Degrees of homelessness
Of the 200,000 people who use homeless shelters in an average year, relatively few (4,000 to 8,000) are what the report's authors call "chronically homeless."
A slightly higher number (6,000 to 22,000) are what they call "episodic homeless." These are people who move into and out of homeless shelters multiple times over several years.
The vast majority of Canada's homeless (176,000 to 188,000) are "transitional homeless" — individuals and families who enter the shelter system for a short stay of generally less than a month. For them, homelessness is usually a one-time event.
Even though the first two groups make up less than 15 per cent of the homeless population, they account for more than half of the resources of the homelessness system.
People can be pushed into homelessness by a variety of factors — the loss of a job, mental illness, addictions, family violence or abuse, extreme poverty.
Changes in the economy and in the housing market are adding to homelessness.
The supply of affordable housing has not kept pace with the needs of the population.
There has also been a decline in the amount of affordable rental housing in many cities. Combine that with declining incomes and a widespread reduction in social benefits for low-income Canadians, and you get a population that has to spend a greater percentage of its income on housing.
High rents and low vacancy rates put more pressure on the 30 per cent of Canadians who rent.
Many more are increasingly vulnerable. The report estimates that as many as 1.5 million of Canada's 12 million households — those with low incomes and who are paying more than 30 per cent of their income on housing — are at risk of becoming homeless.
Tens of Thousands of College Students Have Nowhere to Sleep
Last year at least 56,000 college students identified as homeless
By Rebecca Nathanson December 22, 2015
Sen. Patty Murray recently introduced a bill designed to help homeless youth and children in the foster care system gain access to higher education. Spencer Platt/Getty
LaTia Daniels started at Kennesaw State University as a walk-on to the school's track and field team, earning an athletic scholarship on top of her federal financial aid. When she quit the team to focus more on her studies, and that athletic scholarship disappeared, she compensated by getting a job through a temp agency. That arrangement worked fine until her final semester, this fall, when she needed an internship to meet her graduation requirements. She had to quit her job to make time for the internship, but it was unpaid. Saving on rent by moving to her father's house, plus taking out additional student loans, helped at first, but eventually the long commute and family discord made the situation untenable. Just months before graduation, Daniels found herself without a place to sleep.
Last year, more than 56,000 students identified .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/11/12/senator-wants-to-help-homeless-students-who-are-taking-out-loans-for-survival/ .. as homeless on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, form. But the real number of homeless students is almost certainly higher: That number excludes those who cannot identify as homeless because they lack sufficient proof, such as verification from a shelter. It also does not include the unknown number of college students who intermittently experience housing insecurity but handle it on their own by couch surfing with friends or sleeping in their car or campus library, never telling a university official.
On November 10, Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington introduced legislation aiming to increase the resources available to those housing-insecure college students and ease the barriers to financial aid. The Higher Education Access and Success for Homeless and Foster Youth Act of 2015 .. http://www.help.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Higher%20Education%20Access%20and%20Success%20for%20Homeless%20and%20Foster%20Youth.pdf .. is meant to help homeless youth and children in the foster care system gain access to higher education. Among other things, it asks colleges to improve outreach to high school students who fit those descriptions and calls for streamlining the FAFSA form to make it easier to verify homelessness, and to clarify that homeless or unaccompanied youth under age 24 are considered independents, allowing them easier access to financial aid.
"For so many students, higher education can be a ticket to the middle class," Sen. Murray said in a statement to Rolling Stone, "but students struggling with homelessness and students in foster care face several unique barriers that effectively shut that door of opportunity."
Assisting students with learning about and accessing resources can be essential. "I didn't know anything about financial aid. I didn't know anything about those resources that are available to you if you are homeless or in foster care," says Dominique Vaughn, a KSU freshman who became homeless in her last year of high school and applied for financial aid as an independent, with the help of a homelessness liaison in her school district in Barrow County, Georgia. "I think that it needs to be exposed, that it's not just, ‘Oh, there are people who have [fallen] on hard times, people who have lost their jobs.' It happens to teenagers, little kids, all the time."
These rising costs have a tangible impact on students' lives and their ability to meet their basic needs, let alone succeed in classes. In turn, universities and advocacy organization are having to respond to the ever-evolving reality of the college experience. The National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth, or NAEHCY, which worked with Murray to develop her bill, originally focused only on K-12 education but eventually started noticing the barriers confronting homeless youth once in college. In 2012, it created the Higher Education Helpline, where both students and university employees can call in with problems related to homelessness. "They may already be a student on a college campus, just saying, ‘I'm on my campus. I'm starving right now. I haven't eaten in three days,' or, ‘I don't know where I'm going to go for the winter break,' or even, ‘My college doesn't really have a culture that's accepting of homeless students that are struggling,'" says Cyekeia Lee, the group's director of higher education initiatives.
Sen. Patty Murray Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Getty
Murray's legislation attempts to solve one of those problems: It asks that universities have housing available during school breaks, as opposed to only during the semester.
According to Rashida Crutchfield, an assistant professor at California State University, Long Beach's School of Social Work who is researching housing insecurity in her university system, there is no norm when it comes to how students end up homeless. "If I emancipate or age out of foster care, I am more likely to be homeless. That exists, but not all students who are homeless have had foster care experience," she says. "We've got an increase in students who have limited economic stability. Our students are working, part-time and full-time, and they're supporting themselves and they're helping their families. A lot of students are just living paycheck-to-paycheck and if something happens, if some emergency happens, they can end up homeless."
Student poverty stretches beyond housing insecurity. For financially strained students, confronting the question of where their next meal will come from proves just as stressful as that of where they will sleep tomorrow night. This worry preoccupies traditional undergraduates who matriculate directly after high school, but it weighs especially heavily on the minds of nontraditional students, who are generally defined .. https://nces.ed.gov/pubs/web/97578e.asp .. as students over the age of 24 with jobs or families to tend to while enrolled in school. In response, food banks have popped up on campuses across the country. According to the Michigan State University Food Bank, which was the first of its kind in the US, campus food banks numbered 121 in 2014 — up from four in 2008 .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/more-college-students-battle-hunger-as-education-and-living-costs-rise/2014/04/09/60208db6-bb63-11e3-9a05-c739f29ccb08_story.html . The national College and University Food Bank Alliance .. http://www.cufba.org/ .. now has more than 240 member institutions.
Even at Ivy League universities .. http://columbiaspectator.com/news/2015/10/14/reporting-endowment-return-76-percent-columbias-endowment-climbs-96-billion .. with multibillion-dollar endowments, students struggle to afford enough food. This fall, two Columbia University sophomores created Swipes .. http://www.getswipes.com/ , a smartphone app that lets students give and receive meals from their meal plans. According to co-founder Helson Taveras, Swipes has been downloaded over 900 times since its September launch. "Some students actually use it, essentially, for almost every meal, so there's a core group of students who really are dependent on this working," he says.
Creating new or expanded resources for housing and food insecure students can temporarily help alleviate their financial burden, but the repercussions of hunger and homelessness endure. Even once Daniels and Vaughn found housing, they retained their sense of instability. "I would definitely say that the fear lingers.," says Vaughn. "I wouldn't say that I feel 150 percent certain that I won't be in that predicament again."
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