Thank you.
Through you, Mr. Chair, thank you for the opportunity to speak to the committee this afternoon on behalf of 360°kids.
As one of the leading youth agencies in York region, 360°kids has a 32-year history of providing services to homeless youth, including victims and survivors of human trafficking. We serve approximately 4,000 youth each year, ages 16 to 26, providing them with education, housing and employment and health and well-being supports. Our mission is to transition youth from crisis to stability.
On the impact of COVID-19 on 360°kids, let me first share some comments from the young people themselves. The first comment is, “Being told to stay inside and not leave reminds me of when I was being trafficked and...this causes me a lot of anxiety.” Second comment is “For those of us who have no place to go home to, it’s hard to do the things we are told to do such as staying home, wash your hands. How can you do that when you don’t have access to water. You can’t even take a shower.”
What are the lessons we've learned through the pandemic? There are five things. First of all, great things can happen when we work together. Second, prevention is indeed the best medicine. Third, the marginalized become even more marginalized during a pandemic. Four, youth need very specific solutions. Last, the needs of staff must also be prioritized.
One of the successes of the pandemic that we've seen is organizations coming together. Providers from various sectors in York region, including government funders and private corporations, came together to share resources and their own responses to the pandemic and to collaborate on initiatives. We were able to identify gaps very quickly and respond in real time to address needs for food, technology, housing access, etc. I can really see these built relationships continuing into the future.
Our work at 360°kids on prevention, leading the youth housing stabilization strategy, developed even more significance during the pandemic. This is a group of about 30 cross-sectoral partners and young people working together to better align services and resources to prevent youth homelessness in York region. Why? We know that homeless youth become homeless adults, and the longer you are homeless, the worse your outcome.
We definitely saw how the marginalized became even more marginalized during the pandemic. In our programs, we saw a fivefold increase in the number of youth accessing mental health supports, with past trauma, loss of income and confinement due to lockdowns all contributing to high levels of anxiety.
We need more accessible mental health supports, especially for this population and for those who are Black and racialized. The youth told us that racism was a significant factor in their homelessness. To address these impacts we had to provide various spaces for the young people to share their voices, we expanded partnerships with specific cultural agencies, and at the same time, we reviewed and are updating our own agency equity strategy.
The need for more youth-specific solutions was seen when we closed our drop-ins early in the pandemic. One of my earlier quotes spoke of the challenge some youth who are precariously housed face. We saw that youth living in the rough, these are youth who are living in abandoned buildings, abandoned cars, abandoned spaces in general, many of them went more into hiding due to the closure of many of the spaces they once went to.
To better support the youth, rather than waiting for them to come to us, we went to them. We redeployed staff to do more outreach. We even hired two young people to be outreach workers who were former youth, and we also pushed for a youth-specific isolation facility to make it more accessible for youth to get access to housing.
While we were able to house about 25 youth throughout the pandemic, we know that the need for more affordable housing is so critical. We certainly applaud the government for funding the emergency and short-term needs, but without longer-term housing and wraparound supports to keep people housed, those marginalized young people become even more marginalized.
I close with a reminder about the impact of the pandemic on our staff. Confusing public health messages, concerns about the vaccine, low wages and even the stress of their own family situations, this all took a toll on staff mental health, which worsened with each lockdown. We responded as an agency with additional mental health days off with pay for staff, and with flexibility around their sick time and their child care needs.
The government-funded additional hourly pay, given to frontline workers for a brief period last year, certainly went a long way in recognizing the importance of this sector that is chronically underpaid. We hope to see this kind of support continue.
Unfortunately, for many agencies like ours that are not adequately funded for our programs, it puts pressure on our fundraising. We have seen a significant hit to our fundraising due to event cancellations over the past year.
In summary, it really has been a very difficult year for the young people we serve at 360°kids and the staff who are supporting them on a daily basis. While emergency responses are great, and we saw some great opportunities throughout the pandemic, what is more important are preventative measures and wraparound supports to get people housed and to keep them housed.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you.