It's easy to think about prevention when you think about young people, but let's be clear, it is an opportunity for all populations. It's about that moment in time when someone is about to become homeless and, if you cannot prevent it, then intervening as quickly as you can to get them out of that circumstance as quickly as possible.
The Observatory on Homelessness, for example, created a graphic many years ago now that talked about how the largest part of our money right now is going into a crisis system, with very little going into prevention and very little going into interventions that are better options than a crisis-driven intervention. The model really talked about shrinking the crisis response. It will always be necessary: The example I use is always that someone is going to break their leg in the middle of the night and you will need a crisis response, similar to health care, but most of your money should be going into prevention and/or getting people out of that situation as quickly as possible.
Like Michael Lethby from Raft—I've known Michael for a long time—I ran a youth organization for 24 years. Twenty-odd years ago, we created a shelter, and then we made a decision that we would never apply for funding for another shelter bed again. We pivoted our attention to building housing, as much of it as possible supportive.
One of the challenges right now in the country—I'll talk about housing specifically, and housing development—is that we all want to house the most vulnerable in our communities. We often want to do it with very challenging and sometimes limited capital resources, which means that the depth of affordability is affected and so on and so forth, but the other side of it is that we often want to house people with some pretty high needs with the lowest possible investment in support. I think one of the other panellists also talked about it.
We know very clearly after 30 years how to set people up to fail. It's not because the people in those systems want to set people up to fail, but as systems, we are so addicted to crisis that the only investment we ever think about making is, “What do we do tonight?” The federal government shifting to prevention means that we have a longer view of what we're trying to solve for, and the prevention work and intervention work follow.