Findings


Phase 1: Secondary Analysis Findings

  • Women are significantly more likely to be house
  • People experiencing homelessness are significantly younger than housed people
  • White people are more likely to be house than non-whites, while Indigeneous people are over-represented in the shelter group
  • Many people had more than one disability

Phase 2: Critical Ethnography Key Themes

  • The centrality of poverty
    • poverty is the central construct that shapes the lives of homeless individuals
    • it causes stress, restricts choices, and affects all other social determinants of health
    • Income security directly affects health
  • Homelessness is not a static condition
    • Constantly "on the move" - participants in our research told of considerable movement - from city to city, from agency to agency, from poor housing to poorer housing
    • New notions of "home" - in the process, they began to re-think notions of home
  • Connections and disconnections
    • continually striving to "connect" to people and programs
    • connections that are established are tenuous, easily broken
    • loneliness is a powerful construct
  • De-contextualized family life
    • Widespread perception among consumers, and to some extent among service providers, that programs and services are antithetical to family life
    • little attention to the 'homeless family'
    • emphasis continues to be on the individual
    • lack of recognition about the needs of children
    • enforced separations
    • parental role subverted and re-defined
  • The hidden homeless
    • predominantly white populations in local agencies
    • London population of newcomers is still pretty new
    • if there is a homeless community of ethnoculturally diverse groups, they probably seek services within their own communities
  • Social constructions of space in a shelter context
  • Intersecting vulnerabilities
    • Process by which people are "marked" as different in effect sustains homelessness
    • ensures that those who are homeless will remain homeless

    Phase 3: Policy Analysis Findings

  • our judicial system needs to be undone
  • perception that good programs are continually eliminated
  • perception that people in government lack knowledge about the needs of the homeless
  • fragmented servive delivery