Our latest zine explains Peterborough’s challenges with Coordinated Access
Last month, we shared an analysis from our lab that showed less than five percent of people on Peterborough’s By-Name List got housing through the list in 2022.
It’s important to understand that this doesn’t represent the entirety of people who shifted from homelessness to housing last year. That number is bigger. But of the 311 individuals known to have shifted from homelessness to housing in Peterborough in 2022, no more than 47 did so through the By-Name List. That means a significant majority of people on the list who obtained housing did not do so because they were on the list. They just happened to be on the list.
The By-Name List is the backbone of Coordinated Access — the federally-mandated model for addressing homelessness that was implemented in Peterborough in 2019.
Our community expends significant time, effort and money on adding people to the list, completing in-depth assessments with them, keeping people’s records up-to-date, prioritising people for housing resources, and referring/matching them to those resources. But all this effort appears to be resulting in relatively few people becoming housed.
Why? We offer some answers to that question in our latest zine: Stay In Line.
Stay In Line is the followup to Get In Line, our 2022 zine that documented how Peterborough’s Coordinated Access system is intended to work in theory.
Stay In Line is different: its goal is to show how Coordinated Access works in practice. It is based on interviews we conducted with 48 people with experience of homelessness in Peterborough and 42 people with experience working in the homeless-serving sector.
Over the course of our interviews, people shared many concerns with Coordinated Access, including:
Inaccessible services;
Unreliable assessment tools; and,
A lack of appropriate housing and supports to match people to.
We hope that Stay In Line helps to establish a shared set of facts about the challenges facing Peterborough as it implements Coordinated Access. Most importantly, we hope it fosters dialogue about how we can approach this crisis differently.
Click here to read Stay In Line.
Prefer a printed copy? You can pick one up at our office in Wallis Hall at Traill College, Trent University. Alternatively, get in touch and we can arrange a deliver.