Carleton University researcher Anna Kopec is working to map homelessness services in Ontario — a project she said will help people experiencing homelessness find the resources they need.
In 2024, more than 81,000 people were experiencing homelessness, according to a report from the Association of Municipalities of Ontario. In Ottawa, nearly 3,000 people were homeless in 2024, according to an October 2024 point-in-time count.
Kopec’s research is funded by a $74,000 grant from the federal Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. She said she was inspired to take on the project after a trip to Australia, where individuals experiencing homelessness told her about the lack of visibility for available services.
Kopec said the initiative involves creating maps that highlight the locations of homelessness resources, services and shelters in Ottawa and Toronto.
To create the maps, Kopec and her colleagues used Google My Maps and the 211 Ontario database to pinpoint the locations of homelessness services across the two cities. In the future, she said she plans to create maps for Hamilton and London, Ont., two mid-sized cities experiencing high rates of homelessness.
The research team also hosts focus groups with individuals who have experienced homelessness, which Kopec said help the researchers gain perspective and feedback on the current state of resource visibility. She said participants are asked which services they access and how they could be made more accessible.
“Every focus group is different. Every interaction is different, which I think is beautiful,” Kopec said.
Kopec said it can be challenging to access homelessness resources due to identification requirements, lack of cell phone access, high demand for services and high stress on service providers.
“These services rely on frontline staff to do a lot and the burden is substantial,” she said.
Kaite Burkholder Harris, executive director of the Alliance To End Homelessness Ottawa, an organization focused on public education and advocacy, said homelessness resources need better organization to be more visible.
“There’s a matter of organization that needs to happen within the sector to be able to make that stuff more accessible,” she said.
While Burkholder Harris said mapping homelessness services and raising awareness are important, shelters aren’t the best solution for most people.
“The less time they intersect with the sector, the better,” she said, adding that the longer people use services like shelters, the more likely they are to be exposed to trauma, substance use and trafficking.
Tim Aubry, a homelessness expert and psychology professor at the University of Ottawa, said the visibility of homelessness services isn’t the main problem. Instead, he said access to homelessness services and programs “could be improved by allocating more resources in these areas.”
“A lot of people who experience homelessness do not want to use shelters and instead live unsheltered, couch surf or find themselves tenting in encampments,” Aubry wrote in a Jan. 30 email statement to the Charlatan.
Kopec said her research project will address some of the shortfalls of current responses to addressing homelessness.
“Canada’s homelessness response system has always been extremely fragmented … and has very rarely included folks with lived experience,” Kopec said.
“I think this is where research has also been at times paternalistic and problematic, and why the approach that we’re taking is one that we hope will inspire more inclusion of folks in research as well as hopefully in policy.”
Featured image provided by Anna Kopec.
