223315 - Reaching Home Funding Application - Youth - Prevention and Shelter Diversion Services

Reaching Home: Canada’s Homelessness Strategy is a community-based program aimed at preventing and reducing homelessness across Canada. This program provides funding to urban, Indigenous, and rural and remote communities to help them address their local homelessness needs. Reaching Home supports the goals of the National Housing Strategy, in particular, to support the most vulnerable Canadians in maintaining safe, stable and affordable housing and to reduce chronic homelessness nationally by 50% by fiscal year 2027/2028.
Accordingly, Reaching Home directives include provisions to facilitate delivery of culturally competent homelessness programming, in keeping with the Indigenous homelessness definition in the document.
Through engagement, the Government of Canada has developed the following key components of Reaching Home:
Outcomes-based Approach: An outcomes-based approach which keeps decision making at the local level provides greater flexibility to address local priorities, including homelessness prevention and programming designed to meet the needs of vulnerable populations. Through data-driven systems plans, the community will report publicly on community-wide outcomes (co-developed with academics), people with lived experience of homelessness and data and performance measurement experts. These outcomes will be used to track the progress being made in the effort to prevent and reduce homelessness, including year over year reductions in chronic homelessness. Other outcomes will cover prevention and diversion initiatives as well as the effectiveness of local homelessness systems more broadly.
Coordinated Access System: Through the Reaching Home program, the community has additional funding and support to introduce a Coordinated Access system by 2025-2026 to prioritize people who are most in need of assistance and match them to appropriate housing and services.
Funding available under this Request for Proposal is up to $53,350.00 CAD. The funding period is from April 1, 2026 to March 31, 2027.