There is an adage that to get off the streets you need a home, a job and a friend. The reality is that there are not enough affordable homes, few jobs open to those who are homeless and even fewer friends who are willing to walk the harsh streets to sustain hope in the darkness. 

As number of violent incidents on Toronto streets rises, attention turns to finding new ways to deal with mental illness and addiction among the homeless.

Like a healthcare jazz band, the Saint Elizabeth Foundation, the charitable arm of SE Health Care, has improvised its way around provincial funding priorities to launch a new hospice for the homeless in Windsor, Ont.

The oft-told story of the child who throws starfish back into the ocean because “it matters to that one” is the kind of organic growth that Bob Buckham hopes to see when ministering to the homeless in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

With an ever-growing housing crisis in Nova Scotia, the Archdiocese of Halifax-Yarmouth has extended its emergency shelter initiative.

For young Salesians at St. Benedict Parish in Toronto’s west end, the legacy and teachings of St. Don Bosco are alive and well.

Toronto architect and planner John van Nostrand has over his 40-year career built tiny home communities around the world and is hoping something similar can be brought to Toronto to house the city’s homeless.

VATICAN CITY -- Adam Piekarski, a homeless man from Lódz, Poland, never imagined that the sketches he would draw in his free time while waiting for the public showers near Bernini’s Colonnade would lead to the opportunity of a lifetime.

It’s coming on Christmas and the Halifax-Yarmouth archdiocese is writing its own inspirational story of Bethlehem.

The tents in city parks, men and women gathered under Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway, lean-tos and sleeping bags scattered through ravines, camp fires among the alder trees near the beaches — none of this is new to Toronto. But it has become a lot more visible since COVID came to town.

While most Torontonians are following public health orders to stay home, many of the city’s homeless are still trying to find one. 

A recent report shows that the Good Shepherd’s Youth Reconnect (YR) program has reduced the number of at-risk Hamilton, Ont., youth accessing shelter and other emergency services.

VATICAN CITY -- As the Vatican health service continued vaccinating Vatican residents and employees against COVID-19, it also began offering the vaccine to homeless people who live in Vatican-owned shelters.

The journey home has gotten a little easier for some of Toronto’s 8,500 homeless people in shelters and out on the street any given night.

When COVID-19 forced frontline workers to shift their support for homeless youth online, the result was more loneliness, more depression, more drug use, more overdoses and more thoughts of suicide, according to new research from Covenant House, Canada’s largest shelter serving young people.