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.

Homeless people waiting to learn whether they might have contracted COVID-19 are living in the Jesuit retreat house in Guelph.

Doctors and homeless advocates are demanding government action to address what they call an inadequate response to COVID-19 outbreaks among Toronto’s homeless.

It was a different time and a different crisis, but in the small village of Bronte, Ont., work was hard to come by in the early 1950s.

EDMONTON -- It started with Edmonton churches asking “How can we help?”

For the first time in its 30-year history, researchers have taken a serious look at who uses Toronto’s volunteer, informal, faithbased system of overnight shelters known as Out of the Cold.