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.

The statistics are chilling even though they are imperfect. CBC reported that in December 2021, 35 names were added to the Toronto Homeless Memorial list of those who died while homeless in Toronto. The actual number of deaths could be higher. 

PORTLAND, Ore. -- In a sturdy homemade woodshop amid filbert orchards not far from the Willamette River, the gears of 90-year-old Vern Stuewe’s mind crank all day.

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 spirit of Christmas giving arrived early this year in Edmonton, with the St. Joseph’s College Catholic Students’ Association at the University of Alberta collecting clothing to keep dozens of homeless people a little warmer this winter.

Halifax parishes are working to fight homelessness by offering church property as the sites for emergency shelters to house those in need.

Dollar-a-meal lunches and suppers are back on at St. Francis Table in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood come Sept. 1, when there will be fully vaccinated cooks and wait staff ready to serve up meals to sit-down customers inside the restaurant.

One of my favourite sights when driving along the increasingly paved landscape of Calgary is an ospreys’ nest that has been built atop the metal girder that supports a ubiquitous piece of highway signage. My children and I have marvelled for many years at the site of this large nest, perched out in the open on unprotected steel, which has supported generations of fledgling hawks. So imagine my disappointment driving past the spot recently only to discover that workers had covered the nest with a wooden pyramid. It is impossible not to personify the forlorn hawk, who sat miserably beside this intervention, appearing lost and confused.

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.

A joint project by the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness (COH) and A Way Home Canada — and the slate of projects earmarked for the future — aims to ensure their jointly developed framework to prevent youth homelessness remains an ever-living document.