Starts With Home is a city-wide non-partisan campaign to build public and political support for addressing the housing affordability crisis in Ottawa.
Alliance supporters can learn, connect in, and take action on the Starts With Home website; our new space for public education and mobilization. Join the conversation!
The Alliance has received a Maytree grant to develop a report on scaling up nonprofit housing in Ottawa. Working with Dr. Carolyn Whitzman, Adjunct Professor and Researcher at the University of Ottawa as the lead author and researcher, the report will include a map of suitable and well located government owned sites that could be used for nonprofit housing; a policy scan of policies that can scale up the amount and affordability of nonprofit housing development; and financial proforma modeling for four actual sites in Ottawa.
To truly create system-level change, we need the expertise of people with firsthand experience of homelessness. Our Expert Steering Team works together to bring their knowledge, strengths, and skills to the Alliance and working groups across the sector. Their work impacts the way we create policies and processes to prevent and end homelessness in Ottawa.
Are you or your organization interested in working with the Expert Steering Team?
Empower yourself with our resources! Explore webinars, toolkits, and FAQs to deepen your understanding of housing policy, drive change through advocacy, and protect your right to housing.
Understanding people’s pathways in the homelessness system is an important part of creating robust coordinated access where people can get the help they need while only telling their story once. Taking inventory of all of the poverty-reduction services, agencies, and programs will help us build a more interconnected system of shared resources. Working together effectively helps people better access the resources they need. Together, we’re greater than the sum of our parts.
We look forward to sharing with you the results of our system inventory project.
There is a growing demand for social housing in Canada. The Alliance to End Homelessness Ottawa is collaborating with researchers at the University of Ottawa to create a dashboard that will integrate existing databases of people waiting for social housing, people in the shelter system, and the available housing stock in a given community. The goal of the resulting system is to support communities in making informed decisions that address the specific social housing needs in their neighborhoods. This project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
We look forward to sharing the final product with you when it is published in.
On April 22, 2025, Kaite Burkholder Harris spoke at the City of Ottawa's Community Services Committee on behalf of the Alliance to End Homelessness, to support the need for continued and increased funding for rent allowances to close the gap between current demand and the approved budget.
You can read the remarks below, or watch the deputation here.
Eligible electors who are homeless or have no fixed address can register and vote in a federal election in Canada. Here are the key facts to know:
The Ontario election will take place February 27, 2025.
We urge you to vote if you are eligible, to encourage everyone in your life to vote, and to keep Ontario's housing crisis in mind when you cast your vote.
Unhoused Ontarians have the same right to vote as those who are housed. Learn how shelters, drop-ins, food banks, and community health centres can help unhoused Ontarians vote if they don't have ID, using this printable resource from Diana Chan McNally.
The Alliance has prepared some social media graphics you can use to show your support for making sure housing is part of the conversation.
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