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.
Systems Inventory
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.
We know the solution to homelessness is affordable housing for all. Yet it can feel impossible to find an affordable home. Illegal renovictions are a part of the reason why our neighbourhoods are rapidly changing. While there are many stories of tenants being pushed out of their homes, there is no hard data to support the claims.
Help us build the data. This survey is for anyone who may have experienced an illegal eviction to add their experience and help us understand the larger picture of how this is happening and how we can end it.
Aimed at housing 100 households in 100 days, the Housing Blitz was a community-wide effort to get people housed quickly and learn more about the barriers to affordable housing in our city. The initiative was led by the City of Ottawa and the Alliance to End Homelessness Ottawa, working closely with Indigenous housing partners.
#Hotels2Homes
Alliance members and supporters successfully lobbied the City to fund the purchase of empty hotels and motels for emergency housing during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a notable step in implementing a long-term solution to the housing crisis in Ottawa and creating a healthier, safer, and more prosperous community for everyone.
Civic Leaders Summit
The 2018 Civic Leaders Summit brought together community members, housing leaders, and City staff for a discussion on the opportunities, tools, and resources available for civic leaders to impact homelessness and affordable housing outcomes in Ottawa.
A Way Home Ottawa
A Way Home Ottawa was born out of the desire to build a more integrated system of support for young people who are homeless in Ottawa. Connecting youth services across the City, A Way Home Ottawa ultimately resulted in a comprehensive plan to prevent and end youth homelessness through a systems approach.
Homelessness was at a level of crisis when Ottawa City Council declared the housing emergency in January 2020 but the situation has only worsened. Not only is Ottawa not building enough new low rent affordable housing, we are losing much of the older, affordable housing stock.
The Ottawa Giving Project is a collaborative effort to make donating winter items easy to people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. Due to COVID, community agencies have less space and fewer volunteers to sort through donations. This community partnership continues on with Gifts In Kind Ottawa.