Plan for ending youth homelessness to be launched Friday

NEWS — A plan for ending youth homelessness in Kamloops will be launched Friday.

The City, in partnership with HomeFree and the Kamloops Homelessness Action Plan, will launch A Way Home: A Plan to End Youth Homelessness in Kamloops at the Interior Savings Centre Parkside Lounge.

Starting at 9 a.m., the launch will feature presentations on the project, a gallery of artwork addressing homelessness in the community by local South Kamloops Secondary art students, networking and refreshments.

A Way Home is the culmination of a project that began in November 2012 when Kamloops was named a pilot community in the national Mobilizing Local Capacity to End Youth Homelessness Program.

Tasked with forming a youth homelessness action plan for the community, staff from the City, United Way, Kamloops Aboriginal Friendship Society, Homelessness Action Plan and a project consultant formed a partnership as a planning team that would drive the project through to completion.

Following the input from a visioning session with a broad range of community partners and stakeholders, the planning team put out a call to youth interested in forming a committee to help develop the plan.

Calling themselves Youth Against Youth Homelessness (or YAYh), the youth committee and the planning team conducted interviews with front-line youth workers and a series of focus groups with youth at local agencies in the community.

YAYh partnered with Mastermind Studios in the fall of 2013 to create a video of their reflections from this process, which can be seen on their website at http://www.yayh.org or via YouTube in this post.

Drawing from the voices of youth shared through the consultations, as well as leading research and promising practices from across Canada, the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, Kamloops is now set to release A Way Home: A Plan to End Youth Homelessness in Kamloops.