Coming Together to - End Homelessness - Hamilton’s Systems Planning Framework

The City of Hamilton serves an important role in the coordination and delivery of services and benefits as Service Manager and Community Entity on behalf of the Governments of Ontario and Canada respectively. [...] Within this role, the City of Hamilton is required to deliver a comprehensive strategy to address homelessness and setting out a framework for enhancing the coordination of local services to prevent and end homelessness. [...] To this end, this document serves two main purposes: • To detail Hamilton’s s roadmap to ending homelessness within the context of the broader social safety net; and • To outline a Systems Planning Framework to guide the design of the City’s investments in homelessness and enhance overall coordination of diverse resources locally to meet systems planning goals. [...] In October 2010, the Housing and Homelessness Planning Group was convened to provide guidance to city staff in the development of the Housing and Homelessness Action Plan (2013-2023). [...] While Housing First, as a philosophy and specific type of program intervention, is a critical part of efforts to end homelessness, it is the strategic application of the right to housing across the social safety net that is essential to making a sustained impact on homelessness in the long-run.