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Reaching Home

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REACHING HOME

Reaching Home: Canada's Homelessness Strategy is a community-based program aimed at preventing and reducing homelessness across Canada. It provides funding to urban, Indigenous, rural and remote communities to help them address their local homelessness needs.

Reaching Home supports the goals of the National Housing Strategy, in particular, to support the most vulnerable Canadians in maintaining safe, stable and affordable housing and to reduce chronic homelessness nationally by 50% by fiscal year 2027 to 2028.

Designated Communities

Since 2012, Thompson has been recognized by the Government of Canada as one of 66 urban communities facing significant issues with homelessness. It is defined as a designated community and is eligible under the REACHING HOME program for long-term stable funding. This funding is administered locally by a community entity.

As a designated community, Thompson is required to work toward community-level outcomes, including reduction of:

Chronic homelessness in the community;
Homelessness in the community and for specific populations, including Indigenous homeless residents;
New inflows into homelessness;
Returns to homelessness.

Community Entity

The City of Thompson has proudly served as the community entity (CE) in the delivery of Reaching Home: Canada's Homelessness Strategy since April 2019.

As the CE, and working closely with the Thompson Community Advisory Board, the City of Thompson is administering more than $1.7 million in REACHING HOME funds between 2019 and 2024 to assist in preventing and reducing homelessness.

Thompson Community Advisory Board

Members of the Thompson Community Advisory Board (CAB) are local leaders in homeless services delivery and policy development. They represent most of the major organizations dedicated to helping and supporting those impacted by homelessness in Thompson.

The CAB also reviews and recommends local projects based on REACHING HOME directives, terms and conditions, as well as community plan priorities. The City of Thompson, as the CE and with guidance from Service Canada, works with the CAB during this process, answering program-related questions and ensuring a fair and transparent process.

Thompson's Community Homelessness Reports

As stated on the Homelessness Learning Hub, the Community Homelessness Report (CHR) supports communities to transition to an outcomes-based approach, a key component of the work to prevent and reduce homelessness using a more coordinated, systems-based and data-driven response.

The CHR was developed by Employment and Social Development Canada and is a requirement for Reaching Home communities that are receiving funding from the Designated Communities stream (outside of Quebec), as well as those receiving funding from the Territorial Homelessness stream.

The CHR helps communities to assess progress against the Coordinated Access minimum requirements under Reaching Home. It is also the tool to report community-level data to the Government of Canada on a yearly basis. CHR data gives a year-over-year picture of the state of homelessness at the community level and the system in place to address it. Communities can use these data to identify community-level trends specific to cumulative levels of homelessness, inflows into homelessness, outflows from homelessness, and housing-focused outcomes.

Access Thompson’s 2019–2021 CHR here
2021–2022 CHR here
2022–2023 CHR here

For more information, read the 2019-2024 Thompson REACHING HOME Community Plan, or reach out to our community entity coordinator, Andrea Hatley, at communityentity@thompson.ca.