By: Wellesley Institute The Shout Clinic Harm Reduction Report: 2010
Principal Organization: Shout Clinic, a site of Central Toronto Community Health Centers
Investigators: Lorraine Barnaby (principal), Patricia G. Erickson, Ph.D (co-investigator)
Authors: Lorraine Barnaby, Rebecca Penn and Patricia G. Erickson, Ph.D
Participants: High-risk, substance-using, homeless street-involved youth (aged 16-24) in Toronto
Research Methods: Peer researcher model, survey interview, focus group, arts-informed project
By: Wellesley Institute Towards Effective Strategies for Harm Reduction Housing analyzes the relative effectiveness of housing facilities operating within a Housing First framework. FVCH has made important progress in findings in the following areas: Building design/physical plant; tenant supports; shared accommodation model; substance use and acquisition; landlord obligations; and Housing First models. The findings lead to specific recommendations for providers with a similar mandate to Fred Victor Centre, as well as for providers that are finding that many of their tenants are using substances and are struggling with how to manage their facilities. Recommendations also provide important insight to government representatives and other funders of social housing.
By: Wellesley Institute To increase awareness of the challenges faced by immigrant seniors and to elucidate the structural realities that condition their lives, a series of focus group sessions were organized between January and March 2008. Participants were recruited from the constituent communities, and discussions were conducted in their own language.
By: Wellesley Institute This report presents shared findings and recommendations from eight community-based, participatory research projects on homelessness in Toronto; six of the eight projects used arts-informed or arts-based research methods.
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By: Wellesley Institute By: Wellesley Institute An environmental scan of the sexual attidues, behaviours, and potential risk factors of adolescents and youth of Portuguese-speaking origin in Toronto, with special attention to high risk and stigmatized youth.
By: Wellesley Institute By: Wellesley Institute Project aim was to survey the housing history of tenants in private boarding homes and examine the levels of care and support in these homes. The starting hypothesis, based on anecdotal evidence, was that private boarding homes catered to a disproportionately higher percentage of hard-to-house individuals and that the housing history of these tenants would show a pattern of evictions from other non-profit housing providers. The report found the latter not to be the case and were very surprised to find little evidence of non-profit housing in tenants’ past. The researchers interviewed discharge planners in an attempt to explain this finding and arrived at some tentative conclusions. The tenant interviews provided the research team with a good sense of tenant likes and dislikes and what worked for them. This data coupled with results from landlord interviews points the way toward developing best practices and standards for these homes.
By: Wellesley Institute Despite Canada’s generally high standard of living and a health care system that offers universal access to high quality care, there are major health disparities in our nation. These health disparities are most pronounced for vulnerable populations particularly new immigrants, refugees and Canadian born people from non-dominant ethno-racial communities who often, through the process of racialization, are treated in different and unequal in ways with regressive social, economic and political impacts (Galabuzi, 2001). Improving the health of such vulnerable populations requires moving beyond interventions focused on changing individual behaviours to approaches that address systemic issues that impact on their health, namely racism and racial discrimination.
Emerging research shows that the main determinants of health are neither medical nor behavioural but rather social and economic (Raphael, 2004). Despite evidence of the health impacts of structural inequalities, health determinants such as racism and racial discrimination have received the least attention. For example, there has been very little Canadian research documenting immigrants and racialized people’s experiences with and responses to perceived ‘differential health care’. The term ‘differential care’, adopted by our Racialised Communities and Access to Healthcare Working Group research group, refers to unequal or lower quality care and/or reduced access to care experienced by racialized people as a result of systemic, overt and covert forms of exclusion and discrimination
By: Wellesley Institute A study of the relationship between pregnant and / or parenting Aboriginal women with substance use problems, the drug treatment system and the child welfare system. For pregnant and / or parenting Aboriginal women with substance use problems, fear that involvement with the drug treatment system will bring with it involvement of the child welfare system discourages seeking treatment. This fear is the most visible barrier to drug treatment, however, it is embedded within a wider context of stigma, discrimination and cultural genocide that is not well documented or understood. However, pregnant and / or parenting Aboriginal women with substance use problems would benefit from drug treatment and the development of a culturally appropriate collaborative relationship among parenting or pregnant Aboriginal women, drug treatment counsellors and child welfare workers.
