A program of Frontier College (Toronto), Beat the Street uses student-centered, individualized learning to give "street people" self-esteem and literacy skills. The program uses the street as a curriculum and volunteer tutors who are themselves street people. (SK)

Author Bryan Smith agrees that critiques of Sir John A. Macdonald, and Cornwallis as unworthy of public commemoration are warranted and necessary, particularly as each was instrumental in cementing settler-colonial projects of dominion and erasure of Indigenous populations. However, he observes that each figure is but one point (or multiple) in…

The urban scholar Jane Jacobs once described city life as "the ballet of the streets." In more than a quarter century of joint teaching, the authors have used Jacobs' metaphor to help their students understand that cities are living organisms created and maintained, for good or ill, by the people who live and work in them. At heart their…

This qualitative study examined the meanings ascribed to the construct "home" by 208 youths defined by mainstream society as "homeless". Youth narratives on the topic of home ranged across a continuum with home as state at one end (i.e., home is a state of mind, comprised of one's friends) and home as place at the other (i.e.,…

Among marginalized populations, homeless adults are known to have elevated rates of mental health and substance use problems compared to the general population, but less is known about their youthful homeless counterparts. While few studies currently exist, what research has been conducted among street-involved youth has confirmed high rates of…

The Youth Pathways Project tracked the life-course trajectories of street-involved young women (n=75) in Toronto over a one-year period. At first contact, 60% of these women had been pregnant, and 29% of those had children. In the interim leading up to the final interview 12 months later, five participants became pregnant and five had given birth.…

Presented in this paper are the results of a qualitative analysis of the narratives of 208 homeless youth interviewed on streets and in agencies in New York City and Toronto. The interviews focused on the participants' stories about their struggles to survive and negotiate meaningful and healthy lives in coming to the streets, living on the…

Risks of life on the street caused by inclement weather, harassment, and assault threaten the unsheltered homeless population. We address some challenges of enumerating the street homeless population by testing a novel capture-recapture (CR) estimation approach that models individuals' intermittent daytime visibility. We tested walking and…

This study explores the social worlds of homeless children in two Canadian cities, Toronto and Vancouver, comparing them with the environments of in-home and in-school children from the perspective of the children. Samples of 390 and 482 children were interviewed. The following chapters are included: (1) "Street and School…

Semistructured interviews focusing on suicide were conducted with 80 street youth in agencies and on the streets of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Participants described their understandings of the phenomenon of suicide among street youth and the meanings suicide held for them. Qualitative analysis of the…

Building upon previous exploratory qualitative research (Kidd S.A. (2003) "Child Adol. Social Work J." 20(4):235-261), this paper examines the mental health implications of social stigma as it is experienced by homeless youth. Surveys conducted with 208 youths on the streets and in agencies in New York City and Toronto revealed…