The strongest voices in new housing developments are often those whose needs are already met by current housing solutions. So, what about those whose needs aren’t met?  

Evergreen hosted seven My Future Home Forum sessions in 2022 to identify the future housing needs of Canada’s community members. Facilitated by Creative Futures and Harbingers, the focus of the series was to engage youth, newcomers and older adults to share their individual lived experience and insights, a personal perspective often not integrated into housing policy decisions. They were asked to imagine their future, including an exploration of their aspirations and the needs that housing solutions will have to meet. Participants joined facilitated, highly participatory virtual sessions to share their perspective on their future needs, in their own words, and the priority actions required to advance these futures.

Our Approach:

• To maximize the impact of the sessions, Creative Futures held a kick-off codesign with Evergreen and its partners on this project - CMHC and Meridian Credit Union - to understand how they might apply the perspectives of newcomers, youth, and older adults.

• Based on this session, Creative Futures designed a highly participatory forum agenda. To finalize the approach, Creative Futures and Harbingers tested the session with a sample audience.

• The finalized session design was delivered over the course of three months - four virtual sessions were held with GTA and Niagara Region youth, newcomers, and older adults, followed by three virtual sessions held nationally with the same target audience groups.

• Information from these sessions were synthesized into a series of reports, outlining the needs addressed by participants, and the actions they felt were necessary meet their needs.

• To support broad action, Creative Futures and Harbingers developed a global report, summarizing the needs across participant groups.

Results:

The sessions were highly successful, demonstrated by high engagement rates throughout the workshops, and strong post-event survey feedback. Information gathered at the sessions is being used to frame the next phase of work, focused on activating housing stakeholders to address the unmet needs raised by participants.