When Ryan first set foot in an Etobicoke youth shelter last fall at the age of 17, he felt a surge of relief.
He’d been staying at a homeless shelter in Orangeville for months, but every day its occupants had to clear out for several hours, he said, and he was never sure where to go. So the news that this Etobicoke shelter let people stay through the day was welcome — especially as the weather got colder.
It was the latest shift of surroundings for a teenager all too used to change.
In his younger years, Ryan said he spent a few months in the child welfare system while his mother dealt with some personal challenges. When he hit his teens, Ryan battled with his own mental health, and on several occasions required hospital stays. When he was kicked out of his home last year, Ryan says child welfare workers didn’t talk to him about going into foster care again — but started planning for him to live on his own.
The now 18-year-old, who spoke to the Star inside the Etobicoke shelter in February as freezing rain pelleted the streets outside, is among an alarming population of youth in Toronto who wind up homeless after childhoods entangled, to some degree, with the child welfare system.
Across Toronto, roughly one in ten people who’ve wound up homeless were, at one point in their childhoods, in foster care or group homes. For some, that was an episodic experience: others aged straight out of child welfare into homelessness. Governments recognize this grim pipeline, and have been trying to get it in check; in Ontario, this includes extending available supports into a young person’s early 20s, with hopes more youth will land on their feet.
Still, a recent Senate report warned of a national “crisis” of youth aging out of care and losing access to supports they still need. It called for a national action plan, better efforts to track what happens to young people after being in the protective system and more focused attention on housing, educational opportunities, skills training and mental health for former youth in care.
“This has been a crisis for a long time, but I’d say it’s been amplified since the pandemic,” said Melanie Doucet, a Montreal-based researcher and director of the National Council of Youth In Care Advocates.
The erosion of housing affordability, especially, has made it increasingly difficult for young people to find their footing without the support systems their peers have, said Doucet — who was placed in the child welfare system herself as a young teenager living in rural New Brunswick.
“It makes my skin crawl to just think about it, to try to age out today.”
From one struggle to the next
When he talks about his childhood, Ryan — whose last name the Star agreed not to disclose due to his age and precarious situation — stresses it wasn’t all bad, though he knows it was different than other kids’ upbringings.
Ryan can’t recall exactly what age he was when he was briefly in the child welfare system — around eight, maybe. He hated being split up from his siblings, though he remembers an older couple being good to him. After a few months, he said he was able to return home. Ryan doesn’t have contact with his father, but speaks warmly about his mom.
But as the years wore on, Ryan’s own struggles came to the forefront. Diagnosed with autism, he says he also struggles with anxiety, ADHD and depression severe enough that he eventually stopped attending school.
Ryan is now is searching for a rental he can afford on his own to get out of the shelter system. At 18, he’s still eligible for some financial support from the Ready, Set, Go program that assists young people transitioning out of child welfare.
Nick Lachance/Toronto Star
His challenges with his mental health sometimes led to conflicts at home, when he would get angry and lash out. Ryan and his family hoped he could secure a space at a live-in mental health treatment centre, but a space like that wasn’t open yet. As conflicts continued at home, it seemed to him one of two things would happen: he would end up back in the hospital, or the police would be called. Eventually, his mom told him he had to leave.
“We both agree that it’s better that I do try to live somewhere else,” he said.
Ryan was only 17 at the time — a child in the eyes of the law, meaning child welfare officials still needed to be involved in his case.
There were a variety of workers in his orbit since last year, and he has appreciated their help — whether setting up his bank account and getting onto income supports, or just letting him “vent.”
But with no immediate housing plan available, and no plans to go back into foster care, Ryan found himself homeless.
No ‘warm handover’ to adulthood
For kids in the child welfare system, the transition to adulthood means the supports around them start to be pulled back at a time when their peers might still be living at home or relying heavily on parental support.
Whether due to this withdrawal of supports or other, more entangled challenges — like youth still dealing with past traumatic events — cities like Toronto have long seen a number of youth formerly in care wind up on the streets or in emergency shelters.
In 2024, when Toronto last conducted an in-depth street needs assessment, 10 per cent of homeless respondents across shelters, encampments and other settings like hospitals and jails reported time in foster care or group homes. At a time when 15,418 people were estimated to be homeless, that amounts to more than 1,500 people. It included around 170 youth under 25 in shelters.
Veteran Toronto community worker Diana Chan McNally knows first-hand how hard it is to find your footing as a young person out on their own; she was a ward of the child welfare system herself as a teenager.
There is no “warm handover” from childhood to adulthood, she said.
She has repeatedly seen people end up on the streets during the transition years. Young people looking for someone to trust were especially vulnerable to sexual violence, human trafficking and other exploitation, she said.
“I’ve seen people absolutely get taken advantage of.”
She fears they’re also at risk of chronic homelessness, particularly once they reach their late 20s or early 30s: “If you haven’t kind of solved it by this age, more often than not what I’ve seen is people just stay homeless,” she said.
In 2023, Ontario promised a new program — Ready, Set, Go — meant to give young people life skills, supports and financial backing as they transitioned out of the child welfare system. The idea was to start talking about the future with kids sooner, beginning as young as 13 years old.
It extended the runway for youth to remain “in care” and receive financial supports to a cut-off of 23 years old, up from 21. The funding slowly declines from $1,800 per month for an 18-year-old to $500 per month at age 22.
The extension was a good change, says Doucet. But she says she doesn’t believe it’s yet a long enough buffer.
Ideally, Doucet suggested extending support to some degree to at least 25. Through her early 20s, after aging out of the child welfare system, she said she couch surfed and bounced between living set-ups. “It wasn’t until I was, I’d say, 26 or 27ish, that I started to feel like I had a bit of stable footing.”
In October, Doucet spoke before the Senate Committee on Human Rights as it considered this issue. She cited grim statistics, including youth in care having rates of post-traumatic stress comparable to veterans of the Vietnam War.
The Senate report, which called for a national action plan, reported that Canada is “one of very few Western countries” without national legislation or standards for support offered when kids in care transition into adulthood.
Some social service players in Toronto believe a big-picture approach is key, looking not only at the child welfare system, but also across social services.
“Economic, educational, health, mental health, employment and youth housing needs are deeply interconnected, and our response must reflect that,” said John Harvey, chief program officer for youth agency Covenant House.
Anayah Phares, who also spoke to the Senate committee, was in foster care as a child and later founded a Toronto-based mentorship program for youth leaving care. Housing was one of the biggest problems she’d witnessed through that program; she told the Star she’d seen youth couch surfing or at high risk of homelessness after falling behind on rent in their early adulthood.
If a young person doesn’t have housing, any other efforts to help them will be less effective, she said. If a youth got a scholarship, for example, their ability to study for exams would be blunted by not having a stable roof overhead.
For a long time, Phares felt like this issue had been left for cities or provinces to sort out. She’s glad to see a national conversation now taking shape.
Hope and possibly a room rental
Ryan knows steadying on his feet means getting out of the shelter system. While in Orangeville, he said workers talked to him about housing options, but they would have required waiting in the shelter for several more months. The Etobicoke move seemed like a better option, even if it was a stopgap. The day he spoke to the Star, he was making plans to visit a west-end rooming house.
Ryan figures his Ready, Set, Go funds will be enough to cover the rent for a room there, sharing a bathroom and kitchen with around five others.
When he thinks about other young people he’s met, he sees a need for more supports around mental health challenges, and more guidance for youth who might have challenging family relationships. He described seeing other young people “go down the wrong path, because they’re not properly guided.”
Ryan said his friends sometimes don’t understand why he thinks so much about long-term plans. At times, it also felt to him like he wasn’t taken as seriously as an older adult would be, despite having to make major decisions.
At the Toronto shelter, Ryan says he’s been able to access therapy, which has helped as he works to address his mental health. He believes expanding this kind of support would be helpful in tackling homelessness across Toronto.
And he sees value in talking more openly about what it means to go through homelessness, the shelter and child welfare systems. “A lot of people don’t really have that empathy or understanding of someone’s other situation.”
When he thinks about his life in 10 years, he said the best case scenario would to have a home of his own, and find a job he felt real passion for. He finds it reassuring to plan out his future, relishing in any steady ground he can find.
“I just like following schedules and knowing things ahead of time … I don’t like when things are planned and they don’t go the way they’re planned,” Ryan said, “because I’ve had to deal with that so much during my life.”