Housing project aims to give young Montrealers aging out of youth protection a home

Every year, some 2,000 kids age out of the youth protection system. About a third of them, one third, end up on the streets. Agora Declic, an organization that works with at-risk youth, has a plan that it believes could change all of that. An integrated campus in the East End that would provide housing and education and psychosocial support all under one roof. Former Quebec MNA, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, is an ambassador for the project. Thank you so much for coming in. Thank you for inviting us. First of all, I just want to get a sense what these kids are going through, what their plight is at 18 to age out of a system. You know, sometimes experts call this the cliff of the 18 years old, because we are talking about kids that have lived terrible things during their childhood. They have very severe traumas. They are bearing scars. of what they lived all those years, sometimes only knew an institutionalized setting. So when comes 18 years old, the system is basically telling us, telling them you are an adult. Here is your first welfare check, here are your personal items in a grocery bag and go and live your life. Those kids have no social network, in the vast majority they never had a school diploma and of course they are they are bearing the scars of their childhood so it's no surprise that a big proportion of them end up being homeless in the three years. Well, after aging out of the system. You've been trying to get this project off the ground with others for about a decade now. So where are you in the process? How is it looking? We are cautiously optimistic because we've been fighting for this project for 10 years now. Of course, we are feeling the momentum. There is a social and political momentum right now around the issue of homelessness. Mr. Plamondon has decided to make it a personal priority. It's a good signal that he's sending by doing that. So we are, and Mr. Plamondon has pledged officially to fund the creation of that integrated campus. So we are optimistic, but a lot of discussion remains in front of us to make sure we are able to coordinate the action of the government between all of the ministers that will be involved in the project to make sure the money is there and to make sure that we are able to begin the construction. Very fast. Yeah, you mentioned the ministries because you have at least three ministries involved. And that's complex. We know the bureaucracy in Quebec. You know it very well. So how long will this take to get this project off the ground? We are hoping to meet... With the ministers and their teams in the next weeks. We are hoping to be able to make an announcement as soon as possible. But yeah, the challenge is to make sure everyone works together. Because the beautiful thing with that project is also its main difficulty. Which is, it's an integrated model with, yes, 144 housing units for those young adults. But also a school inside the campus. The psychosocial help to help those kids, those young adults that bear very severe scars and traumas of their trajectory. To have that integrated model, that's why we think it's going to work. But it's also why it's taken such a long time to make the government go into the project, because you have to make sure everyone works together. It will cost millions of dollars, but there is a cost benefit to this, right? It's prevention. Well, an average homeless person represents a bill of $900,000. each year in terms of social services so it's we're going to save a lot of money collectively if we act in prevention of homelessness and the model of Agora Déclic is probably the most forward-thinking model in terms of primary prevention in terms of preventing those young adults to slip into homelessness so yes It's going to cost a lot of money at the beginning, but we're going to save a lot of money at the end because everyone who walks in the streets of Montreal is seeing with his own eyes what the homelessness crisis is doing. Thank you so much for coming in and talking about it. I really do hope this gets done and done quickly. I hope so too. Thank you so much.