Building the Evidence:
Introducing Pillar 3

“No Place Else to Go: Surveying the Human Rights Experiences of Encampment Residents in Ontario” is a seven-part report series. ​
“Building the Evidence: Survey Design, Data Collection, and Research Highlights” is the first in our series of reports. It outlines how we designed the survey and collected the data, and offers a brief overview of our research findings, which are discussed in more detail in subsequent reports. ​

Introducing ​Pillar 3:
​Equitable and Accessible Social Services​

This pillar focuses on accessible and equitable access to healthcare, emergency shelter, housing, and other social services for people staying in encampments (Farha and Schwan, 2020). People living in encampments often experience barriers to accessing supports, including stigma, identification requirements, and transportation challenges. A human rights approach also affirms the right to access supports without participating in data collection, and the right to refuse services.
Access to services is not simply a question of whether supports exist, but whether people are able to use them in practice. Examining the barriers people encounter provides insight into where current systems are failing to ensure equitable access and where changes may be needed. Specifically, we asked participants about:
  • The social services they relied on and those they found difficult to access.
  • Barriers to accessing emergency shelter services.
  • Barriers to accessing permanent housing through the social housing waitlist.

Analyzing the Survey Findings​

To connect the survey findings to the pillars of a human rights–based response, we developed a set of exploratory questions for each pillar. These questions guided our analysis by providing a framework for organizing and interpreting the survey findings.​
Survey findings from this pillar were analyzed through the following exploratory questions:
  • Does living in a camp make it harder to access services such as health care, housing supports, or harm reduction services?
  • What barriers exist to accessing services? Are these different depending on gender, disability, age, race, etc.?
Our survey analysis found that staying in encampments can create barriers to accessing essential social services, including health care, housing supports, and harm reduction services. Forced displacement can further disrupt access to these services. Participants also identified barriers related to disability and gender that limited their ability to access available supports. Concerningly, many respondents were not on either the priority housing or social housing waitlists, suggesting barriers to connecting with housing services.​

​About This Summary

This summary offers a very brief overview of Pillar 3: Equitable and Accessible Social Services. The full pillar report provides a more detailed analysis, using the exploratory questions as a framework for interpreting the survey findings and making recommendations. It expands on these initial findings by situating them in relation to relevant policy contexts, identifying patterns in the data, and offering more specific implications for practice and systems change.​

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