Research
Housing Futures
This international research initiative aims to create an engaging platform for housing practitioners and researchers to explore planning and design innovation for better housing futures. Learn more.
Professor turns to Data Analytics to Help Homeless Shelter
New data tools match clients to services in the latest project for the Calgary Drop-In Centre. The project gathered will help ensure that staff serving emergency shelter clients have an up-to-date picture of the specific needs of each client to ensure no one in need of additional help falls through the cracks. Learn more.
Teaching, Learning and Student Experience
Just Treat us Like Human Beings
An eye-opening downtown tour for UCalgary nursing students serves up profound lessons of loneliness and resilience on Calgary's streets. Strictly voluntary, the walk allows the students a first-hand look at the real-life effects of the social determinants of health, including the pain of poverty, stigma, addiction and mental health. Learn more.
Beds from Bags Project in Lethbridge
Beds from Bags is a project that creates plastic yarn, or “plarn,” sleeping mats for people experiencing homelessness, who have to "sleep rough" in Lethbridge. Plarn is an ingenious way to recycle plastic shopping bags, diverting them from landfills while creating a valuable resource. Faculty of Social Work students joined the growing community group weaving the shopping bags together, creating a durable, weather-proof mat for those who must sleep outdoors. Learn more.
The Future of Affordable Housing
The Future of Affordable Housing Design & Planning Innovation is a research initiative within the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape. It offers a glimpse into what tomorrow's affordable housing in Canada might look like.
Campus and Community Impact
Campus
Students learn about the homeless experience during UCalgary Cares immersive four-day Homelessness at Home co-curricular program. This is the 10th year the Leadership and Student Engagement Office has offered this unique program in partnership with the Mustard Seed, which has been serving people experiencing poverty and homelessness in Alberta since the 1980s.
Local
A public forum co-hosted by Basic Income Calgary and the O'Brien Institute for Public Health at the Cumming School of Medicine, brought experts from a range of backgrounds, from health and economics to those living in poverty, to make a case for implementing a basic income program in Alberta.
International
Pakistan has endured more than 40 years of war and conflict. Decades of conflict has shattered families, leaving many children orphaned or in single-parent homes. The Canadian Association for Children's Education in Pakistan is a group led by a Faculty of Social Work professor. It has been supporting children and families in the region for years, emphasizing education for women and girls in supported schools.