Tackling homelessness means talking about the one thing we least want to talk about.

Tackling homelessness means talking about the one thing we least want to talk about.

For about a decade, I volunteered for a grief peer support organization called Bereaved Families of Ontario (before that, the organization served my family after the death of my daughter Violet). Peer support is not therapy, but rather honest, supportive conversations between people with shared experiences who understand each other's path.

In meeting and learning from people I was supporting and who supported me, I started thinking about how death and loss are some of the factors that contribute to a person becoming homeless.

So I started talking to politicians I knew from previous elections about how we might be able to identify and support people at risk of becoming homeless at the time of a death or loss. It made so much sense to them that we had nothing left to do but draw up some paperwork to pilot a province-wide strategy for peer grief support as a preventive measure for mental illness, substance abuse, and homelessness.

That was early March, 2020. A couple of days later, the world shut down, and for a few years, everything was put on hold. Governments came and went. The project never moved forward.

The population of people living unhoused in London and other places has grown a lot since then. For many, the road to the street started with a loss: the death of a loved one, the loss of a job, the end of a relationship.

We have many amazing, caring, dedicated people and organizations supporting people experiencing homelessness, and we absolutely need to support their work and make better policy choices so more municipal funds reach people on the front lines.

But we also need to look at creative ways to stop people from ending up living unsheltered because they lost someone or something important to them.

We have to get comfortable talking about death and loss. These are experiences we all share.