B.C.’s Housing minister says homeless youth is a focus of her governments work to address the issue of both homelessness and housing.

Selina Robinson says the province is now gathering data to better understand homelessness, who is homeless, and more importantly why in order to find solutions.

In gathering that data, she says Kamloops deserves credit for holding the first of its kind youth homelessness count.

“The data is very very helpful and I want to give a shout out to Katherine McParland and her work at A Way Home Kamloops,” she said. “They’ve done an outstanding job. It is absolutely a priority area for us.”

“Part of what we did is we conducted the very first provincial homeless count that had never been done before, so we never really knew. We had bits and pieces of data but now we have some comprehensive data.”

Robinson says the key is to prevent youth from becoming homeless noting they need to concentrate on things like youth transitioning out of care.

“That’s the key here. Once someone is homeless, it’s much harder to move them back and help them move into a stable environment,” Robinson added. “We’d rather keep people stable, so another example is we’re funding a rent bank, because sometimes it’s just a few hundred dollars that people are short for a month or two, and let’s keep them housed.”

There were 136 homeless youth identified in the 2018 count, while Indigenous youth were over-represented. Fifty six of those were visibly homeless, 30 were ‘hidden homeless’, and 50 were not homeless at the time of the count but had been at some point in the past 12 months.