Clinical sociology and community interventions: The Community Ideas Factory life skills project

Abstract

At least 235,000 people experience homelessness in Canada each year, with over 35,000 experiencing homelessness on any given night (Gaetz et al. 2013a). For many, maintaining housing is challenging due to the absence of essential life skills. This paper departs from a community-identified problem with conventional life skills programming and uses sociological tools to address it. Community partners have expressed a need for a life skills curriculum that is inclusive, representing the intersecting needs and experiences of a diversity of clients, and that will address budgetary constraints of not-for-profit (NFP) organizations in the region.

The Community-Ideas Factory: The Life Skills Project consists of an interdisciplinary research team and 16 NFPs collaborating to build a comprehensive, inclusive, relevant, and effective online life skills intervention. Adopting a clinical sociological and community-engaged research approach, our findings emphasize the importance of recognizing that essential life skills are diverse and shaped by the larger social, political, and economic context, such as social inequities. Notably, social justice is identified as a crucial life skill, uncovering the intersectionalities that shape individuals’ lives and that must be integrated into life skills programming. This ground-breaking finding is facilitated by our methodology, deviating from the positivist research approaches prevalent in life skills studies. Significantly, the entire life skills curriculum is Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI)-informed. The intervention addresses immediate financial strains for partner organizations. We anticipate that the intervention will interrupt current cycles of homelessness while holding promise as a preventative measure.