Homelessness & Activism in Toronto & Montreal: Toward Community-Based Participatory Research & Emergent Strategy

This research explores generating a community-based participatory research (CBPR) project on technology, broadly construed, with housing justice and anti-poverty activist communities in Canada. This research employs stratified purposive sampling and semi-structured open-ended interviewing methods with Toronto and Montréal activists and is approached from the perspective of a CBPR methodology. 12 activists were interviewed for this research. Interviews indicate that barriers and access to technology centre on education, trustworthiness, usability, and dependability. However, activists also desire systemic and structural change grounded in communities. Activists indicate that elite academic researchers, people who represent the state, and corporations cannot solve issues surrounding homelessness and the Canadian housing market. Instead, activists recommend emergent project creation anchored in community as a possible avenue for mitigating aspects of these phenomena. As such, this research provides an appropriate foundation for multiple community projects beyond this text.