Family Wellbeing Program

The Family Wellbeing Program supports parents and caregivers of Toronto youth ages 10 to 29 most vulnerable to involvement in serious violence and crime. The Family Wellbeing Program can help youth navigate and connect with services and prosocial opportunities (for example, volunteering) in their communities. This is done through a collaborative approach with key community partners to provide education, resources and referrals to programs and services that will allow families to improve their wellbeing, build family confidence and improve youth outcomes

The Family Wellbeing Program works to:

  • Increase awareness among parents, guardians and caregivers of the for youth involvement in violence and crime and the ways they can reduce the impacts of these risks.
  • Increase education and participation in prevention and intervention programs and support services available to parents, guardians and caregivers for reducing youth involvement in violence and crime.
  • Improve and support the ways people access the right help and increase collaboration between partners, systems and services for parents, guardians and caregivers who support youth impacted by community violence using a hyper-local, peer-based ambassador model.

The program currently serves families in Scarborough and will be expanding to York South-Weston in 2025.

Focus Audience

Parents, guardians, caregivers, families, and community members that support youth (ages 10 to 26 years old) most vulnerable to involvement in crime and violence in Scarborough.

Catchment area

The Family Wellbeing catchment area is Scarborough which includes the following 9 neighbourhood focus areas:

  1. Dorset Park
  2. East L’Amoreaux
  3. West L’Amoreaux
  4. Eglinton East
  5. Golfdale-Cedarbrae-Woburn
  6. Malvern East
  7. Morningside
  8. Oakridge
  9. West Hill

Eligibility

Participants who would like to receive service in this program are required to have all three of the following:

  1. Must live in Scarborough.
  2. Confirmation of postal code and living in one of the nine focus neighbourhoods listed above.
  3. Must be a parent, guardian, caregiver or extended family member, or a community member who supports a youth in their household or support circle. Youth they care for must be between the ages of 10 to 26 years old.

Critical Eligibility Factor: The youth must be experiencing increasing their vulnerability to involvement in crime and violence.

Priority Access will be given if a parent, caregiver or extended family member has multiple youth with all three eligibility criteria above, they are considered a priority.

The Family Wellbeing Program is funded by the Government of Canada’s Building Safer Communities Fund which supports municipalities and Indigenous communities in their efforts to address gun and gang frequency.

The Building Safer Communities Fund supports community-led projects that combat violence among children, youth, and young adults most vulnerable to involvement in crime and violence.

The City of Toronto is the first of many municipalities to receive Building Safer Communities funding.

There are two focus areas:

Project Prevention

To continue to focus on violence prevention, the City is adding three new initiatives alongside the Community P.E.E.R.S and Youth Violence Prevention projects.

Project Intervention

To continue to support violence intervention efforts, the City will expand its TO Wards Peace project. Building Safer Communities Fund builds upon and strengthens the City of Toronto’s long history of work in violence prevention, including its testing of a range of prevention, intervention, and recovery models to deliver local impact for city-wide change.

These legacy efforts include recognition of the complex root causes of gun violence and the public health nature of the problems by the Toronto Board of Health  in 2019.  The City of Toronto has also determined that the traumatic impact of gun violence in communities goes well beyond individuals that are directly involved. The impact of trauma may also lead to negative, long-term health outcomes and can be a contributing factor to the propensity to commit violence.