About Us

Mission

To walk beside traumatized youth on their journey towards healing and appropriate community integration.

What We Do

Based in Edmonton, YESS provides immediate and low-barrier shelter, temporary housing, and individualized wraparound support for youth ages 15-24.

We focus on working collaboratively with our youth-supporting partners on prevention and diversion out of homelessness. And ultimately, we aim to walk beside traumatized youth as they heal through relationships.

Our Focus

We focus on prevention and diversion out of homelessness. Prevention means providing proactive resources for youth and their caregivers before youth become homeless. Diversion means finding appropriate housing for youth before they become entrenched or as an exit out of homelessness.

We focus on healing trauma through relationship. Trauma has a negative impact on the physical, emotional, and developmental well-being of an individual. Among many other serious effects, trauma can have a lasting impact on the ability to develop healthy relationships.

We focus on walking beside youth to minimize falling through gaps. Barriers are policies or expectations that put resources out of reach of those who need them. These restrictions often prevent people from seeking help.

We focus on collaboration (with everyone). Collaboration means we work together with other organization and in line with local, provincial, and national plans to create a holistic approach to addressing homelessness.

About Our Logo

Meet Francis!

Francis is a swallow and he represents hope and renewal of life, as well as freedom! We hope that the bright colours represent our hope for the future.

The polygons represent that everyone is unique. We are all the building blocks that come together to form the whole!

Read our youth’s stories and successes