About Us

Our Mission

Built for Zero Canada is an ambitious national change effort helping a core group of leading communities end chronic homelessness and veteran homelessness – a first step on the path to eliminating all homelessness in Canada. Our structured, supportive and data-driven approach focuses on optimizing local homeless systems, accelerating the adoption of proven practices and driving continuous improvement.

Learn more about our approach to Getting to Zero.

The campaign is powered by the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness.

Our History

BFZ-C is part of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness (CAEH). Founded in 2012, the CAEH leads a national movement of individuals, organizations and communities working together to end homelessness. We mobilize communities to take action on homelessness and support them to apply proven approaches including Housing First, data-driven decision making and collective action to transform programs, policies and systems toward the goal of ending homelessness.

On June 16, 2015, the CAEH joined 21 communities to launch the 20,000 Homes Campaign with a goal to house 20,000 of Canada’s most vulnerable homeless people by July 1, 2018. We were inspired by Community Solution’s successful 100,000 Homes Campaign in the US, which later became Built for Zero.

We soon realized to reduce chronic homelessness, we had to put much more emphasis on critical community strategies like using real-time data, creating coordinated homeless systems and embracing strategies for continuous performance improvement in addition to a focus on urgently housing our most vulnerable homeless neighbours. We re-grouped and redefined our aim to end chronic homelessness in 20 communities and house 20,000 of Canada’s most vulnerable homeless people by July 1, 2020. When we reached 20,000 housing move-ins in March 2019, we again refocused our efforts. We relaunched as Built for Zero Canada to support communities to reach functional zero chronic homelessness and then expand those efforts to all forms of homelessness.

Our Supporters

Our work is made possible by our generous sponsors who want to see an end to homelessness in Canada just as much as we do. Thank you for your continued support.