SPRE National Accelerator Spotlight:
Yonge Street Mission

Yonge Street Mission (YSM) is a registered charity in Toronto that has operated continuously since its establishment in 1896. Since their founding, the organization has consistently served individuals and families experiencing poverty in Toronto without interruption. While service delivery methods have evolved over time, YSM’s core commitment to meeting people in their time of need, and providing wraparound support that enables movement from surviving to thriving has remained constant. The organization’s mission is to end long-term poverty in Toronto by working in partnership to support life change, develop healthy communities, and remove systemic barriers. Grounded in dignity, compassion, and empowerment, YSM serves youth, families, and community members through integrated supports that foster hope, build capacity, and create pathways for lasting change.

YSM provides a range of interconnected programs, including wraparound social services, employment, housing and education supports, mental health resources, and community development initiatives. A defining feature of its approach is an integrated model of care that responds to immediate needs while supporting longer-term progress. This model is supported by an internal measurement and evaluation system that tracks human and community well-being over time and informs programming decisions, impact assessment, and efforts to identify systemic barriers contributing to persistent poverty.

The organization is most active in Toronto’s Regent Park, a neighbourhood that has undergone significant transformation over the past decade. During this period, YSM established a Community Development team composed of Community Capacity Builders and Partnership Coordinators who work alongside local residents in priority neighbourhoods. The team’s role is to support initiatives that strengthen community wellbeing, ensure equitable access to community supports and benefits, and enable residents to have a voice in decisions that affect them. As Regent Park continues to redevelop, YSM works with local leaders, neighbourhood agencies and service providers, and municipal partners to support the realization of a mixed-income, inclusive community. While this work does not directly alter day-to-day social service delivery, it strengthens the broader neighbourhood context in which many program participants live.

Housing affordability has emerged as a critical barrier for many community members served by YSM. Through a series of community charrettes, residents identified the lack of safe, stable, and affordable housing as the most significant constraint to making progress. This qualitative input was supported by data collected through YSM’s measurement system, which reinforced the link between housing insecurity and limited economic mobility. In response, YSM identified an opportunity to leverage land wholly owned by the organization to address housing affordability while reducing barriers to long-term progress.

This process led to the development of ELEV8 by YSM, an affordable housing initiative designed to function as an alternative to traditional social housing models. The project will consist of 194 residential units, ranging from studio apartments to three-bedroom family units, and will be developed above two floors of YSM program space. These program areas will include an employment hub, entrepreneurship labs, and approximately 10,000 square feet of hospitality-sector training space. The housing model, once approved, is intended to allow residents to increase their incomes and make measurable employment progress without risking displacement, directly addressing policies that impose rent or subsidy clawbacks when incomes exceed set thresholds.

ELEV8 by YSM is the largest initiative in the organization’s history and is being advanced through a structured governance framework. The project is overseen by YSM’s Board of Directors, with guidance from a third-party building committee composed of housing development professionals. YSM has engaged an experienced affordable housing development firm and a trusted building partner to support all aspects of pre-development. Through participation in the Accelerator program, the organization is finalizing design, planning, and feasibility work to secure site plan approvals, pursue government financing, and raise private capital to address a $20 million funding gap. These steps are intended to position the project to be construction-ready by early 2027 and to support YSM’s longer-term goal of addressing housing affordability while enabling upward economic mobility for individuals and families in Toronto.