Middlesex Community Safety and Well-Being Plan

Housing is a foundational condition for safety and well-being. Housing instability can increase risks related to mental health, addiction, family stress, victimization, exploitation, emergency service use, and chronic crisis involvement. The Plan focuses on preventing and responding to housing insecurity, homelessness, hidden homelessness, and gaps across the housing continuum.

Recommended Actions

• Support implementation of relevant priorities in the London and Middlesex County Housing Stability Action Plan (2026-2031) with specific attention to hidden homelessness and the realities of rural communities.
• Improve service integration and referral pathways across emergency services, human and social services, mental health and addiction supports, income assistance, outreach, and housing providers, including for people experiencing chronic homelessness.
• Develop a coordinated data and reporting framework to monitor housing instability, homelessness, service demands, and service gaps over time and, where appropriate, by geography and population, supporting evidence-informed planning and decision-making.
• Identify and share opportunities to pursue provincial, federal, and community based housing investments collaboratively, including appropriate private and nonprofit sector partnerships.
• Provide regular public updates on housing stability and homelessness as part of broader CSWB reporting and community engagement.

Many safety and well-being concerns emerge when children, youth, and families face unmet basic needs, isolation, poverty, trauma, school disengagement, online harms, exploitation, or limited access to positive activities and trusted adults. This priority should be understood as prevention infrastructure, not simply youth programming.

Recommended Actions

• Encourage the delivery of programs focused on consent, healthy relationships, online safety, human trafficking awareness (including sex trafficking), coping skills, and youth resilience.
• Strengthen and clarify pathways for families to access mental health services, parenting supports, crisis response services, school-based resources, and assistance with basic needs.
• Create and maintain active living opportunities through partnerships among municipal recreation services, educational institutions, and organizations serving children, youth, families, and seniors.
• Identify opportunities to engage youth in shaping program development that reflects their experiences and expressed needs.

Poor access can turn manageable challenges into emergencies. Residents may delay seeking help, rely on emergency services, miss appointments, become isolated, or remain disconnected from housing, health, employment, family, and victim support services. This priority is especially important in rural areas, where services may technically exist but remain difficult to use because of distance, cost, limited transit, privacy concerns, or fragmented referral pathways. 

Recommended Actions

• Identify where residents face the greatest transportation and service access barriers.
• Develop a rural service access and navigation map.
• Advance sustainable transportation solutions that connect residents to essential services and opportunities.
• Integrate active transportation into service access planning
• Expand opportunities for hybrid, mobile, outreach-based, and community-based service delivery.
• Work with the Province, the Middlesex London Ontario Health Team, and local partners to expand access to primary health care.
• Work with Indigenous communities and Indigenous-led organizations to reduce barriers to culturally safe services, including transportation, navigation, and locally appropriate service delivery.

Poverty, unstable work, unemployment, underemployment, lack of transportation, food insecurity, and exclusion from local opportunity can increase vulnerability and reduce access to protective factors. This priority encompasses employment pathways, income supports, financial literacy, workforce development, youth employment, entrepreneurship, local hiring, food security, and other basic needs supports.

Recommended Actions

• Work collaboratively with workforce development organizations, employment services, human and social services, employers, schools, libraries, and community agencies to improve access to employment, training, income supports, financial literacy, and basic needs supports.
• Monitor progress in economic wellbeing as an indicator of community well-being.
• Work with economic development partners to identify practical opportunities where local hiring, entrepreneurship, workforce development, business retention, and growth can support CSWB outcomes.
• Increase youth employment through mentorship and accessible skill development.
• Promote inclusive local economic participation.

Mental health and addiction concerns are closely connected to housing instability, family stress, victimization, exploitation, public space concerns, emergency service demand, impediments to child and youth well-being, and chronic crisis involvement. Supports can include prevention, early intervention, crisis pathways, outreach, peer support, warm referrals, caregiver supports, and coordinated responses for people with complex or high-acuity needs.

Recommended Actions 

• Improve access to mental health and addiction services for rural communities.
• Support priority services in applying trauma- and violence-informed approaches in their interactions with children, youth, families, caregivers, and people who have experienced harm.
• Strengthen collaborative response approaches, including outreach, service navigation, warm referrals, peer support, and coordinated case conferencing for high-acuity cases, to ensure more seamless and effective support.
• Strengthen and clarify pathways for 24/7 crisis intervention supports.
• Increase efforts to reduce the stigma experienced by persons with mental illness and those who struggle with substance use.

Violence can occur in homes, relationships, institutions, workplaces, and public spaces. Its effects extend beyond immediate physical harm to negative impacts on mental health, housing stability, family well-being, social trust, and community participation. The Plan focuses on preventing, identifying, responding to, and reducing violence, victimization, exploitation, hate, discrimination, and abuse.

Recommended Actions 

• Strengthen current reporting, referral, and follow-up approaches for victims and their families.
• Identify access barriers and potential responses in rural communities to support victims of gender-based violence, including partnership and funding opportunities.
• Provide a diversity of safe disclosure points in the community.
• Advocate for developmentally appropriate and coordinated responses for young victims of crime and their families.
• Strengthen coordinated referral pathways to ensure individuals and families experiencing intimate partner violence, sexual violence, coercive control, human trafficking, and other forms of gender-based violence can access timely,
  seamless, and appropriate supports across services.
• Support the provision of community training on how to prevent the bystander effect in situations of hate crimes, discrimination, criminal harassment, and other forms of interpersonal violence or behaviours that may lead to interpersonal violence.
• Strengthen relationships with Indigenous, racialized, 2SLGBTQIA+, and faith communities, newcomers, people with disabilities, youth, schools, and local service providers to better understand safety concerns and improve prevention
  and response opportunities.
• Encourage the adoption of programs that focus on the longer-term potential to prevent violence in collaboration with local health and educational institutions.