Delancey Street is a highly structured 2-year live-in community model that provides a pathway towards personal empowerment for those exiting correctional facilities, and/or wishing to leave life on the streets behind. Community members engage in purposeful and meaningful activities that contribute to developing life skills and prosocial behaviours, achieving high school equivalency, and learning three marketable vocations.
Delancey Street provides an attractive, empowering opportunity for vulnerable individuals to lead, learn and earn, at no cost to participating members, family, or government. The model sustains itself through the sale of goods and services delivered through Delancey Street’s own vocational training schools, staffed by seasoned members of the community. A combination of community-focused values and vocational training are the basis for developing individual accountability, personal agency, a strong sense of belonging, and mutual concern for one another.
Since 1971, this evidence-based, peer-led model has capitalized on the inherent power of ‘each one, teach one’ to prepare individuals to rejoin society with confidence, motivation, skills, knowledge and fortitude to forge a new path for themselves. The flagship model in San Francisco has been replicated from coast to coast (New York, South Carolina, North Carolina, New Mexico, Los Angeles) helping over 23,000 people return to fully participating citizens – leading productive lives. Delancey Street BC will be the first replication/adaptation of the model in Canada.
Read the Business CaseLife Skills/Vocational Training Model
Read about the model in Forbes and the Vancouver Sun.
