Claim Your Right to Housing!

Homelessness among women and gender-diverse people in Canada has been declared a national human rights crisis.

Learn more about Canada’s first-ever human rights-based review panel on Canada’s failure to eliminate homelessness for women and gender-diverse people.

The human rights review panel known as Neha is examining the right to safe, adequate and affordable housing for women, Two Spirit, Trans, and gender-diverse people, and the government’s duty to uphold this right.

want to learn more about the neha review panel?

History is being made!

The Review Panel on Canada’s Failure to Eliminate Homelessness Amongst Women and Gender-Diverse People is holding dialogues to gather oral testimony of housing-rights violations and solutions that could transform the system. The panel will then report back to the Minister of Housing with recommendations.

Download Toolkit:

Although the submission portal is closed, our toolkit can still support human rights advocacy work that you are doing in your community!

Our Goals:

Support lived experts and their allies to participate in human rights work
Provide practical tools and templates to enable Review Panel participation
Provide tools and diverse frameworks and mechanisms to enable community organizing on the right to housing
Democratize knowledge about the right to housing in Canada and how to claim it

Check out our Resources and FAQ pages to support you and/or your community’s effort to create submissions!

Read written testimony

The Neha Review Panel closed its written submission portal and we want to thank every individual, advocate, grassroot group, and organization across Canada who submitted testimony and evidence!

Partners and individuals have shared their testimony with us, click the button below to read testimony:

Neha is now conducting in-person and virtual oral dialogues. Read our news page to stay updated.

Thank You Community Champions!

50 Community Champions trained from coast to coast to coast. Our Champions went into their communities and supported people with lived experience to make written submissions to Neha.
Nearly 200 people with lived experience were engaged and either made direct submissions or were part of group submissions.
Community Champions hosted in-person gatherings to collect testimonies, some worked with WNHHN and NIWHN directly in Edmonton, Vancouver, Toronto, and Yellowknife.

Land Acknowledgement

We would like to acknowledge and recognize that Canada is a settler colonial state on Turtle Island, which for generations has been governed and inhabited by Indigenous Peoples practicing traditional ways of doing, knowing, and being. As recognized in Homeless on Homelands, a human rights claim submitted by the National Indigenous Women’s Housing Network: “At the core of the matter is dispossession from lands Indigenous women, girls, and gender-diverse people have called home since time immemorial. Colonial conceptualizations of land, ownership and housing as commodities that are bought, sold and are subject to financial speculation disrupt the relationship of mutuality and reciprocity that is inherent to Indigenous relationship with land. It commodifies land and positions housing development as a tool of extracting wealth and profits. Current housing crises and ongoing financialization of housing in Canada deeply relies on disruption and elimination of Indigenous ways of knowing and living.”

Read Our Human Rights Claims

We came together to utilize the new procedures under the National Housing Strategy Act to claim our right to housing and our right to substantive equality. Our Claims spotlight violations of the right to housing experienced by marginalized women and gender-diverse people across the country, calling for immediate action. We are here to claim a better future for ourselves, our children, our communities, and the planet. We will no longer accept the unacceptable.

We call on the Government of Canada to fully realize our human right to housing and be held accountable for the human rights violations being perpetrated against us.