Celebrating Community-Based Research Excellence: Decisions for Affordable / Social Housing (DASH)

Housing challenges, such as shortages of social and affordable housing and rising homelessness, require collaborative solutions. To address this, we formed a community-campus partnership between the Alliance to End Homelessness Ottawa and an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Ottawa.

Striving to improve access to system-level housing and homelessness data, we are developing DASH (Decisions for Affordable/Social Housing). DASH is a dashboard that integrates siloed housing data and enables stakeholders to visualize and query this information to support evidence-based decisions, such as developing policies and planning new housing stock. DASH development has been guided by a community Advisory Group, and an Expert Steering Team composed of individuals with lived experience. Our collaborative approach ensures that the dashboard is designed not only to strengthen housing decision-making, but also to serve as a model for community-based data-driven solutions.