$25 million latest gift from Slaight family to launch a new model for tackling homelessness

The Slaight family is making a new $25 million commitment to honor the legacy of the late broadcasting magnate and philanthropist Allan Slaight and launch a new model for tackling homelessness in Toronto.

Channeled through The Slaight Family Foundation, the gift will create the Slaight Family Housing Lab, a new initiative housed at St. Michael’s Hospital’s MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions and delivered in partnership with United Way Greater Toronto, with the aim of moving people from encampments and street homelessness into supportive housing using an evidence‑based, housing‑first approach.

The family and its partners say the Lab is designed both as an immediate intervention in Toronto’s homelessness emergency and as a longer‑term experiment in system redesign that can be replicated in other cities.

Drawing on decades of research led by Dr. Stephen Hwang and his colleagues at St. Michael’s MAP Centre, the Housing Lab will work with the City of Toronto to identify vacant supportive housing units across the city and match them with individuals currently living in shelters, encampments, and on the street.

Dedicated case management teams will begin working with people well before they move indoors, helping them secure or replace identification documents, address basic tax filings and benefits issues, and meet eligibility requirements for supportive housing and income supports so they can transition as quickly as possible once a unit becomes available.

Once people are housed, those same teams will stay involved for years, providing intensive follow-up that can include clinical care, addiction and mental health treatment, connections to primary care providers, and access to employment and training services, with the goal of supporting long-term housing stability rather than one-time placements.

The Slaight Family Housing Lab is initially targeting stable housing for at least 300 people over a five‑year period, with outcomes carefully tracked so that successful elements of the model can be adapted and scaled by other municipalities across Canada.

Program leaders note that people experiencing homelessness use hospital emergency departments and other acute-care services at far higher rates than the general population and say that a robust housing-first strategy has the potential to reduce avoidable hospital visits and relieve pressure on an already strained health-care system while improving health and social outcomes for some of its most vulnerable users.

They cite earlier Toronto initiatives, such as Dunn House, a supportive housing project for people who frequently use emergency departments, as evidence that pairing housing with tailored supports can stabilize lives and reduce system costs.

The $25 million gift arrives amid what local officials describe as a worsening homelessness and housing affordability crisis in Toronto and across Ontario. The social housing waitlist in the city surpassed 100,000 names in 2025, and a provincial estimate put the number of people without a home across Ontario at roughly 85,000 that year, up 7.8 percent from 2024.

In that context, the Slaight family and its partners are presenting the new Housing Lab as both an urgent humanitarian response—“doing whatever it takes,” as United Way Greater Toronto has phrased it—to get people indoors quickly and as a deliberate investment in long‑term systems change that can help shift how Canadian cities respond to chronic homelessness.

For the Slaight family, the initiative also extends the philanthropic legacy of Allan Slaight, who built a fortune in radio and media and later became known for his significant charitable giving to health care, the arts, and social services in Toronto and beyond.

The family has continued to deploy large‑scale philanthropy in his name through The Slaight Family Foundation, supporting youth mental health, disability inclusion, seniors’ services, and dementia research; the new Housing Lab is being positioned as the next chapter in that story, applying the family’s characteristic focus on practical, high‑impact projects to one of the country’s most pressing social challenges.