Julio: Homeless and Determined to Finish College in Rural Canada
Homelessness rarely fits the image people have in their heads. It doesn’t always look like a city sidewalk or a downtown encampment. Sometimes it looks like a 20-year-old college student in Pembroke, Ontario, living out of a crisis hotel room, doing everything he can to keep his education on track.
Four months ago, Julio was driving to pick up cigarettes on the reservation when the car he was riding in went off the road in the rain. He wasn’t driving; his friend was, and Julio’s first instinct wasn’t to check on himself. He stayed focused on his friend, working with paramedics and firefighters to make sure he was okay. It wasn’t until later that the full impact of the crash caught up with him.
Julio lives with a long-term concussion disorder, one that intensifies under stress and can be masked by other conditions affecting his eyes. He also has Asperger’s Syndrome. In the weeks after the accident, the stress of an approaching school year and a disrupted routine became too much. He blacked out. When he came to, he’d lost his place at Columbus House, the youth program that had been keeping him housed.
Columbus House exists for young people who’ve become estranged from their families or who carry difficult histories. Residents are required to either attend school or hold a summer job, and staff there had been helping Julio navigate ODSP (Ontario’s Disability Support Program) while he worked toward college. Losing his spot there didn’t just cost him housing — it cost him the safety net that had let him function.
Without the hotel program he’s in now, Julio said he’d be back outside, relying on survival skills he’s had to use before. He’s already been assaulted while homeless in the past; he still carries the scars.
Despite all of it, Julio doesn’t describe himself as broken. “It beats you down,” he said, “but it’s up to you to get back up.” He’s continuing his coursework, working with staff to figure out what comes next, and trying to hold onto a version of stability that has nothing to do with walls or a roof.
“Home is where the heart is,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if I’m on the streets or have four walls around me — I’m always at home with myself.”
When asked what he’d wish for, Julio didn’t initially ask for anything for himself. He wished for other people on the street to be understood rather than judged. He then mentioned wanting peace for himself and more affordable housing, pointing out how sharply rents have climbed in less than a decade.
Julio’s situation is not rare. Rural and youth homelessness are often invisible precisely because they don’t match what people expect homelessness to look like. A car accident, a disability, and one disrupted program were enough to put a college student without family nearby on the edge of living outside. It’s a reminder of how thin the line can be between stability and crisis for young people navigating disability, isolation, and a housing system that offers very little room for error.
