Youth Agency Collaborative (YAC)
YAC led the first provincial customization of MyCompass for youth case management and information sharing. The platform was co-designed by agencies and informed by youth and frontline experience to support collective action rather than siloed work.
YAC is about
The Youth Agency Collaborative (YAC) is a collective of more than 30 youth-serving agencies working together to improve how youth experience services across housing, mental health, justice, child intervention, health, and community supports. Our shared goal is to reduce youth homelessness, strengthen mental health and wellbeing, and create clearer, more compassionate pathways to support for youth with complex needs. Rather than operating as isolated programs, we are building a coordinated system where youth receive consistent, holistic, and culturally grounded care—no matter where they enter.
How MyCompass is helping
YAC led the first provincial customization of MyCompass for youth case management and information sharing. The platform was co-designed by agencies and informed by youth and frontline experience to support collective action rather than siloed work.
Core challenges MyCompass needed to help with
- Youth were being asked to repeat their stories across agencies, often re-triggering trauma.
- Agencies lacked a shared way to coordinate care, see system-wide involvement, or track outcomes together.
- Gaps between systems (housing, health, justice, child intervention) disrupted continuity of care.
- Existing case management tools were not designed to support the holistic wellbeing of youth, focusing instead on tracking outputs, referrals, and service transactions rather than outcomes that matter to young people’s development and growth.
- Frontline workers relied on informal relationships rather than shared infrastructure to collaborate.
Why this matters
This work is about humanizing how social services are designed and delivered. Instead of forcing youth to navigate fragmented systems, YAC is redesigning the architecture around how people actually live, heal, and grow. MyCompass enables agencies to act as a coordinated network, shifting from transactional service delivery to relational, youth-centered care. It points toward a future where systems adapt to youth—not the other way around.
Key elements include:
- Shared youth profiles that reduce duplication and prevent youth from retelling their stories.
- Coordinated case planning across agencies while respecting privacy, consent, and role clarity.
- Shared outcome tracking aligned to youth wellbeing rather than program outputs.
- A culturally grounded framework, using the Indigenous Medicine Wheel, built directly into MyCompass to support balance across mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing.
