Canada’s longstanding narrative of opportunity and stability has positioned it as a key destination for migrants. However, rising costs of living, housing constraints, and pressures on public services are increasingly challenging this value proposition. At the same time, Guyana is undergoing rapid economic transformation driven by oil discovery, creating new conditions of opportunity that are reshaping migration patterns and prompting renewed engagement from diaspora communities.

This research addresses the challenge of understanding how migration, disruption, resilience, and shifting value systems are transforming the meaning of home for Guyanese diasporic communities connected to both the Greater Toronto Area and Guyana, and how these dynamics shape decisions about opportunity, belonging, and community across borders.

Using an explorative qualitative approach, the study employs a braided methodology that integrates three strands: (1) systems analysis of structural forces shaping housing and migration, (2) narrative inquiry grounded in lived experience, and (3) foresight methods to examine shifting future expectations. This design approach informs how these strands are brought together, moving iteratively between lived experience and systemic conditions to generate interpretive insight. Primary data was collected through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 18 participants across multigenerational, kinship-based networks spanning Toronto and Guyana. This approach captures how meanings of home are constructed relationally across time, place, and family.

The research introduces the Home Realization Framework as an original interpretive model, accompanied by visualizations and future-oriented scenarios, to explain how home is realized through the interaction of structural forces, lived experience, and evolving place-based expectations. Together, these findings reveal how home is not a fixed condition but an adaptive process, shaped through ongoing negotiation across places under conditions of uncertainty.

This study contributes a relational and future-oriented perspective that connects lived experienced to systemic change, offering insights for design, policy, and community practice aimed at supporting more adaptive and equitable conditions for realizing home.