Barriers include the usual suspects
The program coordinator for
Future Cents is Rikki Gelowitz (she has a Cree ancestry), who is working for an
important feature of the firmly established Youth Around Prince Resource Centre.
Rikki enjoys the work for a well-conceived
community operation located in the civic square district of Prince George, B.C.,
which takes youth from one place in life and puts them in an obviously
different place. “It started ten years ago,” said Rikki, about the Future Cents
history of turning youth away from negatives to redirecting energy into
positive outcomes.
Future Cents is designed to
work with a segment of society who are facing or emerging from barriers.
“Franca Petrucci of Prince George started this program,” said Rikki, because a
social need existed, “at the same time as the Youth Around Prince George
Building was built and developed into a multi-service youth agency.” She
described the YAP as highly functioning facilities and a one-stop shop for youth
in the city.
Future Cents, she said, is “a
not-for-profit program funded by Youth Service Canada and in-kind funding from
the Ministry of
Children and Family Development in the province of BC.” She described how
Future Cents operates with youth, “facing barriers to education or employment
but have attained a level of self-awareness, and takes these youth for seven
months, ten at a time, to teach them how to break down the barriers.”
In
the variety of nefarious barriers come the usual suspects: addictions,
untenable homes, personal dysfunctions, peer pressures and their opposite,
detachments. All kinds of reasons exist for certain youth, even the brightest,
often the most intelligent ones, to fail in school, or not advance via the
mundane. This puts them at risk of descent into dissatisfying, unfulfilling
lives, and, Franca Petrucci believed it was happening
needlessly just because some people don’t readily jump into the humdrum or
day-to-day world.
Some
people balk at the thought of packing groceries or selling hamburgers, or
cashiering at the drug mart. For most people that is what the world offers
among the many of educational opportunities or jobs available for society’s
emerging offspring. Future Cents endeavours to make those who move aside or out
of sync, as exceptions-to-the-rule, into well-springs of energy, creativity and
community pride from their own self-generated achievements.
Rikki
obtains some current program direction with the help of Danielle Girard, who is
presently engaged as the Youth Representative, and Jan Kupp who is working as
Youth Supervisor. These are two people among those presently taking, “negatives
and turning them into positives by creating self-aware programs and services,
and developing a toolkit of habits about work ethics, skills, and deportment
toward setting fixed goals, and striving to attain them.
Rikki
said, “The projects we see are usually youth-oriented, things like a community
‘clothes closet’ providing a used clothing store, another was community kitchen
to feed the homeless. Others included music jams, others included seasonal
maintenance services for people needing assisted living,” and seniors. In fact
with ten youth operating through each intake, she said, “The programs come in a
lot of different forms and change regularly.”
The
people participating are receiving minimum wage based stipends while this goes
for fulltime, the ten, and a host of part-time youth picking up training
courses like foodsafe, super host, Worksafe CPR and others. “They leave Future
Cents with a resume that includes suicide intervention training, peer
counselling, some advertising and marketing training, and much of it is taught
hands-on, doing field work in their special projects.”
Future
Cents is giving youth a second, third and sometimes fourth chance to navigate
the shoals of life. “Applicants may try several times. The organization of the
current eleven fulltime project designers and three part time honorariums are
supervised by five staff members but
rather than supervision it is more like mentorship. They have a lot of youth in
their midst, said Rikki, “twenty to thirty youth strong are accessing services
on the premises in any given day. The facilities have an Internet CAP site
supplied with Industry Canada machines so youth can build resumes and conduct
email or maintain websites.”
She
noted the gender split is about 50/50 over the long term, while each seven
month intake has its own makeup in numbers. Over the course of the past decade
in existence the Future Cents program has produced over 100 graduates. They are
in the 11th intake and planning for the 12th, which is
forthcoming in March 2008. “We do tracking of the 100 grads on an almost daily
basis,” and past participants are attached by the sense of family that ensues
from working through Future Cents.”
Danielle
Girard has made the environment her focus for Future Cents developments that
she designed and runs. One such program includes the planting of trees at City
Hall and School District 57 properties. She was surprised at the volume of
redtape people encounter when putting togerher projects. She had a short
planting season and got 600 trees on the ground. She intends to leave a roadmap
to Future Cents so next time, hundreds, and perhaps thousands more trees can be
planted.
The program
was not designed to be exclusive to Aboriginal people, but is notably
addressing a large demographic of First Nations with the service, some years
intakes resulting in as high as an 80 percent Aboriginal clientele. (Other
numbers to illustrate the population of Prince George includes 20 percent of
the elementary and middle school population as First Nation.)
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