TIPS For Working with Youth in Community Development Projects

Introduction

As part of Phase II of Canada's Drug Strategy, Health Canada undertook a number of initiatives to address the needs of youth who live in high-risk conditions. Youth-at-risk can include youth having trouble with the law, youth who have dropped out of school or are at risk of dropping out, those having problems with alcohol and/or other drug use, those experiencing depression or having thoughts of suicide, victims of abuse, those living on the street or involved with street life, those with HIV/AIDS or at risk of contracting HIV/AIDS through injection drug use or involvement in the sex trade, and other youth defined by the community and themselves as being at risk.

In 1993, a series of workshops was organized across Canada for federal government employees, service providers and youth to provide information on issues and program strategies from across North America to address issues affecting youth-at-risk, and to get communities working on forming adult/youth partnerships to identify and address local problems.

Nineteen community groups, including service providers and youth, were formed out of the workshops, which were held in Northern Ontario, Alberta and Manitoba. These groups were given some basic community-planning skills and were encouraged to continue their planning and partnership building once they returned to their own communities.

Of the 19 groups formed, 13 stayed together for a year or longer. All of the groups were made up of both youth and adults. Three types of activities came out of these groups:

• to build better youth/service provider networks in the community,
• to develop community education and awareness programs on youth issues, and
• to improve individual youth agencies or service system delivery.

In January 1994, all of the 165 youth and adult participants at the original workshops were sent a questionnaire asking them for their opinions about the effectiveness of the workshops and the follow-up work done at the community level. Interviews were also conducted with 19 service providers and Health Canada staff and 17 youth involved in the original workshops. These "tips" for working with at-risk youth in community development activities came out of this experience.

These tips were further refined with input from the participants in the National Youth-at-Risk Community Development Project, which took place from late 1994 until early 1996. The goal of the project was to assist various sites in Canada to undertake community development processes and activities, to document their challenges and successes, and to make this information available to other Canadian communities interested in undertaking similar processes. This document is a complement to the report "Meeting the Needs of Youth-at-Risk in Canada: Learnings from a National Community Development Project".