On a typical Thursday afternoon at Youth Diversion Kingston, five to seven young people file into a classroom that smells like snacks and looks, increasingly, like a clubhouse. Their artwork is on the walls. The lighting is warm. Four adults who know them by name are in the room. For many of these kids, it is the safest place they will be all week.
Funded by a community grant from the Community Foundation for Kingston & Area, the Empowering Young Minds program (EYM) was designed to reach youth who are not in education, employment, or training. Over the course of the grant, 59 young people between the ages of 8 and 17 attended drop-in sessions regularly, and another 215 participated in workshops, outings, and community events. Ninety-two percent of participants received no criminal charges while attending. For Executive Director Shawn Quigley, who has worked in the field for 30 years, those numbers still do not capture the full picture.
"The demographic of the young person we work with is the kind of young person that may struggle to make a connection at other services," Quigley says. "Having any kid show up at this location at a given time is a huge success. Having them come back consistently is a huge win."
One of EYM's most powerful elements was an unexpected partnership with COSMO, a program run by properly trained and supervised inmates from Collins Bay Institution. The men came in not to frighten or lecture, but to share. They wrote music, talked about choices, and described lives that looked startlingly familiar to some of the hardest youth in the program. "These guys grew up just like our most challenging youth do," Quigley explains. "Same experiences, not having a dad around, introduction to substances young. They told their stories, and the kids really aligned with that."
"We can tell you all the goals we want in our applications, and then all of a sudden these really cool things that we never anticipated start to happen." — Shawn Quigley, Executive Director, Youth Diversion
One young woman, who had not attended school since grade five, was expecting a child, and was navigating addiction and involvement with the law, agreed to come through the door for a Cosmo session. Getting her there at all, Quigley notes, was itself a milestone. Once inside, she began talking about her future. "For someone who lives day by day," he says, "that was a huge achievement."
Two outcomes nobody had anticipated: a food pantry, now stocked through partnerships with Loblaws and the local food bank, born from the simple recognition that a hungry kid cannot engage; and the early formation of a Youth Advisory Committee, with young people beginning to shape the program from the inside. "Nothing good is going to happen if somebody has an empty stomach," Quigley says. "The food pantry would never have happened without the funding to start Empowering Young Minds."
The program has since woven itself into Youth Diversion's core services, with staff committed to keeping it running regardless of future funding. "We go wherever the kids are," Quigley says. "We don't make kids come to us."
The grant, it turns out, was just the beginning.
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