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| Rikki Gelowitz is the program coordinator for Future Sense, an innovative approach to mentoring at risk youth in Prince George BC |
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| YAP Building is home of Future Sense |
Photo credits Mack McColl
The program coordinator for Future Sense is Rikki Gelowitz (she has a Cree ancestry) who is working for this important aspect of the firmly established Youth Around Prince Resource Centre. She enjoys the work for a well-conceived community concern located in the civic square district of Prince George, BC, which takes youth from one place in life and puts them in an obviously different place.
"It started ten years ago," said Rikki, of the Future Sense history of turning youth away from negatives to redirecting energy into positive outcomes.
Future Sense 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 Sense, 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 Sense 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 Sense 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 Sense 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 Sense 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 Sense 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 Sense."
Danielle Girard has made the environment her focus for Future Sense 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 Sense 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.)
