I finally heard from a Federal govenrment department that a grant that I (on behalf of my organization) submitted 15 months ago has cleared the last review hurdle and that the “cheque is in the mail”. This is great news for the Community Resource & Learning Room as if gives us the means to continue on our work at a local school in York Region.

My school has about 2000 students and is proving to be a great school to test out our thinking that a community organization can operate within a school and provide needed community resources and connect with youth who are disconnecting from school and the community. We operate 5 days a week in the school, offering a range of employment, community referral, general support, computer and IT resources, volunteer programming and support to teachers and school groups.

Funding has been alway a challenge for our organization as we don’t fit nicely into funding niches of many of the traditional government funding groups since our operations reside in a school. The prevailing view is that since we operate in a school, it’s a school funding responsibility and therefore we are not eligible for funding. This “catch 22″ has hamstrung us in the past, even though we (as a community non profit organization) are attempting to address some of the most wicked and complex problems that our community and society are facing. Receiving these funds, hopefully will mark the beginning of greater support from our funding sector.

As a community organization we provide services and support to youth in transition to the community, many of which (estimated at 50%) will not go on to post secondary education or training. Of these numbers, its estimated that one half could graduate if they chose to stay in school. My favourite research that connects to this trend is on Resiliency. The core premise of this research identifies that: opportunities for meaningful experiences; supportive and encouraging relationships with significant adults; and having challenging expectations placed on them are the key qualities that drive a young person forward with their development and growth. Bonnie Bernard has many reports and books that outline the resiliency research driven approach.

Our grant mentioned earlier is to conduct youth community mapping in York region. We will engage over 40 youth mappers who will create unique mapping projects that will eventually form one unified map that will illustrate youth poverty and homelessness in our area. Within this map, the youth community researchers/mappers will focus on adult – youth relations; health; and recreation as these elements connect to poverty & homelessness.

In this work and in my complementry work with students and community youth at the CR&LR, I am applying ICT tools, blogging etc whenerver and wherever I can. I hope to run mini workshops this winter on blogging and related tools to students and staff. I was very pleased to see blog called A Difference with a post called “A Growing Community of Fearless Educators”. There are some great posts and links here with a special one by the principal of the school where the author Dan Kuropatwa teaches. I will be pointing my school principal to this post as I work on generating interest in ICT and blogging at my school.

To close, I think working in a non profit organization as an educator and community activist/change agent is a great profession. It’s great even if you have to wait 15 months to receive funds to do a job that everyone agrees needs to be accomplished. Writing grants and then waiting long periods while your grant is evaluated is the norm for community organizations. It’s especially difficult as you depend so much on your community partners and volunteers to work with you and keeping your vision alive can be very challenging. The main premise of our community work in my school is that the problems in our schools are shared by all in the community and only by working together can we create the way out of these complex issues. I’m all for this vision and to close, I think I’ll celebrate with a deep sigh of relief and glass of my favourite bevy.

Brent pre-smtwl