Part of the growth strategy to harness youth leadership skills is establishing community centres that aligned with their interests.
Despite the amount of time, financial resources and human capital invested in constructing and developing programs to meet the needs of youth, many publicly funded community centers are noticeably underutilized and underpopulated. Voicing their concerns are a number of high school students who participated in a youth engagement program organized by the Jamaican Canadian Youth Council (JCYC) and the Skills for Change organization.
The aim of this program was to first enable youth to communicate with different business organizations about their products and use the collected information to structure a business plan. And secondly, the JCYC used the space to liaise with youth to better understand their plights as a way to strategically plan how the organization can assist them with leadership skills.
During the breakout session various youth were asked to highlight an issue in their community and to articulate strategies to remediate the problem. Through their collaborative efforts several issues were highlighted such as the need to improve the current conditions of their existing community centre. They further expressed concerns about its inadequate usage, which they associate with the lack of maintenance and funding.
By pointing to the need for better community centers, it is hoped that leaders at the local government level will collaboratively work with youth and other constituents to understand the underlying factors that led to the poor state of these facilities.
While these ideas may perhaps be conceived as lofty goals, it is hoped that such transformational measures will foster an environment of excellence, where youth leadership capacities will be harnessed so that they, too, can continue to work with their peers, and other constituents to improve our communities.