association pour le dÉveloppement jeunesse de … · to our camp, ca bouge dans mon parc and the...

Association pour le développement jeunesse de Loyola http://www.jeunesseloyola.org 514-872-6721

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ASSOCIATION POUR LE DÉVELOPPEMENT JEUNESSE

DE LOYOLA

LOYOLA ASSOCIATION FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF

YOUTH

ANNUAL REPORT 2017

Presented to the membership at the Annual General Assembly May 5, 2018

Montreal, Quebec


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Starting in 1953 as a grassroots community organization, The Association Pour le Développement Jeunesse de Loyola was formalized in 1998 as a charitable organization with a primary focus on children (4-17 years) of the surrounding community. The Association consists of volunteer parents and community members who work together to provide educational, cultural, social and recreational programs to the chil-dren and adolescents of the community. Programs aim to help participants develop skills such as coopera-tion, leadership, a sense of belonging, independent thinking, and build healthy interpersonal relation-ships. Our programs, employees and volunteers promote values of acceptance, integration and self-esteem . In 1996 the department of Sports, Leisure, Culture and Social Development of the Côte-des-Neiges-Notre-Dame-de-Grâce borough (DSLCDS-CDN-NDG) decentralised the animation and management of sports and recreation services previously delivered by the City of Montreal to 23 local non-profit organiza-tions. The decentralisation was based on three development principles: • Residents are and must be the main focus of recreational activities • The responsibility for recreational activities must be given to the level closest to residents, i.e. the

local community • Residents' quality of life depends on the community making the most of all its available resources This policy allowed for the local community to become more involved in managing services offered on their territory. The Association pour le Développement Jeunesse de Loyola entered into a partnership with the borough to manage a the Loyola Youth Centre located in Sainte-Catherine-de-Sienne elementary school and in four prefabricated units annexed to the school. Throughout the years the Association has offered a vast diversity of programming to children and teens. We are proud to offer a space where the community can learn and grow in an environment where they feel safe and a sense of belonging and members can pass on fond memories to their children, who now make up our current generation of members.

Our goal is to create a safe, positive environment in which there is always room for and movement towards improvement and growth. We take great pride in our programs at the Loyola Centre, we promote respectful treatment of others and a strong sense of belonging. Our participants, parents, staff, volunteers and guests are ambassadors who invite others to visit the centre and based on their own experiences become a part of the Loyola Family. Every individual is encouraged to take on the challenges of personal growth, while contributing to the growth of the Loyola Centre.


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Where do the youth live?

IN 2017: Loyola Centre was open for 1,916 Hours People used our service 28,955 times

Cultural backgrounds

Age


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Loyola Dance Crew continued to expand this year. We are now offering hip-hop dance programs to children from 4 to 17 years old. The younger groups performed our annual winter party and our awards ceremony, they also danced for a holiday show where the mayor of our borough was present, and participated in the Montreal Community Cares talent show and holiday toy drive. The teens competed in the Monnaie Money show and St. Raymonds got talent this year. They also competed at Reprezent Montreal and Reprezent Quebec and danced at the Quebec City Pride festival in September 2017. The teens worked on solo projects as well as their group choreographies, and performed solos at the Jeunes Tal-ents Desjardins Festival as well as St. Raymonds Got Talent. The teens were also invited twice in 2017 to dance on Global Morning News tv.

Every year we make a point of offering at least one free program for children 5-12 years old. This is a way to encourage new families, and low-income families, to come to the Centre for a first time. 29 children who had not previously been participants of the Loyola Centre partici-pated in the arts and crafts program in 2017.

Teens who worked as assistant counselors during the summer offered to share their passion with children in the fall and develop a musical theatre program. 15 elementary school children met for 2.5 hours every Saturday during the fall season to prepare a performance of Cin-derella, complete with music, props, decorations and costumes


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Loyola Centre has a long history of keeping kids active and building community through the game of basketball. 2017 saw many children from 5 to 17 years old participate in our bas-ketball program. Children and teens participated in the NDG Community basketball league in the winter session and competed against St. Raymonds Centre, NDG YMCA, Westhaven Centre, Dawson Community Blues and MMAC (Chinese community associa-tion). The teams also participated in the Pagé basketball tournament and in the YMCA classic hoops. In 2017 we also hosted our first Family Skills day, where parents and older siblings played with the young basketball players. We hope to host this event again in 2018.

In the past years there has been an increasing request to have soccer activities at the Centre. This year we had two groups of soccer that each practiced once a week. Similarly to the Family Skills day for basketball, we hope in 2018 to host a family soccer event, where parents and older siblings can share their love of this sport with the young players in their families.


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One of our grade five members, Maya Bellini-Nunez, began a wonderful initiative in 2017. Maya loves to read, but she knows that reading is hard for some of the kids in the aide aux devoirs pro-gram at the Loyola Centre. At the start of the year she proposed to develop a reading club for kids in grades 2 and to help them practice reading. At a presentation Maya explained “Hi, I’m Maya Bellini Nunez, I am 10 years old and I go to the Loyola Centre. Reading is important to me. This year I started a Book Club at my community cen-ter. In the afterschool program there are a lot of kids that come that need to prac-tice reading. Many of them go to French school and their parents don’t speak French so their par-ents can’t help them with their school work. We have 85 kids in the afterschool program and I read with six kids in grades two and three. My community is important to me. I want the kids in my reading club to be able to succeed at school and get good jobs and help the community like me.” Maya has not only taken on a leadership role in mentoring younger children, but also participated in fundraising to buy new books for her book club and spoke at the NDG reads even in late 2017.

The aide aux devoirs program remains an important program at the Loyola Centre. Again this year we fund ourselves with a full program, and wait lists of parents in the community who request this service for their children. We continue to have a partnership with Marc Favreau elementary school, where Loyola Centre staff walk with 30 children from that school to the Loyola Centre Monday through Thursday, and Sainte-Catherine-de-Sienne school, where 20 children are transported by bus to the Centre daily. Furthermore, we offered this year a walk-safe from Judith Jasmin school every day. These partnerships not only ensure that there is an agreement for transportation, but the schools also pay registration fees for children they refer to the program. These children are struggling academically or socially, and often come from new immigrant families, where the parents are unable to help the children with their French schoolwork. This year we were fortunate to work with Pour Bien Animer program, where teens learn animation skills. The youth were placed in the aide aux devoirs program to provide the children with extra individualized support and also to animate activities for this program. We also had the help of many volunteers who taught the kids music and dance.


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Following the request of many parents, this year we offered lunch to children who were attending on Saturday programs. For one hour every Saturday, 16 children would eat a simple but nutritious lunch, and play in a supervised environment while waiting for their next program to start. This allowed parents who work on the weekends to bring their children to Loyola Centre early in the morning and pick them up in the evening without having to worry about packing a meal.

One of the advantages of our location at Focus-Outreach school is access to a kitchen, some-thing we did not used to have at our old location. In 2016 we developed a cooking program for children 8-12 years old and had offered this program for free. There were many children who, on Friday nights, came to cook and eat dinner at Loyola Centre. In 2017 we were unable to continue to offer this program for free, and there has been a marked decrease in participation. We hope in the next year to find a foundation willing to support the cost of this program to enable all kids in the neighbourhood to experience cooking.


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While homework support for elementary school children is a program that receives some funding from the ministry of education, there is no comparable governmental measure that exists for teen-agers. This year the table de concertation jeunesse NDG decided to earmark a portion of the funding our neighbourhood receives from the department of public health to answer this need. The teen tutoring program offers academic support to teens in our neighbourhood for free. One staff member works with a maximum of 5 youth, we therefore can only take a very limited number of teens in the program and there is a waiting list of youth in need of academic services. Most of the youth who participate in the teen tutoring program are youth who had participated in our French language day camp. These youth are all new immigrants at Saint Luc secondary school.

Ca Bouge Dans Mon Parc was initially an initiative of Jeunes en Santé NDG, a group of partner or-ganization that, working in partnership with Québec en Formes, developed initiatives in NDG to sup-port youth having healthy lifestyles through healthy eating and physical activity. Ca Bouge Dans Mon Parc vise à offrir de l’animation gratuite dans les parcs de NDG pour les enfants qui ne sont pas inscrits dans les camps de jour pour favoriser les saines habitudes de vie. En plus d’offrir des activités physiques le projet permet d’encadrer les enfants qui sont sans supervision de leurs parents ce qui permet de renforcer le sentiment de sécurité chez les résidents et d’occuper les espaces publics positivement et de prévenir la délinquance et les actes antisociaux. Une attention particulière est portée pour rejoindre les filles qui sont souvent plus inactives que les garçons, ce faisant l’équipe d’animation est mixte et les activités proposées variées. This summer our staff animated activities in Loyola Park for 46 children. Working in partnership with the NDG food depot we were able to ensure that these children ate healthy snacks during the day. Most of the youth in the program were new immigrants, and many families told us they did not send their children to daycamp because of financial challenges.


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Our association aims to support the youth of today in becoming the leaders of tomorrow. Every year we are able to work closely with a small number of teens in a leadership program that aims to give teens an opportunity to give back to their community, a first job ex-perience, and a way for youth to develop skills. This year 8 youth took on the role of assistants in our various programs. Additionally, the grade 5 and 6 children also began various volunteer initiatives in our centre.

Our teen open gym program has been struggling since we left Sainte-Catherine-de-Sienne school with instability. Initially, when we moved into Focus and Outreach school we tried to have teen open gym, but quickly realized that the elementary school sized gymnasium at 4850 coronation did not an-swer to the needs of this program. At that time we were offered two evenings of open gym, which meant we had to offer less hours that in previous years. Furthermore, the two days were in different gymnasiums, Fridays at Westhill sports centre and Saturdays at Confederation sports centre. Given that these two gymnasiums are rentals from the EMSB and CSDM, there were also evenings when the schools did not allow us access because of school events. The staff of the open gym pro-gram have worked very hard to ensure that youth in the sector know where the program will be held, on what night. Providing a sense of stability has been an uphill battle, and this task was made more difficult in the fall of this year, when Westhill sports centre was closed for repairs. While we were happy to be able to offer both Friday and Saturday nights in the same location at confederation sports centre, it required changing yet again locations and times. It is hard to community to the youth of our sector that they are important and valued when we cannot offer them stability and there is no tangible demonstration that their community and people in posi-tions of power are investing in them. Every year we speak with the teens about a future where we will all return under one roof and where they can have their own space. We hope that in the years to come we will be able to keep our teen program under the same roof as the rest of our community programs, and that we will have adequate facilities to answer to their needs.


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The Les Jeunes Correspondants camp was created in 2010 following discus-sions at the Comité de quartier of the CSDM and the Table de Concertation Jeunesse de NDG identifying that there was a lack of summer services for the most vulnerable teens in our sector. School principals noted that in our multilingual neighbourhood, learning French was very difficult for newly ar-rived immigrant youth, and during the summer they lost some of the commu-nication abilities they had learned during the school year because they did not practice French and were not very exposed to the language. To answer to these challenges, the Loyola Centre in partnership with the CSDM created this camp. In 2017, we decided to drastically alter our summer project. This year we chose to create a project that was not only useful to the teens but also to the members of their communities, something more focused on how to create change or help other, more than simply having youth share their opinions. We wanted a project that would push the teens to think more critically, a project that, when completed, could help others. The project deal with the theme of immigration and integration in Quebec for new immigrants. The youth were asked to share their personal experiences of immigration and to look at the similarities and differences of their experiences and find possible solutions to problems they faced during their arri-val. The youth were put in groups by country of origin and they wrote texts telling their stories. After they described the most significant challenges and proposed solutions by making suggestions for minis-ters of different governments, their school and the municipal government. Country of origin of participants : summer 2017 (total 50 teens 13-17 years old)

4 from Africa Tanzania, Algeria, Eritrea 3 from Caribbean St. Vincent, Jamaica, Dominican Republic 25 from Asia Chine, Corée du Sud, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Inde 11 from Middle East Iran, Syria, Libya 7 from Europe Ukraine, Russia, Armenia, Denmark


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The last few years have been a struggle for our association. We have found ourselves with no permanent home, more youth in our sector who are in need of services, more families in our sector who are struggling financially and limited financial resources to offer programs while the cost of living has increased and therefore our expenses. The internal structure of the association that was developed at the founding of the association responded well to the needs at that time. As the community’s needs have grown, we have struggled to continue to offer kids a safe space where they can grown, learn and have fun. In the last years we have focused on offering a large number of programs every session and in-tervening in emergency situations, we have had very limited time to stop, evaluate and plan for the long-term. This year the board of directors will be working to develop their skill set through trainings. We will be taking time to plan for the future and will be working with a mobilization agent to help organize the community and develop a stronger voice to better express the needs of the mem-bership. The board will be organizing sub-committees to involve more parents in the process of developing the full potential of the organization and we will be working on fundraising goals.


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Every year a good amount of time is spent sitting on a multitude of committees and developing partner-ships with other community groups. Working with these various committees allows us to get a full under-standing of challenges facing our community, exchange and network with partners groups and develop strategies and programs together. Our centre is represented on the following committees: Table Jeunesse A committee for youth organizations in NDG to exchange on issues and work together to find solutions. Highlights of the Table Jeunesse’s work has included hiring an outreach worker and the Jeunes Leaders program. Loyola has sat on the Table Jeunesse’s coordinating committee since 2013. Comité aide aux devoirs This committee works with organizations providing homework support for youth in the community. This year, the committee organized the Spelling Bee, a training on academic resources for children and parents and benefited from a grant to buy books and subsidized registration costs for the program for some children. Communauté de suivi This summer the SPVM invited community groups to work in partnership with the police to discuss concerns and strategies for our neighbourhood. Démarche de revitalisation Fielding-Walkley Loyola participated in this committee which focuses on the improvement of the “Fielding-Walkley sector”. Local community organizations, the municipal services, and health and educational institutions sit on this committee. Comité de Quartier CSDM Directors from CSDM elementary and high schools, parent-representatives, community partners and representatives from the school board meet many times a year to collaborate on projects benefitting CSDM students. The French day camp for children and teenagers is an initiative of this committee. This year a large topic of discussion was the overpopulation of our neighbourhood schools. Sainte-Catherine-de-Sienne governing board In fall 2014 we were invited to sit as the community rep-resentative on Sainte-Catherine-de-Sienne’s governing board. Participating in this committee allows for better flow of information with the school. Table des coordonnateurs des camps de jour Every summer staff from various community groups work together to discuss challenges in our camps, and organise activities for the children of NDG


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Ville de Montréal The City of Montreal continues to be our most impor-tant partner and provides us with financial support and use of facilities. From the DSLCDS we receive funding, access to infrastructure and the support of our anima-tor, Kenny Whittaker. This year our file was assigned to a new agente de développement, Genevieve Bienvenu. We look forward to continue working with her in the upcoming year. Commission scolaire de Montréal The Commission Scolaire de Montréal continues to work with us to develop and offer services to students in our community. Again this year we were able to work in close collaboration with Sainte-Catherine-de-Sienne and Marc Favreau schools for the afterschool program and École Secondaire Saint Luc for the sum-mer camp. Our partnership with the school principals, teachers and social workers in the schools is of great importance to plan interventions in tandem, and to plan for the future of all in the community. English Montreal School Board We have now been in our new location for approxi-mately three years, and we are very thankful to the teachers and principal of Focus-Outreach school for their ongoing collaboration. St-Viateur Bagel This year St-Viateur Bagel generously donated bagels to our camp, Ca Bouge Dans Mon Parc and the after-school program. The bakery delivered bagels weekly for the children.

Federal government We have benefited for many years from the Ser-vice Canada summer employment program for full-time students. This year the program contrib-uted 85% of the funding necessary to hire six stu-dents during the summer program who were em-ployed as counsellors for our summer camp and animators for Ca Bouge Dans Mon Parc. Generation Foundation The Foundation continues to generously offer us snacks for our various programs once a month. The afterschool program particularly benefits from this donation. Gazette Christmas Fund The Gazette Christmas Fund looks to local part-ners to find families who are in need of financial help over the holiday period. We are honoured to be a local partner for this important project. Caisse populaire Desjardins Through the aide aux devoirs committee, funding from the Caisse populaire Desjardins was re-ceived to help with the purchase of pedagogical supplies for the afterschool program to help the children with their school work. The Caisse popu-laire Desjardins was also very generous and con-tributed financially to the summer camp in 2016. The Provincial government’s program Soutien Action Bénévole supported volunteers in devel-oping special initiatives for the children at the cen-tre. We also received support for summer camp from Kathleen Weil’s discretionary fund.


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