|
|
|||||
|
|||||
| Path: Main Street : NewsWeek : Archive : Funder Focus : Article |
This is an archive of CharityVillage NewsWeek. To find a word on the page,
use your browser's "find" feature (CTRL-F or CMD-F). Please note: While we ensure that all links and e-mail addresses are accurate
at their publishing date, the quick-changing nature of the web means that some
links to other web sites and e-mail addresses may no longer be accurate.
To view other articles in the archive, use our Chronological Index.
Funder Focus: Kathy Powelson and the McCreary Youth Foundation
By Elisa Birnbaum
February 5, 2007
This month in our Funder Focus we feature the McCreary Youth Foundation, which is dedicated to advancing the needs and issues of BC’s youth. CharityVillage spoke with administrative director Kathy Powelson about the foundation’s unique initiatives, its ongoing commitment to youth and the various challenges it faces as a young organization.
CharityVillage: Who started up the foundation and what were the goals in doing so?
Kathy Powelson: The visionary of the foundation is Dr. Roger Tonkin, a retired pediatrician and a chair on the board. He started another nonprofit organization in 1977 called the McCreary Centre Society, and what they have done over the past 30 years is community-based research on adolescent health. One of the things they are most well-known for is provincial-wide adolescent youth surveys where they’ve gone into schools and surveyed young people, grades 7-12. From those surveys, special topic reports have resulted, such as, youth in custody, sexual exploited youth, and aboriginal youth.
In 2003, Tonkin had the idea to develop a foundation that focused solely on youth issues, partly because of the shift in our government. The switch in parties, from NDP to Liberal, resulted in major cuts to social services. But I think more importantly, the bigger impetus was his experience professionally as a pediatrician. He felt there’s never been, in his mind, a focus of youth in terms of young people. The focus is always on children. But Tonkin’s argument is that you don’t stop developing once you hit puberty. There’s different, but very significant, changes that happen in adolescence that we need to be able to support so as to provide opportunities for young people. He spent his career as a pediatrician working with adolescents, for example, girls with eating disorders. He really saw a need for a foundation whose primary focus was on youth but that also had a content expertise. So the people that he initially brought to the table, many of whom are still with us, were Cindy Morton, a children’s commissioner, Dr Judith Hall, former head of Children’s Hospital, and Barbara Oates, who’s been working in youth and philanthropy with the Vancouver Foundation for years.
CV: Since its inception, the foundation has focused significantly on one program - the Commercially Sexually Exploited Program (CSEP). Explain what it’s about and how it came to be your primary project.
KP: Well, when Roger Tonkin had this idea for the foundation, he put together an interim board. Their plan was that it would take a few years to develop because we needed a fund development strategy, etc. But in the meantime, this Commercially Sexually Exploited Program was spurred on by a very generous donation of one million dollars from the Ministry for Children and Family, specifically earmarked for sexual exploitation.
There were four phases to the project; the first one started in 2003 and we just wrapped up the last in June 2006. So, over the last three years, we funded 85 organizations and gave around $700,000 in small grants. We’ve provided seed grants and extension grants for the seed grant organizations. We also had a more specialized and focused grant for peer support mentorship where we chose four specific issues in sexual exploitation and granted larger grants, for example, immigrant populations, the Internet and fetal alcohol syndrome.
CV: What’s the status of the program today?
KP: We’ve wrapped up the program but for the last phase we developed a curriculum for critical thinking workshops. The idea behind that was to provide a curriculum for a series of workshops that organizations can facilitate to a group of youth. We also provided facilitator training and the grant money to support the facilitation of the workshops. It was really successful and far exceeded my expectations; the feedback was so amazing and so positive. We then brought the facilitators back and got their input about the curriculum and have just recently revamped it. Actually, we are in the process of granting out - what we call phase five - to organizations to do the workshops again. But they will be more generalized than sexual exploitation this time. This phase is still part of the government donation we were given, but with a broader focus.
We’ve had applications from school districts who want to train a group of teachers and/or support workers within their alternative schools. It’s fantastic because once the facilitators are trained with the curriculum, they can do the workshop over and over again. This will be the final phase of the program. And because it’s a general curriculum, it’s something that we can take forward to any of our granting opportunities. Overall, the CSEP has given us three years of great experience, exposure, getting to know the communities, and developing our grantmaking process.
CV: How does this and other programs reflect the overall ideology of the foundation?
KP: The CSEP stems from part of our philosophy about positive youth development and providing young people with skills and competency to be connected to make better decisions. So how we see ourselves as a unique foundation is that we also provide this high engagement support. In addition to money, we provide other types of support that help build community capacities. The idea is that if we provide young people with the tools to make better decisions and solve problems in a more critical way, then we are reducing the chances of them engaging in high risk behaviour or we’re helping them make decisions to get them out of high risk behaviour activities.
CV: Given that the foundation is based strictly in British Columbia, do you think BC youth face issues that differ from young people in other provinces?
KP: I think youth face similar issues throughout Canada, while each region may have different needs or issues. Even in BC, the young people in the Lower Mainland, which is more population-dense than the more rural communities, have to face different needs. So it’s about having a foundation that can provide that kind of expertise and support. For example, with the CSEP, while we did support organizations in the Lower Mainland, we tried to actively connect with communities outside of the Lower Mainland as well. They are often the least-supported, the least-connected and the issues are different. Sexual exploitation occurs across the province, but what it looks like in Vancouver is very different from what it looks like in a community like Nelson, a small community in the Kootenays.
CV: What current activities is the foundation involved in? Are you accepting granting applications?
KP: We’re actually in a fund development stage right now so we’re not currently open to applications. We are right in the middle of developing our strategy, but if a donor came to us and said, ‘Here’s x amount of dollars, I’m interested in suicide or youth mental health’, we certainly have the capacity to take that granting initiative on. We just haven’t figured out how to align ourselves in order to do a formal ask. We’re in a real period of flux. Before we can actually develop a strategic plan for fund development, we need to have a strategic plan for our priorities. So the board is in the process of identifying what our priorities are. Once we’ve identified that, we’ll be able to develop a more strategic fund development plan.
CV: What are some of those challenges facing the foundation in its fund development stage?
KP: One of our struggles in our fund development strategy is that people want to hear stories. It makes sense; they want to know why they should give to the foundation. And we have tons of stories about young women who have experienced changes because of the foundation’s projects. But we will not put those young women in front of an audience to get them to tell their story because, in our opinion, it's just re-exploiting them. The challenge is to be able to tell that story without re-exploiting and identifying that young person. That’s going to be one of our biggest challenges for fund development.
We’ve had people that want the heart-wrenching stories and we won’t do it. Now, particularly with the Pickton trial, many of the groups we’ve worked with in the past are in damage-control mode, trying to support many of the young girls on the street. And this trial will go on for a year, so it's completely inappropriate to go to any of these organizations at this point to ask for a story. We have testimonies from organizations in general with regard to community development work we’ve done, but we will have to be creative. It’s a challenge.
CV: What do you foresee as the foundation's future priorities and goals?
KP: Well, we do see us moving toward more general youth-focused programs. But one of the things that the board is challenged with right now is identifying our priorities over the next few years in terms of what issues we see as relevant to young people. So we’ll take the data that we have from the McCreary Centre Society’s research, such as their adolescent health surveys. They’ve done three of them over 10 years, so they’re able to look at trends.
Also, one thing that has not improved with young people in BC over the last 10 years is suicidal feelings. So mental health will be one of the priorities, I’m sure. Binge drinking is also an issue, and while smoking tobacco has decreased 18% in the last 10 years, smoking marijuana has increased. And BC has a very relaxed attitude about marijuana, more so than smoking - it’s more acceptable to light up a joint than a cigarette in BC. And it’s interesting to see how that has affected youth culture. Those are the types of things we’d like to look at. We also want to provide some opportunities for young people to volunteer in the upcoming Olympics.
CV: You’ve aligned with the government on one project. Do you see other partnerships - with the government or otherwise - as the foundation moves forward?
KP: In terms of fund development, we know we want to focus outside of government to give us more freedom around what we identify as our priorities. Of course, we want to remain partners with them but there is also potential for corporate partners, private individuals, etc. Because the culture of McCreary has always been community development, we’ve always assumed that we would partner. And I think it only makes sense to partner. The Children’s Hospital Foundation, for example, is a very good potential future partner. They’ve been very supportive of the work we’ve done so far. I don’t think we’re competing with any other funder in BC, so it’s a matter of building partnerships that make sense for all organizations involved. The question I have actually put to the board is, who is doing what already and should we align ourselves with them as a partner or change our priorities so we’re not competing? But until we really know what our priorities are, what I think today about who we should be partnering with may be very different tomorrow.
A student of criminology who recently competed her Master’s thesis, Kathy Powelson has worked with the foundation since its inception, helping get it off the ground and onto its first phase of granting. And though the stint was meant to be temporary, with Powelson expecting to return to school for a PhD, her plans have since changed. After all, with an opportunity that combines meaningful community work with an academic mindset, it seems Powelson has found the perfect mix. For more information about the foundation, visit: www.myfoundation.ca
Elisa Birnbaum is a freelance print and broadcast journalist living in Toronto.
|
|||
