Great.
First of all, thanks for having us. This is a great opportunity and an important opportunity. If ever you want to tease folks from the community, ask them to concisely describe what they do in five minutes. So we'll do our best to rise to that challenge, and again, thanks for the opportunity.
Here is a little bit about Phoenix. Phoenix is a community-based organization that's been in existence for just over 20 years. Perhaps one of the features for which we are best known—and I'm going to speak to this just very quickly this afternoon—is our continuum of supports and services that we offer, which covers a very broad range. It covers a range from a prevention program, which is largely school-based, to a drop-in centre, to residential programs, to a learning and employment centre that focuses on life skill and pre-employment development as well as job placement, through to a follow-up or after-care service. Across all those programs we offer health care, which is an essential component of what we do. We primarily work with youth between the ages of 12 and 24, so it's very key to understand the age range.
We also offer parenting support and a program we call special initiatives, which works with our youth to find their voice and to find their skills and to be involved in arts and culture and therapeutic recreation as well.
So that's a little bit about our organization.
Now, I know part of the challenge you have before you is to understand our efforts in the ongoing debate on best measurements of poverty. So whether we're talking about low-income cut-off as a measurement or low-income measurement or market basket measure, the thing I would encourage the committee to understand—and I hope it's reflected in your work going forward—is the importance of being completely as inclusive as possible in the way in which we look at those measures. So it's to understand the issue of poverty not just around an issue of finances but to understand it as we see it lived out daily as the poverty of lack of opportunity. It is poverty meaning no chance to engage and no chance to have the opportunities many of us take for granted.
Our work at Phoenix is work of a restorative nature, so the question is how you facilitate the process by which kids and their families move from the margins and become fully involved in the world around them. In essence, it's an examination of the difference between ability to contribute to culture and being only in a position of consuming it.
Through that lens and with that understanding, I want to just highlight really quickly the work we're most hopeful about at Phoenix. If we think about our opportunities—government or a set of community-based organizations or just simply the individuals in our communities around us—and our responsibility to do what we can to make sure people have their inherent right to have their basic needs met and to feel the opportunity to thrive and to succeed in their lives, then we can think about it potentially in three stages. I'll just go through them very quickly.
Stage one is early intervention and prevention. Stage two is crisis management: crisis is already happening, so as a government through services or as a community, we're scrambling to provide some assistance around the management of that crisis. And then stage three is the opportunity for someone to thrive and make use of community-based support.
It's a very linear way of thinking about it, I realize, but it gives us the sense of that continuum from early on to crisis itself and the way in which we manage it regardless of which social issues we're talking about, and then the opportunity in the end to provide meaningful support so people don't go back into that place of need.
Something that has been successful for Phoenix is that we offer a continuum of support, as I've mentioned. This allows us to deal with the whole person. This allows us to understand their lives in a context and it allows us to leverage and to build and to make good use of a relationship that's sound and of substance and is informed of the understanding of how we can best be relevant to the people we have the privilege of knowing through our work. That continuum is essential.
The second thing I want to talk about is our prevention program. We work from a perspective simply known as narrative, and Michael White has been key in the creation of a narrative approach. Simply said, it helps us understand how the story of someone's life has been written and it helps us understand our opportunities for the writing of a new story authored by the individuals themselves but supported by us, as people who are caring and providing support around them.
Since our prevention program is community-based, we have limited wait times, so that allows us to work really effectively with kids and their families. We're seeing individuals and families with more and more need, so our ability to respond quickly within an informed context is essential.
The last one is special initiatives. It is a program that allows our youth, through partnerships we form as an agency, to become engaged in the world around them. We have a partnership, for instance, with the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, where our kids not only learn how to paint and how to express themselves, but learn how to curate a show and eventually launch it at the art gallery. It's a transformative thing on the night of a launch to have Monet hanging in one corner and your work hanging in another.
We start to understand the importance of having those opportunities for success by developing connections through the community, a sense of collective identity, and eventually coming into our own sense of entitlement and the ability to influence the world around us. It's that sense of entitlement that allows people to understand what they're called to do with their lives, to be excited about it, and to feel like they have a right to find their talents and really thrive. That's key.
It comes back to the notion of how we contribute to the culture or the world around us. We know that hopeful youth are most likely to lend themselves to being part of healthy neighbourhoods, which leads to healthy commerce, and healthy communities that are most likely to generate healthy individuals. So hope is at the centre of that, and we need to understand that in the context of our work and our policies as a government. We need to understand that inclusion and the finances of a family are key considerations when we turn our attention to the work at hand.
I'll leave it at that and hope that questions will allow us to get to other discussions.