Thank you, everybody, for the opportunity to be here today.
I want to give you a bit of an overview of Youth Opportunities Unlimited. I understand that in your package you received a letter that we received from a young person who recently graduated from a program at YOU. I'll come back to it, but I included that in the package because most of that young person's activity with our organization took place during the pandemic. He had what we found to be really wonderful insights into his experiences that reinforced what we find is quite helpful in supporting marginalized youth in particular.
What does Youth Opportunities Unlimited do? In a nutshell, we're a local not-for-profit organization, incorporated in London, Ontario. We've been around since 1982. I've been with the organization since 1984 and been its CEO since 1988, so I have a lot of history with this organization.
It started off as a provincially funded youth employment centre focused on providing employment supports for young people who were leaving school early. It was to help address the gap between their not having experience in getting a job and needing access and supports to access the job market when they didn't have experience and had limited education.
As we've developed our organization, we've kept with that same mandate. Our vision is a community where all youth are embraced and engaged and will thrive. Our vision statement is as much about our community as it is about youth and what we do—actually, it's more so about community. That informs key priorities for us.
We're funded by all levels of government. We still provide employment programs. We do a variety of job placement programs, many of those funded by our provincial government. We also have a significant footprint in affordable housing. I know MP Vaughan would know about that because he's been to our facility a number of times in his tenure. We have a growing footprint on that. We also have a long-standing training platform using social enterprise models as a vehicle for training people and preparing them for employment.
How does all that work? In a nutshell, we have 25 or so different programs operating at any one time, funded by all levels of government: the federal government, through a couple of departments; the provincial government, through three different ministries; and the municipal government. We are also funded by the United Way and earn a significant amount of revenue from Youth Opportunities Unlimited's social enterprises. Although this can be messy in terms of administration, from a young person's experience, the programs all interplay with each other beautifully.
A young person can come into our organization at various access points. They may be experiencing homelessness and are looking for a place to eat or a safe place to help them find housing for that night, whether it's a shelter or permanent housing, or they could have graduated from school and are looking for their very first career opportunity. For all of the above there are various access points that put people at the right starting point for them. It might be setting up an employment counsellor or working on a resumé. It might be not touching a resumé for a long time and focusing on how we get a young person in front of some employers who will want to meet with them. It might also be connecting them with a housing adviser to help them find permanent housing.
What's key around those successes really is the relationship with people. While they may come in looking for a particular touchpoint, what really works fundamentally well for a marginalized and vulnerable young person is finding the right person to connect with.
That's where I think the letter jumps into play. Of course I won't read it to you, but as a highlight, that young person—his name is Sam—wrote the letter voluntarily after he graduated from some programs at YOU. He was engaged with YOU after providing physical care for his mom for a number of years. I think since he was a very young child he was caring for his mother. It was through his grandmother that he got connected to Youth Opportunities Unlimited. She was worried about his overall health and worried about her very isolated grandson.
She wasn't sure what the outcome was but she wanted him connected to an organization. He engaged with one of our employment counsellors, which is a provincially funded program at YOU. Through that, he started exploring what options were available to him. He ended up being connected with a federally funded program called ISE, which is delivered through Youth Opportunities Unlimited. Through that, he trained in a recycling facility at YOU.
I mentioned our social enterprises. We use them as a platform to train people, in this case, with recycling, not because he necessarily wanted to work in the recycling industry, but he'd never drawn a paycheque before. If you had the opportunity to read the letter, you will have learned that he suffers from significant mental health issues and addiction issues that were profound. In his own words, every time he went to bed, he didn't care if he woke up the next day. He wasn't actively trying to prevent it from happening, but he didn't care. It was his grandmother who got him connected to us. He was not ready to go out looking for work, so that recycling facility was an opportunity for him to start getting a place of security, a place of grounding, and to start building a community for him.
Out of that, he ended up going back into some provincially funded programs, and most recently he was hired through an online interview with Home Depot. He's been with Home Depot for just over a month and he's already had one promotion. He and I shared a panel sponsored by CAMH on serving youth with mental health issues during COVID. His insights were that he probably would not have connected with this program, with this organization, if not for COVID. His anxiety was so much that he could not have envisioned himself walking into an office and sitting across a table from strangers. An online platform made it easier for him to do that.
That gives a bit of insight into why I chose to use that letter.
I'm going to talk a little bit about what we have under [Technical difficulty—Editor] because they provide insight, particularly around the COVID time right now. We have a couple of projects on the go that really focus on housing. One is a project with our partnership with the Children's Aid Society, our child welfare organization in London, where we're providing housing for young people aging out of care—young people as young as 16 years old who, otherwise, would be experiencing homelessness. There is a shelter in town right now that they could go to. There is shelter space access for them. Many of these young people have experienced human trafficking, they've experienced horrible trauma, and they just won't go into a large shelter. They'll sleep on the streets instead. They'll couch surf with friends. They'll get by. They'll trade off and find a place to live, but they won't have a home. This place provides an access path towards a home. There are six apartments, each of them independent. Every day they have some contact with a staff member from Youth Opportunities Unlimited and ongoing care from Children's Aid Society. The program has been an amazing success. It actually operates without additional government funding, just through the funding relationship between YOU and Children's Aid Society.
MP Vaughan will be interested in knowing this. Our shelter actually completes construction this week, Adam. It will open to the public on August 17. We've created, over the past three years, a concept for a 30-bed youth shelter. As it turns out, it's an amazing resource in COVID because unlike most shelters, there's no dorm style. It's 30 individual rooms for 30 people with 10-foot-wide hallways. Why did we create that? Certainly, we envisioned it long before there was a pandemic, but we know that young people who come into shelters have experienced physical and emotional trauma in many ways. To put them in a dorm style, many young people would choose to sleep outside instead of that. Thirty beds for 30 people allowed us to support people of the LGBT2Q community without feeling like they're at risk, people who need the emotional respite of having their own room, or people who need isolation for the safety of other people. The 10-foot-wide hallways are for emergency responders to come and go easily because, if they're ever on site, it's an emergency and they need to come and go fast. As it turns out, this is an amazing facility during the time of a pandemic.