Thank you.
My name is Evelyn Humphreys, and I work with S.U.C.C.E.S.S., one of the largest not-for-profit organizations in British Columbia.
About four years ago, I had the opportunity to create a program called A Chance to Choose, targeted mainly at youth who had not completed high school. We monitor the barriers that youth have to employment. It's funded by Service Canada, and its goal is employment. However, we are finding that a lot of the youth have been involved in youth justice and adult justice, and that's one of the barriers we look at.
On average, the youth have five barriers to employment. That would include homelessness. That would include justice. That would include not completing high school, having learning disabilities.
We have a success rate for completion that's well over 80%, and 75% of the youth are working or back in school. Our success rate is really high.
I did some numbers on our last class, because I think numbers are important. Out of the 36 students involved in the tricities, 16 were involved in justice, nine in youth justice and seven in adult justice. If you look at the cost, according to the provincial director involved in custody, youth justice is $300 a day. Adult justice is anywhere between $100 and $170. If you calculate that out, nine young people at $109,000 is $981,000. The seven youth at $36,500 works out to be $255,000. Add them together and the cost is well over $1 million. A Chance to Choose costs $500,000 to run, and that includes paying the youth.
One of the things we do extremely well as one of the elements is community-based learning. We take youth out of their environment and put them into a community environment. We take them out and introduce them.
The reason we came up with this is that I had the opportunity to work with adults. One of the gentlemen who came to my house told me that he had never been to a social function where there were not drugs involved. He was 54. That led me to believe that if you're in a world that does drugs, drugs are a part of your life. So we take the youth out of the environment to introduce them to a new environment. It has been extremely successful.
Another thing we do is listen to the youth. We have a Toastmasters, which we call Speechcraft, so that young people have an opportunity to share and talk about their stories.
If we're talking about prevention, I can tell you about a young man who came in and shared his story. At Christmas he was in a shelter, and he said he'd never been so alone in all his life. He had no Christmas tree, no family, no nothing. He sat there and told us that it was the most depressing day of his life. January 1, he met his new best friend, a drug dealer, and soon started dealing drugs. He needed the money. This young man--luckily--was arrested. He ended up in jail, which was worse than the shelter, and he ended up coming to us. He's now working and doing very well.
What these young people need is connection, or reconnection, to their community.
As well, I've done a lot of research on transition, and what has been really successful is the transition between adolescence to adulthood. If we can intervene in that area...but a lot of times we don't look at that area. When they're in transition from adolescence to adult justice, youth have a tendency to look back on their lives and say, “I don't want to be here. I want to move forward.”
We've had gang members and we've had violent offenders. It has been really successful in the whole concept of A Chance to Choose, because it's choices and consequences. We're very strict on the consequences. We have a no drugs policy and we have a no weapons policy. We're very tough on the youth, probably tougher than the justice system.
They come to us because we create an environment that's safe, that's inclusive, and that's fun for them to be in. I would really encourage this committee to look at this group of young people, look at the community base and at some of the things we've created in A Chance to Choose, because it's working, and it's working well.
We had the opportunity to open in the downtown east side last year. Unfortunately, our funds were cut, so we pulled out of the downtown east side. I'm really angry about that, because it had worked really well.
We run based on Service Canada funding, and we run on annual funding. In four years, I think we've had one large gap in service. Our contract was negotiated for 2009 to 2010, and we signed it on March 27 to start on March 30. In two weeks we had to have a full class. We had over 49 applicants. We stopped taking applications because we couldn't handle them in the two weeks. So there's a huge demand for this type of programing.
We have also experienced young people who have offended again. Last week this young man got out of jail, and he was a violent offender, and his first stop was to A Chance to Choose. We had sent him his portfolio in jail to show him his positive things. We also create strengths, and we sent him his positive things. His first stop out of jail was to A Chance to Choose to say thank you.