Thank you once again, and good morning to everyone. I appreciate the opportunity to be here. I think it's very seldom that someone like me gets to speak to a committee like this, so I certainly appreciate the privilege of being here this morning.
As stated before, I am the executive director of Hoodlinc Youth Organization, which is a grassroots, not-for-profit organization in the east Scarborough area of Toronto. I will speak strictly from a community perspective. I'm not an expert on crime, or organized crime for that matter, but during my work I find myself interacting quite frequently with the criminal justice system, specifically the youth criminal justice system.
There's a perception within our communities, especially in Scarborough, that there are a lot of gangs and organized crime there. I'm here to tell you that there aren't.
While at some level members of the community, especially youth, do end up supporting organized crime in terms of everything from drugs to guns that find their way into the communities, and through our community hubs are then disseminated throughout the larger community, what we do see in our community are mostly young people who are involved in these street-level crimes and supporting organized crime. These are young people who have been disengaged from anything mainstream, who have been marginalized, and, to put it in a nutshell, who are struggling within our communities and commit acts of desperation in getting involved in crime to support their lifestyle and to live.
For many of our young people, getting involved in crime and selling drugs is quite simply a measure that they use to survive. So I'm here to say that there are no gangs or organized crime within our community, even though we supported.... What we have are simply groups of young people who have grown up together, who have from time to time slept in the same bed and eaten from the same plate, who have come to support each other, and who, because opportunities are so few and far between, end up being involved in criminal activity.
For the past seven years, our organization has been engaging our community to try to find solutions to the issues. We've implemented a number of programs that have been very successful, especially in the Malvern area of east Scarborough.
In 2005, when the City of the Toronto and United Way were identifying high needs communities--I think they have been labelled the 13 priority communities, with Malvern, where I reside, being one of them--Malvern was among the worst of those communities in terms of youth crime, youth vandalism, and higher dropout rates among the youth in high school. I'm pleased to say that after four years--going on five years now--we've turned that around, for the most part. Malvern has gone from being the very worst to the best in terms of the priority communities.
The solution for us was active and intense engagements of the youth populations and the communities. It was not only engagement, but also empowering those communities to take responsibility for themselves. We've been able to get into communities and engage the young people to act as mentors and leaders for other young people. We've been able to mobilize local resources, school boards specifically; local police departments; and local agencies, in order to collaboratively engage and bring resources to these young people, especially in the area of education.
When I started, only four in ten youth from my community would make it to high school graduation; one in ten would make it into a post-secondary school institution. This was an issue that needed to be addressed. We had way too many young people being disengaged from anything mainstream in terms of schooling and being left to their own devices within the community.
We've been able to form partnerships with the Catholic board and creating alternative schools for these young people to go to. And we've had successes. We've been able to create nutrition programs to feed kids and social and cultural programs to engage their imaginations and interests. Collaboratively being delivered by a number of agencies within the Scarborough community, all these programs have had a very significant impact.
I don't want to leave you with the impression today that everything is okay in our community. It simply isn't. But what we don't have is gangs, and I don't want my community to be labelled as gang-riddled, because it implies to folks who are forming policy that it's quite simply a policing issue. While there's a small segment of the community that needs to be incarcerated in order for them to embrace any real change, what it comes down to is a two-tiered approach: one being policing, to create a deterrent to crime, but also understanding that the vast majority of the young people within these at-risk, high-risk communities within Toronto are anywhere from 12 to 21 years of age, in all likelihood coming from a single-parent family.
As a matter of fact, we've stopped referring to families within our neighbourhoods as “families”. We refer to them as survival units, because that's essentially what they are, a mother and a number of children trying their utter best to survive in these communities.
While part of the problem is policing and deterrence through incarceration, the bulk of the solution lies in pointing resources toward creating opportunities for young people in the areas of education, employment, and social change.
Thank you.