Tyler Sommers' Blog

The Canadian Youth Assembly.

We’ve come a long way. The first while was interesting, I started off in elections and went from a passive, quiet, avoid conflict at all cost, follow the leader volunteer, to a voice demanding change, demanding more representation, more accountability, and a more of a bottom up structure.

The CYA became a real vision, something I’ve never seen before; something I doubt has ever existed. A national organization, one with the possibility, no, the likelihood of becoming something so incredibly beneficial, so groundbreaking, unlike anything Canada has ever seen. We’re on the right path, we’ve come a long way, structured ourselves well and that truly shows.

We’ve really been experiencing and learning a lot as we’ve come through the last year or two; as we work and speak with youth from across Canada we’re discovering so much that youth are missing and so much that we feel we can do.

This is why we’ve created CYA! Volunteering, The Representative and are constantly trying to address the concerns that are expressed to us from the youth we exist to serve. As we’ve been doing this we have constantly had, in the back of our minds, a constant reminder (through our lack of monetary flow, in-kind services, etc) that becoming a charity would make things so much easier – but this would come at a cost. The cost would be that what has come to be deemed as advocacy would have to be downplayed greatly, but if we did this, what would happen to the original vision for the CYA? The “a voice for youth” concept, where the CYA and the members therein would not only spark the involvement of apathetic and uninvolved youth, but make sure the people of Canada heard about the issues facing youth.

After much soul searching, talking to various experts (politicians, advisors, other non-profits and charities, etc) we’ve come to realize that if we were to become charitable, we would be sacrificing some of the most important aspects of the CYA. Even though we’re not approaching advocacy in a traditional way (which has gone extremely well, I’ll explain more in a minute) the Government of Canada has made it clear (we called and asked) that if we were to give youth a voice and try to get youth involved in their community and the public sector, we’d be deemed an advocacy organization which would remove our ability to become a charity.

Therefore, I’m going to take a look into incorporating a charity which would work alongside the CYA (this is done by organizations such as Earthroots, and ICA Canada/Associates). I know we’ve been doing a lot and this is just adding more to our workload, but there are three things you must understand: (1) It’s very difficult for us to acquire funding and support if we are not a charitable organization (2) This isn’t going to consume a great deal of time, I’ll be working on it as a tertiary project (3) the youth of Canada need a whole lot more to get them involved. If we just perform the elections, training, and voice through passing resolutions, we’re going to miss a great deal of youth and lose what many deem to be the most important aspect of the CYA: getting apathetic and uninvolved youth involved!

With this understood, I’m going to jump into explaining the CYA and what we’re planning for the near future.

We will be focussing our efforts on media, funding, elections, and outreach. Essentially we are really looking to solidify things for everyone both internal and external to the organization. The various projects which we have launched throughout the time of the CYA (volunteering, The Rep, etc) will not be closing – we will continue to work on these, though they will not be our primary focus (they’ll be secondary projects, with the election and post-election primary and the charity tertiary).

One of the most important aspects of the organization is something we had spent the least amount of time on prior to now, and practically all of our time in the recent past. This aspect is what youth will do after they are elected to the CYA.

As you all well know, many of our members came together to create a riding list of 177 ridings so that we would be able to gradually grow as the organization progressed. I believe that we may never end up using the Elections Canada division of ridings simply because youth population concentrations are not equal to general population concentrations. We understand that we may not fill all of the ridings in the first election; this is something that we expect. As the organization grows we are sure that not only will we fill each riding, we will have many youth vying to be elected to the CYA in each.

Representatives of the CYA have been meeting with many people regarding the CYA. We’ve met with people from various organizations in order to discuss what we’re doing, how we can work together, and receive advice on the CYA. We’ve also met with politicians and community leaders from mayors, to councillors, to volunteers for the same reason. One of the most stressed opinions that was expressed to us practically unanimously throughout our meetings was the fact that in order to be taken seriously and in order to remain a voice for youth, we would have to ensure that we distanced ourselves a sufficient amount from Canadian politics. This means that while we were advised to work with politicians and parties (on all levels), we were cautioned that we must remain vigilant against people attempting to use the CYA to push their agenda, through general influence, helping certain groups of youth, planting individuals to sway opinion, etc. We were provided with the same cautions regarding the commercial and corporate relationships that we are sure to build. This means that we can comment on legislation, we can work with parties, but we must be vigilant in ensuring that we maintain control. We are not tools, we are not going to be taken for granted.

We will, however, be more open to partnerships and working with these groups than we have been in the past (while considering charitable status). As we are no longer seeking to incorporate as a charity we do not have to tiptoe and worry about our affiliations with these groups – we have already been offered some services from politicians and we will be working to ensure that these wonderful opportunities are utilized. We will still be working closely with CYA parties in order to ensure that they remain fully independent of outside influence – again, we must ensure that the CYA is a voice for youth from youth and not a voice for youth from politicians. I do understand that I am being somewhat critical and worrisome, however the fact that politicians with whom we’ve spoken have warned us of possible issues lets us know that while a majority of them want us to work and want us to fulfil our goals, there are some who would see us serve their purpose.

All parties will be receiving a great deal of information regarding what we are looking to limit and what we are looking to expand. There will be lots of information about absolutely everything to do with the CYA and their role within the CYA.

I understand that there was a lot of talk about CYA parties thus far, but they are a means by which members have chosen to create smaller communities in which they can network and discuss things that matter to them. They exist within the CYA and at this point in time a majority of youth do utilize them. There are several parties which are unique and do not exist otherwise, which is wonderful and we hope our members continually come up with new ways to represent themselves and their peers.

We were also reminded that if our goals are to incorporate apathetic and uninvolved youth in the organization and to serve as a bridge between inactivity and becoming engaged, effective leaders it would be problematic for us to mimic a system which seems to deter youth from involvement or become overly influenced by it, or those parts which constitute the whole. We were asked whether youth would want to become in something that accepts and encourages the system as it is.

It is for these reasons that we must ensure that the CYA does not become overly political in its actual setup. While we will work with politicians (with, not against) to ensure that the youth of Canada have a real and effective voice, we will not simply become a national model or mock parliament. The CYA model parliament is one of the projects that will be taken on and expanded by the charitable organization when it is created – all mock and model parliaments are purely educational and while some do present their findings to decision makers, it is not often that decision makers come to them looking for advice throughout their work (an offer which has been made to us be numerous politicians). This means that the relationship between CYA parties and politicians, political parties, and other decision makers is going to change.

We are not eliminating the electing and gather aspect of the CYA – we are not taking away from that – we are simply adding to what we have to do. We have to make these additions because without them we will not be able to incorporate any youth outside of the political realm and we will not be able to perform as an effective voice for the youth of Canada (more of this is discussed below).

I will now discuss what we are thinking will occur after the 2010 elections.

Once again, I’m going to stress that if you are looking to play politician, you are going to want to stick to the CYA Model Parliament. I do have to make a point though; what we see in the media is not even a quarter of the work politicians do. They do not simply fight for legislation and argue with one another, they have a great deal of work that we don’t see, they volunteer endlessly, they research and plan, they do an amazing amount of work that isn’t ‘interesting’ enough to make it into the paper.

The elections are a big event. We’re planning on having a lot of work go into the election: publicity, speeches, the works. But that’s another story for another time.

So we’ve had the election and we’ve elected youth from coast to coast to coast. So what now? There are two primary goals to the CYA:

1) Bring youth into involvement. Bring youth into volunteering, getting involved in their community. Essentially, getting all inactive and apathetic youth involved!
2) Representing youth. Employing a real means through which youth can be represented. Making sure that not only are we heard by decision makers, but that they want to hear from us and even come to us for our opinion (if this seems like a stretch, just think, we’ve had at least 3 politicians already ask us if they could come to us occasionally).

Now the method that we’ve employed when meeting with decision makers and when discussing issues that face youth (such as the driver’s restrictions) has not been to shout and try to get people to listen through sheer force. While some organizations do take this route and it gets them on the front of papers and in headlines, this does not always (or ever) mean that it works. However, those organization which have a respectable, honest, mature, and professional relationship with decision makers truly do have the ability to make real change. A great example is of an organization which primarily dealt with a particular disease (I’m being purposely vague, because I’m unsure how open this is) meeting with politicians in order to discuss the route that should be taken by the government. They were asked, at the meeting, to come up with a proposal and a week later they met again with these politicians, presented their proposal and much of it (if not all) was adopted. This did not make headlines; most people probably never heard about this, but it facilitated real change from those who knew the situation best.

I would trade headlines and fame for knowing that we can actually make a difference – that we can truly change the way youth are represented and treated, the opportunities available to us, and much more.

Keeping this in mind, this is the approach we are going to be taking toward being a voice for youth. I am going to deal with this in two parts, each pertaining to the goal I mentioned about.

(1) Involving youth.

We cannot expect youth to jump into involvement. We cannot even expect them to get involved with the CYA as their first project; I’m sure that most, if not all of the members here have volunteered elsewhere (most likely for reasons other than fulfilling high school requirements) before they became involved in the CYA. I’m sure that many people started off volunteering in some way before realizing that they can make a difference through this sort of work.

We must therefore be sure to provide youth with opportunities for involvement. We must also be able to show Canada that we are able to get those youth who have not been involved to stand up and make a difference.

We will be providing some sort of training to those youth who are elected. If we can, we are indeed looking to bring youth together so that we can have a large conference, part of which would be training them to be leaders in their community, to get other youth involved, and to get local projects started. This is absolutely necessary and fundamentally important – it’s not an easy thing to get a project started, it takes specific skills and specific information.

Between the periods of meeting and discussing what matters to youth (this is indeed part of the process) elected youth will be getting involved in their community not only to spread the word about the CYA and get youth involved, but to understand what is effecting youth there, what youth want to see, and providing opportunities for youth to make a difference in their community. This will involve taking a look at what the community seems to be lacking – if it’s a recycling program then that’s something that may want to be pushed for, or even started and run by the elected youth and whomever else they get to help them. If youth simply have no way to express themselves to the local decision makers (they lack a voice) then perhaps a monthly meeting of youth is what will be created and run by these youth. This will lead to youth becoming involved on a local and community level, essentially this is the planting of seeds for future involvement. The youth who become involved on this level may choose to make a difference on a grander scale – if this is what they choose, we will have helped equip them with the skills needed.

We cannot expect youth to just jump into becoming involved in an organization like the CYA. That’s like jumping off the diving board into the deep end without being in the water prior. While some may want to do this, many will feel very intimidated and want something smaller and more local to start with.

The main idea here is to find a way to get youth who have not been involved, either because they lacked opportunity, because nothing appealed to them, or because they are displeased or apathetic toward community involvement for some other reason. The CYA will stand behind and help you in doing this through whatever means are available to us.

(2) Giving youth a voice

This is very important. But remember, if we are giving 10 youth a voice, this isn’t nearly as important, effective, or persuasive as giving 10,000 youth a voice.

Now keeping that in mind, remember the driver’s legislation that we discussed a little while back. Legislation was proposed that would have had a monumental effect on the youth of Canada and of course, the members of the CYA had opinions as well!

Well what we did was that we came together and had a lengthy discussion, people submitted their thoughts on the forum, through PMs and through email and they were all brought together into a single statement, a single letter, from the CYA. We sent this to a few politicians and we followed up with calls, emails, etc.

The response to this was phenomenal. Not only did they hear us and write a nice response which referred to our message (it was not just some template), but they got back to us in more detail, they sent a follow up message which asked for more information about the organization. We eventually got to the point where several politicians explained that they really enjoyed the letter we had written, how we’d written it, and how we’d come together to express the collective views of youth in the CYA. They asked if we would be willing to help them when they were in need of bouncing ideas off of youth; they wanted to use the CYA as an advisory group.

With just that minimal effort, with just a few people expressing our views (far less than the massive numbers we’re going to have), we got tremendous results.

Once we have a full slate of elected members, they will have gotten involved in their community and know the issues facing local youth; they will also have brought many youth into involvement, which not only increases our numbers and legitimacy, but also shows Canadians that youth can and will get involved and make a difference – so long as we have support and opportunities. The elected members may not be able to discuss everything that comes up; they probably will be very busy with things, so we’re not expecting a comprehensive meeting on every subject or issue, but we are expecting that they will come together on a regular basis (hopefully annually in Ottawa, so long as we are able to acquire the resources for this) and discuss the more systemic and regular issues which face youth. They will also be discussing what’s going on in their constituencies so that others may give their opinions (or solutions that have worked in their area) to these problems.

To represent youth in an effectively the CYA must be more than a body of youth who come together, talk for a bit, and pass resolutions. There is a very common saying: “talk is cheap” and if we only talk, there will be precious few who really pay attention. However, if we are getting youth involved and we are breaking down the traditional stereotypes, disproving them at every turn, we will accomplish monumental things. We will change Canada.

The CYA is sticking to it’s fundamental purpose, we are electing youth and they are serving their peers, but we understand that just talking about issues isn’t enough. It’s not enough to get people to listen and it’s not enough to make real change – therefore we need to enter into other strategies, we need to look at the possibilities and implement strategies to carry us forward.

The CYA is youth on a whole new level. The leaders of tomorrow, today.

What a week!

There's absolutely no way I'm going to be able to remember everything, so here's a pretty crude list:

Volunteer meeting went well - Kr is going to be outreaching to media; Jason is going to update our facebook and fun stuff; Allison is working on some potential funding sources and a grant template I whipped up (making sure she corrects all the mistakes and things I forgot to list ); and Steven is going to keep on making our amazing database even more amazing, while running the CYPC election!

We have a list of over 100 youth run/driven organizations that we're going to look into approaching regarding partnership (we're just working on something more concrete regarding an agreement, it's difficult to give/get much if it's all loosey goosey).

We've compiled a couple of lists of possible funding (grants and whatnot) and Allison is working on getting in touch with them - one of our newest volunteers - Erin Shin - is working on getting a bit more information on a few (for some reason I like hyphens in this paragraph!).

The planning on the CYA conference is coming - I'm taking a break from writing a grant application to be used on that to write this! (btw we have a paypal donation link on our main site http://cya-ajc.ca *hint* - we're non-profit, but not charitable )

I wrote up an agreement for parties - I have to go over this and make it into an agreement, maybe I'll be lazy..or... time efficient.... and just add a signature line

We started a group planning session on the forum (see the COLLABORATIVE PLANNING section, we need YOUR input!) - this is going to outline what we want to accomplish before the 2010 elections!

Oh yeah, the CYA elections department set the date for the elections, March 2010 (see http://election.cya-ajc.ca for details). We transferred candidate registry and voter registry over there as well! Take a look - great job Steven!

I've been looking into whether CYA can become a charity (relentlessly) and I've determined that in order for us to really give youth a voice, it's better for us to remain as a non-profit organization. The CYA needs to enter into what the government has deemed 'advocacy' in order to get our point across and be sure that the youth of Canada are truly represented!

I am going to be looking into incorporating another organizations to carry out some of the other duties (training, volunteering, model parliament, etc) that will be able to incorporate as a charity - but don't worry! (I can see all you people getting ready to facepalm at the fact that we're already doing too much) This isn't something I'm going to be doing all the time, it's something that I'll do once in a while - CYA is the top priority!

Did I mention the CYA Conference? Well, taking place in November - in OTTAWA (unless the reception to that is really bad). We're looking into lodging, venue, etc. There is a conference committee board on the FORUM (http://cya-ajc.ca/forum) - so please take a look and give us a hand

There are two volunteers (one new and one returning) working on The Representative - expect movement and shaking there! Template is being worked on, but I'm sure we'll continually improve it! If you have something to submit, let me know! See - http://cya-ajc.ca/therep

That's all I can think of for now... we're making progress! We're ALWAYS making progress.

Oh, the BBQ went amazing! Thanks to everyone who went, I hope you ate enough! And Allison's Skittles game was amazing - I was wondering if people were really going to put effort into it and they did! It turned out to be a smash! Expect more random introduction games from Allison at each event!

Keep on keeping on!

Tyler

Oh! And help us! The Forum (notices section) and the http://volunteering.cya-ajc.ca have volunteer information! You CAN help if you're involved in a CYA party!