Tyler Sommers' Blog

Hey everyone, long time to write. How are you? Enjoying the winter weather? Have plans for the holidays? Well Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone out there! I, and everyone at the CYA, wish all the best to you and yours.

I wanted to give you a couple of updates regarding the CYA. Things seems slow don’t they? Well, that’s not true and we’re moving along with our projects at a decent pace (it’s slower than it has been because I’m working and volunteering in other areas, and our senior volunteers are all caught up with school, which is good).

Not sure if I’ve mentioned this to you before, but we have a policy with our volunteers: School always takes precedence. When the workload at school is higher or you want to focus on school, you are encouraged (and sometimes forced through our removing responsibilities from you) to do so. School is important and we want you to succeed in your education. This goes for all of you participants as well. School is a priority over the CYA and we like when people tell us they’re busy with school and will need to take on a lighter load.

So, what’s going on with the CYA you ask?

As part of the strategic review and change process that we’re going through, we’ve revamped our volunteer system. People no longer volunteer in vague and blurry ways; this was too catered to people with lots of time and effort to put into volunteering. We still have the option of taking leadership roles, but everything is now done on a project-by-project basis.

So, if you want to volunteer you’re sent a list of we have underway and you take a look to see where you want to volunteer. Each project has a list of things you could help with and we start from there.

I’m going to get the project list on the website soon, but I’ve been busy. Aside from this rather extensive internal change, there are also some important changes that will take place directly related to you, the participant.

The CYA will, in time (maybe years, so don’t hold your breath), be splitting our focus. We’ll have the CYA Model Parliament (and other similar activities) on the one hand, and on the other we’ll have everything else (roundtables, conferences, etc). The reasons are plentiful and I’ll write more about them soon, but it boils down to there being two types of youth showing interest in our organization:

Group A – Those who want to participate in mock/model type events because they believe in the current systems and want to eventually be a part of them.

Group B – Those who don’t support the current systems and therefore see mock and model as a silly way to go about things (in their minds it’s like imitating a broken system) and who therefore want to participate in other ways.

Now those lists were in no particular order and that was a really broad description, so don’t worry, I know it’s far more intricate and thought out than that.

We’re not going to function in a way that’s only going to attract half of our target audience. Our goal is to incorporate everyone into the fold and to do so we need to ensure we’re not just operating one sort of thing. So, we’re going to slowly be separating responsibilities, etc.

This will require some changes to documents, guidelines, the website, forum, etc, but we will maintain our current purpose and structure. That means that if responsibilities or roles are removed from one document, they’ll be added to another of equal importance. Basically we’ll have a set of documents that applies to the organization and specifically the Model Parliament side, and another that applies to the organization and specifically the other side (of course we’ll have central documents for the oversight of everything as well). In time we’re hoping to incorporate two organizations (one with charitable status), but as I mentioned, it could be years before this happens.

We’ll be sure to keep everyone in the loop.

I want to assure you that we’re maintaining our bottom-up, grassroots structure. However there will be changes because we need to streamline some things and we’ve realized a lot over the past few years (especially regarding the roles our members are interested in playing in the CYA).

We’ll be the same old CYA, but things will be far easier to understand and follow, making it easier for us to grow and become much more than what we currently are.

I’ll write again soon!

Respectfully,

Tyler Sommers
Executive Director – Canadian Youth Assembly