Boyle Street to benefit from part of $1.6 million funding

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At a press conference on Jan. 24 at the Boyle Street Education Centre, Anne McLellan, minister of Health, along with provincial MLA Stan Woloshyn, announced that under Canada's National Crime Prevention Strategy, $1.5 million will be doled out to 38 communities across the province.

Two of Boyle Streets initiatives benefit from the announcement-the Beat Of Boyle Street and the Green Team.

Shirley Minard, the principal of the Boyle Street Education Centre, said the Beat Of Boyle Street is about re-engagement. It is a music program set up in conjunction with the University of Alberta and is about speaking the language of music and how that language is universal.

"There is research all around on if you keep kids busy, they are going to be involved in things. They are interested in [things], rather than in crime, and music is a definite way for them to be interested in something," she said.

Hope Hunter, the director of Boyle Street, said the Green Team project is a concept worked out with the downtown business association and Boyle Street Education Centre. She said the funds will be accessed by the business groups in the downtown core who are involved in crime prevention.

Hunter would like the downtown business association to have a better understanding of the challenges that inner city Aboriginal youth face and be open to helping youth explore opportunities.

"It is our hope that through this project we will have more of a relationship between Aboriginal youth and the downtown business community. So that we will see more and more Aboriginal faces in downtown businesses and in jobs."

She said that part of the challenge is that a lot of the Aboriginal kids at the centre know people with jobs in social work, child welfare workers and police, and they sort of gravitate towards those kinds of careers.

"What they see in action is what they know. I'm really hoping this move will give kids a better sense of the range of jobs out there, and what they might be interested in. That is why we have a partnership with the downtown association, which is a bunch of non-Aboriginal people mostly. So it is really going to the sources that have the jobs and hopefully we will be able to develop a dialogue between our youth here and our community here," she said.

Hunter would like to see the youth create opportunities for other kids as well as get people to talk to each other, to do some networking among businesses.

"To educate one student who will introduce their friend who will then introduce them to their friend. That kind of idea, so gradually it will build up to a network of people," she said.

"I just want to make sure Aboriginal students do not flip burgers for the rest of their lives because that type of work could not pay the rent. I would like them to get a job that is more permanent. The youth are the fastest growing purchasing population that we have. They are our consumers tomorrow and they are also our employees of tomorrow," she said.