It’s around 4:30 in the afternoon at St. Stephen’s youth arcade in Kensington Market and, apparently, it’s quiet. Manager of youth services Bridget Sinclair explains that it’s calmer than usual because a group is about to start. She’s shouting over “Shopaholic,” which is playing in the living room area that also functions as a classroom, pool hall (the pool table doubles as a homework desk), counselling space, computer lab, art studio, kitchen and about a dozen other things I didn’t catch.
It’s like that at the youth arcade; it moves fast, at about the pace teenagers talk (and text and instant message and email). While Bridget and I are leaning up against the couch, she dispenses light health advice, welcomes new arrivals and gives me a tour (at about 900 square feet, she can show me the place from the couch).
Other times, she might conduct a mock job interview or help rehearse a school presentation or advise on some math homework. For the uninitiated (or, more accurately, for me), it’s a little like sitting inside a very genial pinball machine. To the youth who use the space it’s, as 18-year-old Sasha puts it, “organized, relaxing chaos.”
But it’s chaos with a purpose; the room is dense with productivity. “It’s a place to learn, to be yourself and to find out who you want to be in order to be yourself,” says Sasha, who has been coming here since Grade 9. She explains that many of the programs are initiated by the youth themselves. “In Grade 9, I wanted to dance. I told them and they organized a hip-hop dance class, and then I started leading it. I’ve been leading it ever since and now I’m actually in a dance group outside.” Or there’s the boxing program, “We had a punching bag.... So we were like, why don’t we just make a boxing program? So we went to them, they said OK, they looked for funding, we got the funding, and there’s a boxing program.”
The youth arcade is, technically, a youth centre, a special breed of youth space that’s difficult to define. There’s no formal template for youth centres but, according to St. Stephen’s Associate executive director Bill Sinclair — who is also a member of the Toronto Coalition of Youth Centres (TCYC), a recent initiative to secure core funding for youth centres in the city — they pop up spontaneously across the province, organized by neighbourhood houses or community groups, by churches or by youth themselves, and meet a basic need for safe, unstructured space. It’s the difference, say, between an activity (organized sports) and a context (somewhere to be).
Beyond that, youth centres have in common a non-institutional feel and an unshakable popularity (the youth arcade, for example, sees about 60 kids a day, many of whom keep coming back for years). Here’s what else most youth centres have in common: they do not receive core funding from the province.
It’s not that the province isn’t putting money into youth issues. They are, including $28.5 million over three years for a multi-pronged “Youth Opportunities Strategy,” according to Ministry of Children and Youth Services spokesperson Anne Machowski. The TCYC itself emphasizes that provincial youth funding is going to important work — they just want youth centres included in the mix. St. Stephen’s, for example, receives funding from the province for specific projects like its youth justice program. At the same time, the youth arcade — the context that houses the programs and provides continuity for the youth — relies on private foundations and the United Way, a funding arrangement Bridget Sinclair says leaves the arcade “often struggling to make ends meet... and spending a huge amount of time searching for dollars.”
The emphasis on project funding over core funding is also leaving some youth centres at risk of closing completely. Without quick intervention from the province, the west end’s Dufferin Mall Youth Services (DMYS) — which has been run out of Dufferin Mall for 14 years and sees about 3,000 kids annually — will shut its doors later this month. DMYS is run by a group of agencies, with Turning Point Youth Services taking the lead. Now, Turning Point is no longer able to carry the centre. Will the province come to the rescue? Turning Point executive director Colin Dart is “optimistic.” At press time, negotiations continued.
The province’s Youth Opportunities Strategy is, itself, another example of the strange schism between programming and space. As part of its mandate to “develop more services and programs for youth in under-serviced areas,” the Youth Opportunities Strategy has created a number of permanent positions for youth outreach workers. One problem, though: they didn’t fund the spaces to put them in. Instead, the outreach workers are using a series of existing community spaces, an arrangement that doesn’t always work.
“Youth space facilitates an environment that allows young people to drop their barriers,” says one outreach worker who asked to remain anonymous. “It’s really hard in the office space I have now, where I’m surrounded by adults, to get young people to tell me what’s really going on. And when young people feel comfortable, they’ll also listen. Which is key to what I do.”
But, as the outreach worker explains, space is more than just a quiet place to do counselling. “If you look at under-served areas in the city, there are huge housing facilities which are owned and maintained by other people. You have no say over it. So when you don’t have any connection to the property you live in, it’s important for you to have a connection to something in your immediate community. And that’s what youth space should be. A connecting point for young people.”
So why the blind spot around youth space? As Bridget Sinclair points out, the province provides core funding for, say, seniors’ centres or early years centres. What would catapult youth into the same funding category as other vulnerable populations? A provincial youth policy might be a good starting point. At present (according to many of the youth professionals interviewed for this story — I was unable to get a comment on this from a spokesperson for the province), there is no one policy that runs across the different ministries, binding together the interests of “youth” as a category.
Instead, they are often divided up according to their problems — mental illness, crime, academic struggles — and sent to institutional settings for help. An integrated-policy approach to youth would give ministries a mechanism by which to provide stable funding for grassroots initiatives that don’t fit well into current funding silos. It could also result in integrated solutions, ones that play to both the humanity and the complexity of individual kids.
In the end, youth centres might be best defined as spaces that take strong direction from youth themselves. And since most youth (like most people) want to feel better and do good, the spaces they help shape reflect their best interests, even as communities change. As Sasha puts it, “When the next generation comes in, they can always put in new ideas, and then the programs shift.”
But, in addition to programming, youth centres also offer something intangible, a place to be and, according to Sasha, to “feel good.” And that’s the key to space: the blank canvas, the improvisational feel, the endless possibilities life holds for youth (for anyone) when they are supported, respected and equipped with a place of their own.