Kids line up for cake at the official opening of the new Rochester Heights wing of the Boys and Girls Club of Ottawa.
Youth in the Rochester Heights community now have a safe place to spend their leisure time with the launch of a new Boys and Girls Club of Ottawa satellite site in the neighbourhood.
Children and their parents filled the gymnasium of the Cambridge Street Community Public School recently for the club's official opening.
“We’ll be running five days a week, all year round,” says Boys and Girls Club executive director Scott Bradford.
The new club will provide children and youth with active engagement after school and during the summer, he says.
The program ,which aims to foster leadership skills among youth, will be split between two locations – Cambridge Street Community Public School for children six to 12, and Adult High School for youth aged 13 to 18.
The club already boasts 130 members.
Bradford says that by offering homework clubs, leadership programs, sports and recreation, the Boys and Girls Club, which has been active in Ottawa for 86 years, hopes to keep youth positively engaged.
Benefits of the program, he says, are that it helps youth to improve their grades, and youth crime drops because they are positively occupied.
“It’s a real preventative strategy of engaging young people,” he says.
“You are going to see kids doing better in employment as they get ready for the real world and just happier, healthier young people.”
The Rochester Heights Club was made possible through the collaboration of the United Way, Telus Corp., Ontario Trillium Foundation, Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, Somerset West Community Health Centre and Rochester Heights Community House.
Ottawa Centre MPP Yasir Naqvi commended the groups for their joint effort.
“We’re all pooling our resources to make sure that we have effective programming for our young people,” he says.
Naqvi says the program is important because learning also occurs outside the classroom.
“It gives their parents the necessary help, especially when you are looking at inner-city neighbourhoods like Rochester Heights where you have a lot of single mothers,” he says.
“You’ve got a lot of parents who have two or three jobs. We are working with them so that we can help them break from that cycle of poverty and give them a hand so that their kids have the necessary support while they are working hard to support their families.”
It was important for Telus as good corporate citizens to contribute to the Boys and Girls Club’s new program says Ann Mainville-Neeson, Telus director of regulatory affairs.
As part of the company’s “We Give Where We Live” campaign, Telus provides funding for worthy projects within the community. This project provided the perfect opportunity for the company to give back, Mainville-Neeson says.
“This one is just so great for the children, to see them flourish with the nutrition and the opportunity to access computers, which they may not have at home,” she says.
“I think it’s a great initiative. We are proud to support it.”
A member of the Boys and Girls Club, 10-year-old Hersi Hashi, says he has enjoyed being a part of the club and has learned many important values.
Foremost he says, “You have to respect each other and treat them the way you want to be treated.”
Because of the Boys and Girls Club, Hashi says he has learned the benefit of working together through fun games.
“It’s awesome. I love the Boys and Girls Club.”