By Sarah Osborne
Somerset Ward’s newest Ottawa Youth Cabinet member wants to bring her personal touch to the committee — a focus on marginalized youth.
Zahrah Hajali, 21, formerly the reserve member for Somerset Ward, will take over for Nathan Hauch who resigned in November.
The Ottawa Youth Cabinet is an advisory committee that reports on city services and issues confronting local youth, including recreation and health services.
It’s a 21-member board of youth representing each ward of the city.
Hajali says she first heard about the youth cabinet from a city advertisement.
“I’m already really involved in youth-oriented organizations, so it was just something that I was looking for to take a bigger role,” Hajali says.
Hajali volunteers at the Youth Services Bureau, is part of the youth drop-in on Besserer Street, helps with the HIV-AIDS peer education, and is a member of the bureau’s multicultural club.
Because most youth cabinet members are from the suburbs, she says many of them might not be aware of issues facing youth in Somerset Ward.
Hajali says she wants the cabinet to focus more on youth who are marginalized, such as street youth and single mothers.
“I find that youth who are at risk really need more attention because they don’t have a lot of opportunity to change their lifestyle, and if they do want to change their lifestyle it’s very difficult,” she says. “I know, because I’m speaking from experience.”
Hajali, a single mother herself, says having her daughter motivates her.
Hajali says she is excited about starting her duties as the Somerset Ward representative.
She says hopefully she will bring new ideas to the cabinet, and perhaps a less formal structure to the meetings.
“I want to go in there and I want to feel like I’m the new blood, you know, like it’s going to be run differently,” Hajali says.
Hajali says she is satisfied with the way the cabinet is run, but that covering too many issues lowers the cabinet’s ability to make a significant contribution to the community.
“I just started reading about things they have done in the past, and that’s great, but do we really have to do it every year? You just need to change things up.”
Some of the youth cabinet’s past actions have been to formally support the Ottawa Senators, push for a skate park, and help organize an annual youth symposium.
At the end of December, a review committee decided there would be no changes to the cabinet’s mandate or number of youth representatives.
The youth cabinet had problems last year getting enough attendance to hold meetings.
In the last six months of 2003, five voting members and three reserve members resigned from the cabinet.
Hajali says this year she wants to put together a documentary about at-risk youth in Ottawa, but she does not want it to be a typical documentary about that subject.
“Most of the time, you don’t hear about the issues until something bad has happened, like someone dies who has been on the street or a single mom gets fed up and leaves her kid and goes somewhere else,” Hajali says.
“I’d like to bring positive images to the city and then do something about it before things happen.”