This month, Ottawa’s Inuit community centre, Tungasuvvingat Inuit, is celebrating 25 years of supporting Ottawa’s Inuit community, but it will also mark a full year without its youth services.
The centre spent most of that year waiting for its application for a revamped federal funding program to go through.
The original proposal was submitted in January 2011 and several times the application was returned by the department of Canadian Heritage with requests for more changes.
“We revised, and we revised, and we revised,” says Christine Lund, the former manager for the youth program.
In late January, their proposal was approved – Heritage Canada offered $35,000 for a youth program, as long as the money was spent by the end of the fiscal year eight weeks later.
“So here we are, over a year later from when the proposal was actually written, almost a full year from when the program ended, and they asked us to deliver a program for youth for two months,” says Lund.
Lund, along with Tungasuvvingat Inuit’s executive director, Jason LeBlanc, decided to refuse the money. Aside from the short duration of the program, the newly changed requirements would have limited the centre’s ability to deliver quality programming, says LeBlanc.
The youth program had been wholly dependent on Canadian Heritage funding for more than a decade. LeBlanc says they used to receive about $60,000 in financing each year to run the teen-focused activities in Ottawa.
The department revamped the Cultural Connections for Aboriginal Youth funding program last year, introducing the new requirements that stood at the centre of the revisions and delays. The budget for youth funding at the department wasn’t cut last year, says LeBlanc. The money is there – but accessing it had suddenly become a thornier affair.
For example, Canadian Heritage introduced tighter limits on how much money a youth program could spend on food.
Cooking, eating, and learning about traditional Inuit dishes was part of the program’s healthy-living focus.
Before the youth program at Tungasuvvingat Inuit disintegrated, it offered a range of activities for local Inuit between the ages of 10 and 25 to get in touch with their Northern culture and community. Sports, craft-making, and storytelling sessions with elders were all part of the mix.
Lund estimates that half of Inuit youth in urban Ottawa were involved at the centre, with workshops bringing in as many as 60 youth at a time.
“The youth who have participated have become leaders within the community. Without it, that won’t be happening,” says Lund.
And without more stable funding, it’s unlikely they’ll come back, she says. It will take more than two months to establish new relationships with the youth who lost their after-school hangout.
The program was the only one of its kind in Ottawa.
Other programs targeted at the broader aboriginal community don’t cut it, says Karen Baker-Anderson, executive director of the Ottawa Inuit Children’s Centre.
“When they go to pan-aboriginal services they don’t see themselves. We think that’s really important because in Ottawa you can’t look out the window and experience your culture. You have to go create it,” she says.
The Ottawa Inuit Children’s Centre, which caters to Inuit children up to age 13, is studying the possibility of creating their own youth program for teenagers to fill the gap.