Friday, December 30, 2016
By Mike Adler
In a community hub without a name, in a part of Toronto most of us ignore, there are reasons for hope.
And that hope, so far, is coming from young women and girls.
Each started work on an idea to help York South-Weston, their neighbourhood, and one of the city’s most passed-over places.
Ubah Idle started #SaveOurSomaliYouth in February, after the city’s Somali community received a double blow: two 17-year-old boys — Saed Kaylie and Sharmarke Farah — killed in incidents days apart.
Idle then realized “there was little to no conversation about issues within our community,” because, she said, the older generation believes Somalis should hide their faults rather than talk about them.
“We sweep it under the rug, and eventually that rug is going to start to be lumpy,” Idle told other young project leaders at a launch of what will be a youth-led network backed by the For Youth Initiative on Keele Street.
Idle and friends started a social media platform where they could reach other Somali youth. In her words, they just ran with it.
Riley Peterson, a student at Vaughan Road Academy, formed a group to get girls at Charles Webster Junior Public School ready for high school. She went to Webster herself, and saw it did not have an after-school program for girls.
Peterson created a place where they could “get to know each other and trust each other.”
She brings them guest speakers. York South-Weston is isolated; the rest of the city “doesn’t really know us,” she said, and girls who do well in the community tend to leave. Peterson believes more need to come back to York South-Weston.
Other inspiring ideas for the neighbourhood are off the ground too. No doubt there will be more after January, when what FYI calls the Youth-led Initiative Network (also open to boys and young men) starts meeting monthly in the building, and comparing notes.
It could add up to something big for York South-Weston.
The recently-created hub, which houses FYI and other nonprofit agencies beside George Harvey Collegiate on Keele, doesn’t have a single sign yet announcing what it is. It should.