Fort Providence celebrated the opening of its new youth centre on April 26.
“That's pretty exciting for us and for the community to be able to have that space for youth really to congregate and come together,” said Jason Collard, program coordinator for Northern Loco, which is operating the Fort Providence Youth Centre in conjunction with the Zhahti Koe Friendship Centre.
“There hasn’t been a consistent space for youth to be in the community for quite a few years now.”
Programming at the youth centre has already begun, running from 5 to 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday last week, then 4 to 8 p.m. on Friday and 7 till 11 p.m. on Saturday.
Collard moved to Fort Providence in January 2018 to work for Northern Loco and now also facilitates youth and recreation programming for the hamlet.
Northern Loco—which stands for Lois’s Company—was founded by Lois Philipp, a lauded NWT educator, with the goal of prompting community development programs and helping to develop local capacity.
It has been around for three years but has been at its most active since Collard arrived to fill the program coordinator role.
“One of the first things we did was a help lay out a plan and implement a strategy to have the fire department come back into service,” said Collard. “I then transitioned into a role as interim fire chief where we were able to take steps to meet the new requirements to have a functioning fire department in the NWT.”
Another major focus for Northern Loco has been in delivering youth programming through Deh Gah School and working with a group of students in community engagement programming.
“The youth identified an issue that they were concerned about, which was drugs and alcohol in the community and developed and implemented their own response to that, which was a sober weekend that the youth ran and organized back in October this past year,” said Collard.
Northern Loco has also been running an exchange with Glebe High School in Ottawa. Students travelled to Ottawa from Fort Providence in the fall, then students from Ottawa came to the hamlet in March. Another trip south is planned for this month.
“The themes around that are having youth figure out what reconciliation and decolonization mean to them and come together to figure out, from a youth perspective, what we do to kind of forge a new path for Canada moving forward and really strengthen Indigenous and non-Indigenous relationships,” said Collard.
He says an eventual goal of the company is to open a charter school in the area, building and expand upon Philipp’s work in delivering on-the-land education.