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Vancouver Working Group Discussion Paper
The Youth Friendly City
Chapter 2: The Secure City
How young people use peer-based programs and prevention models to create secure urban environments.
"In order for young people to truly experience social justice, we must create a society in which young people are full citizens, empowered to contribute and make decisions. Youth Participation is an idea whose time has come..."
- Anne B. Hoover and Amy Weisenbach, Youth Leading Now!
As the majority of the world's people continue to concentrate their homes and livelihoods in cities, both the anxiety about threats to human security and the actual breaches of this security have increased. This is especially true in relation to issues of disease, violence, hunger, and poverty. Given their vulnerable status in society, children and youth are amongst the most immediate victims of these contemporary human security threats. Since young citizens are not a homogenous group, their vulnerabilities increase in association with gender, race, geographic and class location, immigrant status in particular.
Young citizens are not just victims however, and many are engaged solution-makers securing their own futures. The children and youth who work on human security issues have chosen to wade into these complex and controversial areas to critically change the adverse conditions in which they, their peers, and their community members live. In their action-oriented work, these young citizens are contributing to the reframing of two contemporary debates: how to address the critical and enduring problems that threaten human safety and security; and, defining what is the role of young citizens in building secure, sustainable urban environments.
In an urbanizing world, the threats to safety and security are well known; what remains hidden is the multiple prevention and intervention measures children and youth are engaging in to safeguard individual and community well-being. The most resilient prevention models tend to be youth-driven, asset-based, inclusive and empowering. As such, policymakers have an urgent and vested interest in recognizing and supporting young citizens' participation in building human security. Their contributions are critical to securing a viable future in urban life worldwide. This chapter will examine child and youth-driven promising programs and prevention models in three key areas of global concern:
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Peer Prevention: HIV/AIDS and Securing Health
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Girl Power: Building Safety and Security for Girls and Young Women
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Youth-led Intergenerational Change: Building Food Security
Peer Prevention: HIV/AIDS and Securing Health
UNICEF Right to Know projects
In a country most known internationally for conflict and strife, teams of young people across Bosnia have engaged approximately 2500 adolescents, aged 11 to 18, in expressing their views about HIV/AIDS prevention issues in a by youth for youth Participatory Active Research (PAR) process. These young citizens are trailblazers, leading the first-ever youth-lead program in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In one of 16 countries adopting a UNICEF Right to Know project, the young Bosnians have taken responsibility for creating an efficient HIV/AIDS prevention communication strategy.
The 70 young people participation from the three cities of Tuzla, Sarajevo and Banja Luka, know that children and youth are experts in their experience and have ideas about how best to change the attitudes and behaviours of their peers to reduce harm. The PAR questionnaires and individual interviews gave adolescents the opportunity to give voice to their experiences and to identify behaviours that lead to infection risk and human rights violations. In the process, youth speak openly with their peers about risky behaviour in ways that they cannot with parents, teachers and other adults in their lives. In Tuzla, the youth team has combined youth activities – street basketball tournaments, street dances and film nights, for example – with their opinion poll research in order to connect with other children and youth and distribute prevention information and condoms. As the youth communications team devises the best communication strategy and moves on to implement this strategy in partnership with government institutions, the impact they are already making is significant.
Based on current rates, it is projected that by the year 2005, HIV will infect more than 100 million people worldwide. Currently, 95% of people living with and dying of HIV/AIDS reside in developing countries. In Sub-Saharan Africa, one of the hardest hit regions, experts indicate that one in four adults are dying from AIDS; as the adult prevalence rate increases worldwide, the demographic shift towards a younger global population is intensifying.
Engaging youth prevention efforts as an integral part of this effort cannot be overstated in the face of this growing, multi-faceted health and security threat, and United Nations' commitment to cut prevalence rates by 25% among young people around the globe by 2010. In a 1995 European Commission survey of adults and youth (80% of respondents were between ages 15-24), young people were found to be better informed than adults about HIV transmission and protection. In most European cities where youth and adults often live in separate worlds, young people are necessary partners in reaching their peers.
Youth Community Outreach (YouthCo) Aids Society, Vancouver, Canada
YouthCo is Canada's only youth-driven HIV/AIDS agency. The energetic and committed staff at YouthCo work to involve youth ages 15 to 29 from all communities in addressing HIV/AIDS and related issues. YouthCo also provides peer-driven educational initiatives and support services to youth infected with and/or affected HIV/AIDS and/or Hepatitis C. Combating stigma, embarrassment, and fear around issues of sexual health is easier to do in an environment where youth respect and interact with their peers. Evan Jones, Executive Director at YouthCO explains why their peer-based, prevention models are so successful: “Youth is a difficult time of transition. They may be transitioning in and out of school systems, home, paid work, volunteer work, or entering into spaces of having to negotiate being sexual for the first time. . . We help them make their own educated decisions about securing their own health.”
YouthCO follows the principle and practice of harm reduction by providing accurate information on health issues and by helping youth discover underlying issues that may lead to harmful or risky behaviour. In YouthCo's dynamic environment, youth help other youth recognize and address the interrelated factors such as self-esteem, access to housing, culture, education, gender and poverty, that influence health and well-being.
Collective advocacy and youth-driven political work that represents youth interests and helps negotiating healthier choices sends a very strong message to decision-makers: Young citizens are taking responsibility for their own health and safety and are well-positioned to champion strategies of prevention and harm reduction to peers.
Girl Power: Building Safety and Security for Girls and Young Women, Canada
Gender-based research points to a connection between gender-specific spaces and the combative and preventive programming on the diverse threats associated with growing up female. In this context, POWER Camp, a Canadian young woman-centred organization, emerged to inspire, promote and support the creation of sustainable, empowering critical education opportunities for girls and young women.
In January 2003, POWER Camp National launched the Girl's Club Inner City Partnerships to create a culture of support for girls inside schools. In Montreal's Verdun Elementary School, grade 6 girls are being supported by young women in “taking space” – two big classrooms that they have filled with their colour decorations, lively conversations, energy, fears, big questions and big ideas. Claiming physical space is the first step to claiming space in the dominant educational, social, cultural, economic and political structures in which girls and young women struggle to develop. Herein lies the heart of the POWER Camp prevention approach: popular, critical education begins with girls and young women's lived experiences and moves to capacity building and collective action. POWER Camp's processes engages and empowers girls and young women with the confidence and tools they need to promote their own health and wellbeing as part of challenging societal barriers including institutionalized racism, homophobia, poverty, sexual and structural violence.
The intersections of race and/or poverty with gender continue to exacerbate women's and girl's vulnerability to violence. Women account for almost 50% of HIV/AIDS cases around the globe. One in three women will suffer violence in sometime in their lives; two million girls under age 15 are brought into the commercial sex trade annually. Economic globalization is leaving the legacy of persistent poverty for more and more women, trapping them on the periphery of society without the sufficient means to escape.
Microenterprise training program for young women, Venezuela
In a Venezuelan woman's prison, another story of youth-led prevention emerges to stop cycles of economic deprivation and violence. The young, first-time offenders enter prison because of drug-related crimes that were committed to help them end the economic violence in their lives. Demonstrating the resilient power of one, Virginia, a 25-year old inmate, used the knowledge and confidence she gained in prison through a microenterprise training program, to create opportunities for others to escape the severe economic crisis that often defines the lives of Venezuelan women. Finishing the program that helped her rebuild her values and recover her potential, Virginia used her developing leadership to inspire other inmates to desire more for themselves. Virginia worked with Cendif to bring the microenterprise training program to her new prison, using her manuals and bi-weekly orientations from Cendif to train 25 new detained women. Participation in Cendif's program gave the inmates access to bank loans in prison to start their own microenterprises that they can continue upon their release.
Having witnessed the impact of her own power, Virginia is now starting a new training program for a second cohort of inmates in her San Juan prison. This young woman is creating the building blocks towards her own economic security, and contributing to the building of others'. There are many more examples of young people addressing their own complex challenges, in collaboration with their communities, to stave off threats to human security and sustainability.
Ellen Woodsworth
Counsellor, City of Vancouver
Youth-led Intergenerational Change:
Building Food Security
East African Youth Coalition
Urban governance – the broad process of public decision-making in cities – plays an important role in ensuring urban food security. With little access to such governance, young citizens find themselves poised to inherit staggering problems of environmental degradation and food insecurity when, as adults, they are finally invited to make decisions. For young people like the East African Youth Coalition, this practice of democratic ageism is unacceptable.
Combining their expertise from their home countries (Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda), the Coalition initiated a resolution for the 2002 World Summit on Social Development. The East African youth issued a powerful call to governments to include youth in decision-making at all levels in order to foster youth empowerment and create formal processes for achieving more sustainable, accountable governance for society.
Santropol Roulant meals-on-wheels program, Montreal, Canada
In wealthy nations like Canada, where the threat of hunger often falls below the political radar screen, an award-winning youth-driven organization is taking on the food security challenge. Operating out of a busy storefront office in the heart of Montreal, Santropol Roulant is the largest independent meals-on-wheels program in the province of Quebec, Canada. Creating a unique model for building intergenerational community, Santropol engages young citizens aged 16 to 35 in addressing the health and food security needs of seniors and other Montrealers living with unemployment.
Youth often enter Santropol “active volunteerism” program as adolescents. By preparing and delivering food, and rebuilding meaningful intergenerational relationships with seniors, Santropol Roulant provides a social context for the important issue of food security. For many adolescents, this experience is often their first political exercise of their citizenship. By taking an active role in reinforcing the health of communities, many young volunteers deepen their understanding of the issues of poverty and social justice and go on to promote advocacy in other organizations. This participatory, youth-inclusive, meaningful process resonates with young citizens in a way that spurs their desire to be part of broader community governance.
Conclusion
These promising practices, advanced by young people typically excluded from traditional political processes, exemplify the need for youth to create their own alternative spaces for local governance. These models tend to be youth-led and inclusive, strength-based, affirming and generative. They create space, build trust and respect, and connect their prevention efforts to underlying, core issues such as equity gaps of age, race, gender, social and citizenship status and geographic location. They recognize and develop strategies to address the intersections between sexism and violence; poverty and crime; conflict and HIV/AIDS; democratic ageism and youth insecurity. They engage young people, from the critical entry point of their own lived experiences, and prepare them to play a vital role in creating safer urban environments in their local, national, and global urban communities.
Only a sustained partnership of young people, community, and government may fully address the growing threats to urban well-being. Policy makers need to support youth-driven prevention and peer-based models and develop coordinated and collaborative responses to helping young people address the needs of human security for themselves and for generations to follow.