Long Lake #58 youth come together to support one another
By Rick Garrick
LONG LAKE #58 — Long Lake #58 recently held a 10-day detox and alcohol program for about 42 youth at the Best Western Plus NorWester Hotel and Conference Centre in Thunder Bay that included a trip to Toronto. The program was developed based on the community’s Better Together Wellness Strategy for adults.
“Treatment for youth is quite different than treatment for adults, so we designed a 10-day program for our youth,” says Long Lake #58 Chief Judy Desmoulin. “It’s more self awareness as to why they’re getting into drugs and alcohol so early in their lives. We created this 10-day program and it was a really good eye-opener for us and it was a really good learning experience for the youth who signed up.”
Desmoulin says the strategy for both adults and youth involves having a core group of participants who can support one another and slowly gather others into their circle to continue to make the community healthier.
“One of the things we did was we continued with an incentive,” Desmoulin says. “[For] all the youth that stayed in the program, completed the program, there was a follow-up trip. We just got back from Toronto yesterday [Aug. 28].”
Desmoulin says the youth loved the program.
“They participated 100 per cent in everything we did,” Desmoulin says. “We had many awesome presenters, people their own age. It’s really important to spend this intimate time with them so we truly hear what their needs are, what their greatest stresses are.”
Desmoulin says one of the issues the youth raised was about how they don’t attend school in order to help their younger siblings because of their parents’ addictions.
“So as programs, we step in, we made allowances for those siblings to get to our day-care centre,” Desmoulin says. “They can drop them off at the day-care centre and go to school and then pick them up at the end of the day.”
Long Lake #58 Councillor Noreen Agnew says the detox and alcohol program featured teachings and awareness on living alcohol and drug free and on self-esteem.
“They did a 10-day program here (at the NorWester), which was led by our community by our workers,” Agnew says. “As an incentive for living a positive life, we took them to Toronto. We took them to a Blue Jays game, we took them to the CNE (Canadian National Exhibition), the Hockey Hall of Fame, the Zoo, just a lot of fun stuff to take them away from the community and a lot of their hard times, trauma they go through, and show them a good life.”
Agnew says a lot of the youth who participated in the detox and alcohol program are looking forward to doing more positive activities in the community.
“They want to fundraise, they want to do more travelling, they want to go back to school,” Agnew says. “A lot of them want to just keep busy, get their education, so they’re keeping busy. They understand now why their parents are struggling and what they can do just to step up and do what they need to do to continue living a good life.”
Agnew says it was important to take the youth away from the community as a group so they could learn to support each other and to be away from the environment of drugs and alcohol that became so normal for them.
“This initiative was important for us to take it into our own hands to get a group together to get better together, to support each other, and get stronger together and find a positive way to adapt in our community and become who we need them to be for our future in our community,” Agnew says.