Empty Spaces Caring Connections: Group Home Review

Child & Youth Advocate releases report highlighting the experiences of children and youth in Group Care

The Office of the Yukon Child & Youth Advocate has released its latest review, Empty Spaces – Caring Connections:  the Experiences of Children and Youth in Yukon Group Care. A copy of this report has been provided to the Department of Health and Social Services.

The systemic review describes the experiences of children and youth living in Group Care from April 1, 2015 to March 31, 2018 (the review period).  94 children and youth lived in Group Care facilities during the review period.

To access the full report, follow this link: https://www.docdroid.net/SxKhMuh/ycao-2019-sr-eng-fnl.pdf 

Current Events

What’s Up YCAO!

Our main role at the Office, Individual or Systemic, is applying the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child to service providers to understand positive ways to support these rights for children. However, it is everyone’s responsibility to uphold the rights of children and youth as they are human rights. In knowing this, our focus in 2019 includes (aside from our Individual Advocacy and other work) a couple of things:

1. The group home review and;
2. public education and sharing what we know about upholding children’s rights

The Office has been working hard on the group home review to ensure recommendations for meaningful change, at a systems level, can happen for young people coming in to group care. The Review will be released at the beginning of April, as planned.

One goal of the Advocate Office is to reach a place in time when service providers, families, parents, caregivers and communities, as a whole, understand and enact children’s rights. We do this through public education. This links in with the old African proverb that “it takes a village (community) to raise a child”. It takes a community to uphold children’s rights, especially in the Yukon where we have generations of families who didn’t have rights as children. There is healing that needs to happen before we can look out for others.

An example of how we do this is our 10 Ways list from our Annual Report.

Another example is by including videos about children’s rights in our work. Such as this video:

Some of the ways we’ve channeled our public education this year include;

• Holding a presentation/discussion about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, linked with the UNCRC, for the CORE FCS Social Worker Training
• Hosting UNCRC discussions for the FCS and other HSS employees
• Wrapping up our Jays Care Rookie League events which connected to Articles 30 and 31 of the UNCRC
• Supporting one semester’s BSW student group in their policy class by partnering them with our office to complete UNCRC based reviews of current Yukon legislation
• Connecting with Vanier Catholic Secondary, Individual Learning Centre, Elijah Smith Elementary, FH Collins, Porter Creek and the Youth Achievement Centre for the Global Child Research
• Supporting Ira Manis, pictured below, to attend the United Nations 23^rd Annual Youth Assembly in the Big Apple (New York!)

We are thankful to be able to host such presentations, and to be invited to share information, with service providers and the public, as well as build relationships with future advocates. We find it a privilege. We are also thankful to have enough staff at YCAO to be able to provide such education – it is quite the feat to be able to do outreach while also managing the many other child and youth focused events and strategies, plus doing our Individual and Systemic Advocacy work.

If you or your organization is interested in learning more about children’s rights or having us host a presentation, information session, discussion or workshop please give us a call, email or connect with us on Facebook and we will set something up!

Or fill out our form and email it in! Presentation Request Form

Current Events

Here, we’ve been working on the GlobalChild project with Katie at Network for Healthy Early Development Yukon. The GlobalChild project is an international project organized by the United Nations. Canada, a signatory country that has ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of a Child (UNCRC), along with all other countries who have ratified the UNCRC, report to the UN every five years on how well they are implementing the UNCRC. The UN has decided to create a global monitoring tool that they will have all countries use to report back with, called GlobalChild, and it is near its completion stage. The final task they are doing before sending the tool out for all countries to use, is to hear from youth around the world on how they feel their rights are being upheld.

The GlobalChild project has 49 focus groups taking place in 33 different countries, 9 are happening in Canada, and we are facilitating the ones happening here in Whitehorse. So far we have held two focus groups, one with the Vanier Catholic Secondary School Social Justice class and one with students at the Independent Learning Centre.

The rights that these students examined were articles 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30 and 31 of the UNCRC. These articles are: the right to special education if needed, the right to the best healthcare, the right to help from the government if you are poor, the right to food, clothing and a safe place to live, the right to education, the right to education that helps you use your skills and abilities, the right to culture, language and religion, and lastly, which may be one of the most important rights, is the right to play! Articles 30 and 31 were also the rights we focused on through the Yukon Rookie League/Jays Care project from the 2017/2018 years. Below is a picture of the Vanier Social Justice class, thank you to all of the students who participated, if you are youth between the ages of 11-17 and want to learn more about how you can be a part of upcoming focus groups let us know!

We’re also focusing our attention on our group home review. If you are a youth, or know a youth, who lived in the group homes from April 1, 2015 – March 31, 2018, connect with us either in person or through phone or Facebook. We want to hear from you!