Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I made comments earlier about the Youth Ambassador Program. We get a lot of youth who go through that program, but we also get a lot of youth who go through various programs through the Northwest Territories. We do have the successes but we also have some youth who fall through the cracks.
I want to ask the Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs, what type of follow-up does the department do, or the division, in following up with students after they have successfully gone through the program? As I mentioned, there is a mentorship program, but not everybody makes that mentorship program. What are we doing for the youth who don’t make it to that second level? Is there a follow-up component to this Youth Ambassador Program? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Moses. Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs, Mr. McLeod.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I think of all the programs that are run through the GNWT, the Youth Ambassador Program is one of the best. This is one program that’s going to have long-term benefits for the people of NWT. A lot of these young people are going to be our future leaders. In my time in interacting with them, I think the future of the NWT is in good hands.
To the question, the sport and recreation youth staff are constantly in contact with a lot of the youth ambassador alumni and potential youth ambassadors just to support and encourage them to pursue a healthy lifestyle and set goals and work hard. There is some follow-up with the former youth ambassadors, Mr. Speaker. Thank you.
I know the department does a great job. As I mentioned, they have developed a lot of life skills and job skills. A lot of questions we’ve heard through this sitting of the Legislative Assembly are the human resources issue and vacancies in some of the jobs.
Does the Minister and his department work with the Department of Human Resources to look at how we can get some of these youth ambassadors, who are fairly young, anywhere from the age of 18 and 24, to fill some of these vacancies? Has the Minister had these kinds of discussions with the Minister of Human Resources, or any other department for that matter? Thank you.
My information is there are 11 youth ambassadors who have been hired as summer students and have completed internships. There are six former youth ambassadors who are actually employed within the GNWT, and some of the successes you can measure. We have some youth ambassadors who are holding councillor positions within community governments, and there are some that are executive directors of NGOs. We’ve had some that have taken international volunteer placements and many have had academic scholarships and bursaries. Many of them are in volunteer roles in the community. We’ve had four youth ambassadors who have actually won the Outstanding Volunteer Award for the youth category. So, there’s a lot of opportunity for them there and the department tries to do what it can to ensure that there are opportunities for them within the GNWT. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
It’s great to hear all those successes. Aside from asking questions about the success of this program, can the Minister possibly commit to work on some sort of success story on the website? I know on the NWT website there’s a blog where youth ambassadors can post things, but would the Minister be willing to create a success story on all the years that this program has been going? Success stories that we’ve had among our youth ambassadors to showcase how successful the program is but also encourage youth that are coming up to look into the program and also join in the successes of that program? Thank you.
This program has been in effect since 2007. We’ve had about 250 youth ambassadors go through this program. There have been 27 youth ambassador projects. We’re coming up on 10 years here soon, and we’ve had some discussions of maybe doing a 10-year anniversary booklet or something to do exactly as the Member stated, just to measure some of the success we’ve had in the program. But we also have the proud2bnwt youth website, and that suggestion has some merit to it. We could possibly post a lot of the success stories on there, because this is a program that we as a government should be quite proud of in the development of our young people across the Northwest Territories. Any chance we have of highlighting their successes I think will go a long way in the development of them plus future youth who are coming up through the program. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Member for Yellowknife Centre, Mr. Hawkins.
