Côte-des-Neiges Youths : Transforming the Neighborhood Through Service

In a neighbourhood in the middle of Montreal young people are coming together to learn about transforming their communities and their own selves. Many years of experience and effort are giving forth beautiful fruits as youth from all backgrounds across the Cote-des-Neiges neighbourhood are learning, serving others, and reflecting about what it looks like to build a stronger, more united community. One group of youth who are now high school graduates are organizing free tutoring spaces for the younger children and youth in their community. This act of service has allowed many families, who could not have access to tutoring before, to sign their children up for weekly tutoring. Through their weekly tutoring spaces, dozens of children are seeing improvements in their academics and their relationship to education. The youth who are tutoring are strengthening their own skills and learning to assist their students develop a stronger love for learning. A group of 15 year olds spent this past summer in daily action through a summer program aimed to assist them to volunteer in their community. Throughout the summer they had regular conversations with neighbours, planned community gatherings and festivals for children, and started a class for children in their community. These classes teach the children different virtues such as kindness, generosity, and patience, weekly through art, storytelling, songs and games, it also helps the children gather with others their age and build connections in their community. After the summer ended this group has continued teaching this weekly class. At the end of the summer program one participant shared, “I feel happy that I served my community and that I developed my own capacity. I felt really great that I did all these things to help my community and it helped me too.” Another group of youth are animating weekly junior youth groups for 11-15 year olds. These groups help them develop capacity to serve their community and help the junior youth recognize the forces that influence them, develop their power of expression, sharpen their spiritual perception, and assist them in making efforts to improve their neighbourhoods through the service projects that they organize together. Some examples of service projects these groups have carried out are garbage clean ups, food drives, fundraisers for various charities, and social gatherings for the community. As animators, the older youth are engaging over 50 junior youth in weekly groups and are bringing whole families into the community building process. These are but a few examples of groups of young people at the vanguard of a process in their community, a process through which unity of being built and a younger generation is being tended to. What we are seeing is transformation in the community through the selfless efforts of these youth but also a transformation that they are noticing within themselves. > "In the young people of the world…lies a reservoir of capacity to transform society waiting to be tapped." -The Universal House of Justice, world governing body of the Baha’i Faith