The Collingwood Neighbourhood House Youth Action Committee is a group of youth who come together weekly to plan and execute community projects. This year we decided that the unhoused people living in the downtown east side of Vancouver, facing financial hardship, and/ or an addiction to substances would be our focus to help in any way we could. We then planned about a multi-step plan to benefit the community, and one of the steps included making an educational workshop to help teach the local youth about how stigma was negatively impacting those facing adversity and/ or poverty. The goal was to help educate these youth and contribute to creating a more inclusive neighbourhood and with the $400 grant from the NSG this goal was able to be achieved. With the grant we could afford a guest speaker (a recreational therapist named Alyssa) to talk about her experiences in the DTES and what the conditions were like. She was very involved and informative and her presentation taught the audience a lot more about the daily lifestyle of those struggling in the downtown east side, and she really helped clear some negative stigma some of the audience members previously had. We also used the grant to get people interested in the workshop in the first place. We used food, games, and prizes (such as pizza, candy, a raffle, and toys) to incentivize youth to come, and this really helped us reach the audience we were looking for. Overall, NSG really helped us out by giving us the resource we needed.
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