These days there are no easy solutions. Issues are increasingly complex and interdependent. For instance we know that educational attainment influences income, health, even voting behaviours and the impacts carry over from one generation to the next.
To tackle these webs of interactions, researchers, policy makers and community leaders now approach issues from a “systems perspective” – looking at relationships between people, services, schools, communities, employers, etc- to find critical leverage points.
That’s why we approached our Vital Youth research with a broad lens and no pre-conceived notions of the outcome. Of course, we are aware of news reports of youth unemployment, bullying, gang behaviour and protests but we wanted to know if these snapshots are accurate reflections of the state of Canadian youth today.
So we kept the definition of youth deliberately broad to include as much research as possible. We wanted to identify trends and changes between “young-youth” (12- 17) who are connected to their communities, volunteering, still in high school, etc. and older youth (sometimes defined as up to 34) who have a significant debt load, are facing challenges in the labour market, perhaps feeling isolated and for whom life transitions are increasingly delayed.
Vital Youth included research on aboriginal issues, physical and mental health, data on educational attainment, employment, volunteerism, voting behaviours, community engagement, crime severity, smoking, income levels, housing and rental prices, debt loads and more.
We looked at global, national and community research which included statistics and reports from the OECD, the United Nations, StatsCan, Canadian Paediatric Society, the Canadian Index of Well-being, the National Association of Children & Youth, Deloitte, Calgary & Vancouver Community Foundations and several more. (All references are available in our on-line bibliography). We included longitudinal research, web-sites and news stories. We also interviewed experts from the Canadian Index of Well-being, Apathy is Boring, and Judith Maxwell –former President of the Canadian Policy Research Networks & former Chair, Economic Council of Canada as well as youth within our network.
Vital Youth is a catalyst for dialogue and action in communities. It does not purport to be exhaustive in its breadth or depth as each community will have its own priorities and nuances. However, new information is released regularly that corroborates our finding of a broken path and an increasing opportunity gap not only in Canada but worldwide. These include the United Nations World Youth Report released in August and the September announcement by Microsoft that it will focus its philanthropy on the opportunity gap.
Vital Youth provides direction but not solutions because those can only emerge within communities and among committed individuals. However, attention and action is urgent if we are to have the Canada and the smart and caring communities we want and need in 2017 and beyond.
