After the gunfire
Initiative trains young adults to help lead other youth over the ‘trust hump’
Jah-Reign Taylor knows what it feels like to feel not good enough.
The 24-year-old now speaks humbly and openly about his experiences growing up with depression and PTSD, being known to police and coming from a marginalized community.
A new-found confidence and passion to help others is due in part to an opportunity from the city to teach and uplift youth. But it is also a result of his own desire to seek help.
“I felt like society wasn’t really giving me a chance. I would try to apply for jobs, I was getting denied. I wasn’t really focusing on school because at that time I still had charges pending and I was worried about trial, so there was just so much stress going on for me,” Taylor says now, years after he said he made mistakes and ended up in trouble with the law. “I bottled it up to the point where, I think it was the beginning of last year I finally said enough was enough and I took the initiative to go get help for myself.”
It was his therapist who first recommended a project he’d never heard of.
City staff, with help from community organizations, have been trying to address the roots of youth violence since a request from council in 2014.
Staff created the Toronto Youth Equity Strategy, an action plan that is today severely underfunded. As violence continues — with gun violence in particular trending upward in Toronto — there was a realization that the trauma experienced by youth after the gunfire also needed to be addressed and that mentors were needed to talk about mental health in hopes of building stronger communities.
That’s where people such as Taylor come in. The Community Healing Project, which began in 2014 in partnership with the youth mental health organization Stella’s Place, trains and empowers young adults to facilitate workshops in communities where there is a need. The “healers” themselves may have experienced violence and the hope is that understanding where other youth are coming from can get them over the “trust hump” blocking others from reaching youth on a personal level to discuss mental health.
In July, the project was one of several the city put forward for federal and provincial funding, requesting $160,000 annually to expand to eight more neighbourhoods. It has not yet been announced whether funding has been secured.
What wasn’t clear when staff first started the program is how much of an impact it would have on the facilitators themselves.
“I’ve always been told no for things, so this opportunity was just amazing,” Taylor says. “It ultimately changed my life for the better. In so many ways so many doors have opened.”
When he was picked for the program with a dozen others to become a “healer” he says it made him feel good.
That first Saturday morning of a months-long training program held at George Brown College was intimidating at first, he says. Hearing where other people had come from — that they had college or university degrees — made him feel like maybe he wasn’t right for the job. On top of that, the day before, a friend had committed suicide. “I felt like I wanted to give up,” he says. But he soon learned others had struggled and doubted themselves. In the end, the bonds they formed with each other inspired them to get out of bed and make, for some, the long trek to campus each week.
Taylor is grateful he stuck it out, making it to a graduation ceremony where the newly-minted healers donned traditional black gowns. As the familiar sounds of “Pomp and Circumstance” played, they received certificates for their efforts in front of friends, family and peer mentors. Taylor literally danced up to get his certificate. When the other names were called, he was always the loudest to praise his friends’ achievements.
He and his partner from the training program were then assigned the Rexdale and Jane and Finch areas and set up weekly workshops with help from a peer mentor who supervised. At first just two people showed up, but word about the project spread and soon they were in front of a room of about a dozen youth.
“I felt that was like mission accomplished,” Taylor says now. His time as a healer is over, but he’s recently applied for an opportunity to be a peer support worker.
Abdul Nur, 23, another healer who went through the training program, says a friend recommended the project to him.
Mental illness is spoken about in some communities, he says in his own experience and counselling the youth, as a lack of spirituality rather than a health concern. Finally opening up himself in training sessions, he says, was a “great experience.” He helped run workshops that wrapped up earlier this year in Scarlett Manor where they saw youth ranging in age from just 8 years old to high school graduates. Training only prepares you for so much, Nur says.
“At that point I had to try to manoeuvre a bit and figure out different ways to go about the workshop,” he says. “So that the younger children would be able to figure out what mental health means but at the same time don’t be so formal about it.”
He says the time he spent with the youth was powerful for all involved.
“If they would share something with me I would always try to share something back to try to tie that into what we’re going over and tie that into their story as well just to make sure they’re comfortable and that there’s someone here who’s going through a similar situation or who’s going through something that you might be going through, that there’s always a way out of it.”
It created a safe space every Friday for those youth, he says. When it ended, the youth kept asking if he would be back the following week or the next.
“Within certain communities you need constant leadership,” he says. “With programs like this, it would be beneficial if they were longer.”
Another healer, Claudia Appiateng, heard about the project by email and signed up for training.
“It makes you think about your own trauma and how you can better deal with it. So it was really powerful, those weeks in there,” she says.
She was surprised to see how desensitized some youth she worked with in the Jane and Finch area are to shootings.
“I’ve lost a lot of people,” she says, noting she herself grew up in a marginalized community in Rexdale.
“They don’t understand that it’s not normal to hear as many gunshots as you do.”
Now, some of the youth she worked with want to sign up to be facilitators themselves, a cycle that can grow with more funding.
Appiateng’s role with the project has also come to an end for now, but she considers herself a youth worker and is continuing her mission in Scarborough.
When the project began, it served just two communities. Now it has expanded to 25 trained facilitators dispatched to10 communities. The workshops include food and activities meant to pull youth in. Appiateng designed a talent show for her workshop, for example, that the youth worked together on.
The hope is to expand to 50 healers and extend the workshops through the fall months instead of concluding at the end of summer.
The healers too are getting more opportunities. A pilot project placed some of the trained healers in a clinic for mental health services where they help guide patients signing up in the waiting room and even accompany them into their visits with clinicians.
Taylor says with the violence seen in the city right now, there’s a need for more programs such as the community healing project to engage youth.
“To be in a position where I can help others and especially youth that don’t really have that guidance or don’t really know what to do, that are suffering from mental illnesses … trauma, or have criminal records, just to be that leader to be that voice for them, it’s such an amazing experience.”