Program offers guidance teen never got at home
Initiative offers youth from priority regions chance to finish school
Akeem Raphael has overcome more challenges in his young life than most adults will ever face.
He never knew his mother, who died giving birth to him. The aunt who was raising him also perished young. Living with his estranged father was hardly The Cosby Show. His dad wasn’t the Cliff Huxtable role model he so desperately needed.
“I knew I would have to learn from someone else,” said Raphael.
He did. Swept up by life on the streets, Raphael started running with the wrong crew and turned to violence, crime, drugs and gangs.
Trouble followed after he moved in with an older sister in Niagara. He’d brought his baggage with him and his new-found friends looked up to the tough kid from the city. A big fish in a small pond, Raphael became the leader of the local gang and felt on top of the world. In reality, his life was spiralling out of control.
“At first I loved it,” said the 22year-old of those troubled days. It took two years for Raphael to recognize he had to take back his life or lose it. He did it as much for his mother as for himself.
“She sacrificed her life for me — she gave me a gift,” he said, adding that his mother has been his guardian angel. His renewed faith and support from members of his church helped guide him as well. But Raphael was smart enough to know that sooner or later his luck would run out. He’d be dead if he hadn’t changed the course of his life.
It wasn’t easy. Raphael flipflopped between work and school, at times tempted to go back to his old ways. He took a chef’s course at George Brown and worked in a restaurant, where he was a respected employee. As a crew chief at Won- derland, he and his team won awards for their work. His leadership skills became stronger with each new experience, bringing him closer to his goal of being a role model and one day opening a community centre to work with youth who need guidance just as he did.
A turning point came while Raphael was enrolled in HYPE (Helping Youth Pursue Education) at Centennial College. A Youth Challege Fund initiative supported by United Way and the province, the free six-week program gives young people 17 to 29 from Toronto’s priority neighbourhoods a second chance to finish school or find work.
This year,128 youth from Scarborough graduated from the program; one-third of them then enrolled in further education.
That’s where Raphael’s path crossed with Arnold Jeyabalan, an employment counsellor with United Way-supported JVS Toronto and its Youth-Reach program.
Raphael recalls a talk Jeyabalan gave about the importance of stepping out of comfort zones and taking risks.
It resonated with him, and he turned to the counsellor for help as he struggled over going to work or back to school full-time. After many sessions with Jeyabalan, he made up his mind that education was the way to go.
Raphael is enrolled in the business entrepreneur program at Centennial and has landed a job in administration at the college. It was the best decision he’s made in a long time.
Raphael is among the success stories at JVS, which offers a variety of employment, training, life skills and education programs for youth and adults, said Oliver Watson, manager of the Toronto Youth Job Corps at JVS. United Way funding is helping to change lives.
Jeyabalan is proud of his mentee and surprised at the strides Raphael has made, adding he’s overcome many challenges and emerged as a strong communicator, leader and role model. “It’s very inspirational.”