Province launches mentorship program for black children, youth
Program is part of a 4-year initiative to eliminate systemic racism in Ontario

CBC.ca and DurhamRegion.com 
July 26, 2017

Ontario has launched a mentorship program aimed at supporting black young people by making things like job skills training, tutoring and the arts easier to access in what it calls "priority communities."

The program, Together We Can, is part of the province's four-year initiative to eliminate systemic racism and is intended to improve opportunities for more than 10,000 black children and youth in Ontario.

It is also aimed at building cultural awareness and identity.

Black young people make up 41 per cent of those in the care of the Children's Aid Society, five times their representation in the overall population, the Ontario government said in a release on Thursday. They are also unemployed at nearly two times the provincial unemployment rate, it said.

Michael Coteau, Minister of Children and Youth Services, who made the announcement on Thursday at the Alexandra Park Community Centre in Toronto, said the program will support 25 locally-run initiatives across the city as well as in Hamilton, Ottawa and Windsor.

Four of those initiatives are already in the works in Toronto, Vaughan, Scarborough and Peel Region. The province is inviting community organizations to apply for the other 21 programs.

Dwayne Dixon is the executive director of Nia Centre for the Arts in Vaughan, where one of the programs is being delivered.

"Very early in my artistic journey, when I was coming up, there were very limited opportunities (financial or otherwise) for young black artists to make the arts a viable career choice," Dixon said in the release.

With the help of the new program, he said: "I'm confident experiences like mine will be the exception and not the rule."