Anti-gang program at risk of ending

This worries executive director Peggy Rubin.

“Basically we are very concerned about our kids, how can we keep helping these kids with no staff. So we try brainstorming some ideas,” she said.

Over the past five years, Warrior Spirit Walking staff worked in the schools and led the anti-gang presentation team. About 950 kids received some support from the organization and 133 youth were worked with intensively, meeting with their workers for about 30 hours a week.

Many of these kids don’t have any other support networks in place.

Stephanie Halkett-Stevenson was using drugs and alcohol before she joined Warrior Spirit Walking.

“I don’t know I just quit drinking and smoking weed and I just stopped everything when I started (here), I started powwow dancing,” she said.

“Before, when I was younger, I used get hit by my mom and I got sexually assaulted by my dad so really the thing is I never had parents around, I never had no one to look up to, but myself, so I just started this.”

Halkett-Stevenson and her friend, who's name is being with-held for her protection, joined the presentation team to learn public speaking and to help other kids.

“Being in this group we get to tell our story and help other people and that’s what I’m about. I like to help people,” said the girl, who was sexually abused by people close to her.

“So going around to different places and being able to tell your story and help other people really helps me. It makes me feel good about myself — saving another kid, another girl or boy from what happened to me,”

When the funding ends, Warrior Spirit Walking is gone, six staff positions are eliminated overnight, said Rubin.

“Unfortunately it’s in the middle of the school year, so here’s these kids that have seen workers so many hours a week for the last five years and come Apr. 1, that person is not going to show up,” she said.

“It’s kind of like yourself, it’s like all of a sudden your mom is gone or your dad is gone or your auntie is gone. How does that make you feel? Once again it’s that whole where is that kid going to go again?

Back to the streets, back to the gang? I don’t know.”

Felicity Bighead is planning to graduate Grade 12 this year and she says she wouldn’t have made it to where she is without the support of the staff.

“You don’t really know who to turn to when you are not going to school, you don’t know if (you have) the right people to talk to or anything. You don’t know if the choices you make are good,” she said.

What Rubin said she finds the most frustrating is that they have evidence —gathered from surveys with all the kids they work with — of the effectiveness of the program.

In the first year of Warrior Spirit Walking, 61 per cent of kids who were in gangs, left those gangs and after another 18 months, another 50 per cent left, she said.

There has been an increase in the number of kids entering the labour force and they had six kids graduate Grade 12 last year. One of the youth they started working with is now in university training to become a teacher.

These are young people who came from gang life, drug trade and from jail, Rubin said.

Talks have begun with the provincial ministries of Saskatchewan Justice and the Ministry of Corrections, Public Safety and Policing.

“They are very interested. I think everyone wants to have less crime and they realize that we do have a gang problem here in Prince Albert and we don’t want to go backwards, we want to go forward,” Rubin said.

Even if the funds come through, there is a concern that it won’t come in time.

“Even if I do get funding, let us say six months from now, (current staff) will be gone, so it’s very frustrating because they can’t continue the work,” Rubin said.

ahill@panow.com

by Angela Hill

Anti-gang program at risk of ending

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