Abdulrahman Elmi is leading a group of young Canadian-Somali leaders to mentor north Etobicoke youth away from the pull of drugs, gangs and dropping out of school.
It is urgent and important work made possible through a $46,000 share of U.S.-based website Gawker’s $200,000 crowd-sourced money from its online “Crackstarter” campaign to buy the now-infamous video in which Mayor Rob Ford allegedly smokes crack cocaine from a glass pipe.
The Somali-Canadian Association of Etobicoke was one of four Ontario organizations that got a split of the money, which it is using to operate a two-year youth leadership program aimed at steering high school, and especially elementary, students toward college and university and away from drugs and gangs.
“A lot of kids need the positive role model,” said Elmi, 23, a York University environmental management graduate. “We can take something negative and turn it into a positive. Change the issues of drugs and gangs and violence and offer role models and leadership and put a name on it and be proud of it.”
Many of the leader-mentors are university graduates or enrolled in university.
“Kids will think, ‘if they can do it, I can do it too.’ Growing up in a priority neighbourhood, you can go to university and work or you can take the easy way out,” said Elmi, who was hired in December as the program’s co-ordinator.
Elmi acknowledges ‘the easy way out’ refers to a life of drugs, and potentially gangs.
The mentoring program is expected to enrol as many as 40 kids ages nine to 16 with as many as a dozen older youth mentors.
Three nights a week after school, kids will get homework help, can discuss life challenges, and engage in activities they enjoy, whether basketball, soccer or art for example. The hours will change in the summer.
While the program is geared to Canadian-Somali children, it is open to kids of all ethnic backgrounds.
APPLICATIONS BEING ACCEPTED
Scheduled to start in April, the program is currently accepting applications from parents to enrol their pre-teens and teens. It is also accepting donations to help with program costs. Call the association at 416-742-4601 for more information.
Murder is no stranger to the Canadian-Somali communities in Ontario and Alberta. Victims have been young men born in Canada to families, often a single mother, who fled Somali’s civil war.
Last June, police raided homes in Etobicoke, Windsor and Alberta seizing guns, drugs and cash as part of a year-long investigation called Project Traveller. Many of the 60 or so men arrested were from a cluster of high-rise buildings on Dixon Road in north Etobicoke known as Little Mogadishu.
Elmi said the program offers the opportunity to create a positive out of the unflattering light cast on the Canadian-Somali community after the video and Project Traveller arrests.
“It gives kids someone to talk to if they have problems,” Elmi said. “They can ask us, ‘what should I do’. There will be lighter moments, like basketball and activities outside. We want them to feel comfortable. If they’re not having an easy time at home, we want them to feel this is their home.”
Mohamoud, 20, called the program an “investment” in area youth.
The program offers an opportunity to help grow youths’ self-esteem, suggested Hanad Jibril, 20.
“All these kids see the environment they live in. They think people have forgotten about them, that people have better lives than them. Now we can tell them, ‘people care about you, too.’” Jibril said.
Osman Ali founded the Somali-Canadian Association of Etobicoke 26 years ago in response to language and cultural barriers then facing the local Somali community, often women and children who fled Somali’s deadly 1991 civil war.
“I have a passion for it. It was the first Somali organization in Canada,” said Ali, the organization’s executive director.
In recent years, Ali has knocked on the doors of all three levels of government, and submitted numerous applications to grow the agency’s youth programs.
But no money came – until Gawker.
“Isn’t it ironic?” asked Ali, recently retired from his career as an electronic engineer with Bell Canada. “A blogger in the United States of America based in New York looks at our application, the needs of the community here, the issues with drugs and drop-outs especially the boys, and is sympathetic to us and gives us money.
“Where is our own government — all levels of government?”
Ali said he is excited and encouraged to hand the reins over to his young leaders to help the youngest generation of Canadian-Somalis and other local children in need.
“Now you see the youth taking over. They’re doing the job,” he said of his young mentors. “They make my life very easy. They just need a little coaching sometimes. I’m so proud of them.”
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