Crystal Kids offers the following programs and services
All staff at Crystal Kids, including the Front-line Mentors, work within a frame work of programs designed to support and encourage youth to have the best possible outcomes for their lives. All intentional mentoring occurs within these parameters.
Mentoring and Intentional Work
Our work with children and youth is relationship-based. We have a unique opportunity to influence our participants because we first and foremost build relationships with them. Trust is earned and maintained between staff and participants. We go to great lengths to make participants feel valued and respected and engage them in meaningful conversations and activities that impress upon them their worth. We model and mentor responsibility, accountability, self-discipline, appropriate boundaries, leadership, citizenship, friendship, and healthy family relationships, just to name some of our intentional principles. Our staff each invest 20-47 meaningful hours mentoring in our youth each week. With mentoring staff hours invested in, on average, 45 daily participants, life-skills, life-lessons, and teachable moments are staples we serve up, in addition to healthy meals and snacks.
Casework & Crisis Management
To meet the needs of our youth we are engaged in casework that might be as simple as arranging for and transporting youth to well-being appointments to as complicated and layered as harm reduction practices with street-entrenched youth. We help youth with wellness appointments such as AHS doctor’s appointments, mental health and addictions appointments, STI screening, Pregnancy exams and resources. We support youth through their lived experiences such as LGBTQ advocacy and medical, legal appointments, and court support for justice matters, family court advocacy, banking, CRA filings, Alberta Works facilitation, obtaining provincial and federal ID, and employment readiness supports. Crisis management is part and parcel of our case-work, and would include safety planning, housing facilitation for homeless youth, food, clothing, transit passes and tickets, access to mobile phones and minutes when safety plans require youth to be in possession of a way to communicate. A few of our youth are high-risk IV drug users or chronic Crystal Meth and/ or Fentanyl users. Our street-entrenched youth casework includes harm reduction principled supports.
Literacy, Life-skills, and Transition
We are aware that each child’s potential to defeat and conquer exclusion and suffering lies with completing school. Core and basic competency in reading, writing, and numeracy skills, coupled with a high school diploma are critical tools for beating the cycle of poverty. When a youth is so consumed with where they might sleep on any given night or where their next meal will come from, it’s difficult to find value in school attendance. Although we know it is their ticket out of poverty it’s a hard sell in their reality. We support our kids through their educational journeys by mentoring in them a desire to stay attached to school and exposing them to peers and role models who are or have succeeded at school. We challenge them to dream of a future that includes post-secondary or trade school. Over the last eight years the percentage of children completing high school and receiving a diploma has steadily increased. Last year all of our grade twelve children received Diplomas.
In addition to supporting literacy, we also mentor life-skills to prepare our youth for independence. As well as life-skills coaching for children of all ages, we also began our transition project for older youth as a formal project in 2017. This includes volunteerism, basic labour skills, cooking, janitorial, resume writing, interview skills, and other employment readiness activities. The 20 participants involved in this project spend time junior mentoring younger children as well. Thus far the project is on track for successes.
Nutrition
Food security is a major concern with our children. We serve at minimum one snack and one meal daily. At times we serve 2 snacks and one meal daily, and during summer, Christmas and spring school breaks we ensure each child has 3 snacks and 2 meals per day.
Just like in a family home the kitchen is a social centre at Crystal Kids we encourage the children to prepare food and promote healthy eating habits. We teach the importance of cleanliness and personal hygiene. We create opportunities for instilling family values in our youth and the concept of communal responsibility.
Fitness and Sports Leadership
A large component of daily activity takes place in our 4500 square foot gymnasium. Fitness is emphasized as vital to the overall well-being of children and youth and is promoted heavily. We limit the number of hours that sedentary activity is allowed and encourage physical activity. Youth are encouraged to participate in intramural games, tournaments, and youth-driven competitions in a variety of sports including volleyball, badminton, floor hockey, basketball, etc.
Trauma Informed Care
Staff observation indicates 90% of centre attendees suffer from neglect at home
70% of centre attendees have been exposed to family violence either as the witness to, as the victim of, or as the perpetrator
For all of our children and their families/caregivers, security of the basic needs of food, clothing, and shelter is a daily risk
According to the Government of Alberta when children experience frequent or continued adversity, the stress can undermine their ability to cope. Children who have been exposed to unpredictable and uncontrollable danger, such as abuse or severe neglect, live much of their lives in survival mode and respond to the world as a place of danger. Traumatic stress can negatively impact a child’s developing brain and this can result in learning, memory or social-emotional difficulties. A major factor that influences the impact of childhood trauma is the presence or absence of supportive relationships. Positive relationships and successful involvement in school can buffer the impact of past adverse experiences. Given that effectively all of the children attending Crystal Kids have and continue to suffer trauma in their lives we provide trauma informed care in all of our programing.