Youth Hub coming to downtown Brandon

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This article was published 19/03/2021 (1676 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The province, alongside groups like the United Way and Shared Health, announced it is establishing five new Youth Hub locations across Manitoba, including one in Brandon.

Westman Youth for Christ executive director Dwayne Dyck confirmed as much in a followup interview with the Sun, stating that this one-stop shop for mental health care, addiction treatment, peer support and other social services is being set up at 701 Rosser Ave.

“Our hope is to have it up and running by the summer, maybe late spring,” said Dyck. “We’re in the middle of renovating right now. We had to wait until all this news came down before we could kick into mobilizing the youth to be part of this.”

The province stated in its Thursday news release that the Youth Hubs are designed to provide a variety of low-barrier, integrated services for young people and their families in a single, easy-to-access location.

Dyck said that the Brandon location is no different, since the site will house representatives from a variety of different community organizations, including the Brandon Friendship Centre, Career and Employment Youth Services and the Addictions Foundation of Manitoba.

However, Dyck clarified that this Youth Hub is not going to reduce the services these organizations offer in other parts of the region. Instead, the site will serve as an expansion of resources and provide a simple access point where vulnerable young people in Westman can get help in a timely fashion.

“It’s not a drop-in centre. There’s no pool tables or anything,” he said. “But there’s safe relationships, people to talk to, easy access to services that they need and … there’s some clinical services on site.”

The five new Youth Hub partnerships announced on Thursday — which includes three sites in Winnipeg and another in Selkirk — were selected in response to a call for proposals issued in November.

While Dyck said that several local organizations answered this call for Brandon, it was decided that Westman Youth for Christ should take the lead due to the infrastructure and resources they already had in place.

But the executive director maintains that all of the groups, including consultants from Brandon University and Prairie Mountain Health, have remained deeply engaged through the entire development process, and will continue to help shape programming after the site opens its doors.

He added that local youth groups will also be heavily involved in determining the hub’s direction moving forward, including how the $300,000 the site is receiving from the province and the United Way every year will be spent.

“A wide variety of individuals and agencies have come together on this, so it’s kind of community-focused all the way through,” said Dyck.

Beyond all the nuts and bolts of this recent announcement, Dyck said he is happy that the region’s youth will have a brand-new resource at their fingertips, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated a pervasive mental health crisis that already existed.

“Youth are complicated and so we need to define safe places with real people and real relationships that they can navigate through,” he said. “It’s a real need in our community.”

Manitoba’s first Youth Hub location was established at Winnipeg’s NorWest Co-Op Community Health back in 2017.

» kdarbyson@brandonsun.com

» Twitter: @KyleDarbyson