The LifeCycles Project Society
The LifeCycles Project Society (Cultivating Communities) was born in 1994. A small, dedicated and highly motivated group of residents created a nonprofit organization geared toward cultivating awareness and initiating action around food, health, and urban sustainability in the Greater Victoria Region.
A recent offshoot of the LifeCycles project that launched last year (largely sustained by a Victoria Foundation grant) is YouthCore. It is a youth engagement and community-building project focused on developing a range of community and leadership activities for youth in Greater Victoria communities. The program builds community awareness, identifies resource gaps, and feeds a continuous stream of data to the ever-evolving resource mapping undertaken by participants in the program.
“The program mobilizes the social capital required to address the physical assets that are lacking in the community”, says Katie Shaw, program director. Shaw joined LifeCycles in 2006 to facilitate the research that led to the formation of YouthCore.
Besides youth engagement, YouthCore consists of a Youth Development Team and Community Asset Mapping initiative - that so far has created two series of Community Youth Asset Maps that focus resources for young parents and parks/recreations centers for youth. The data from these mapping initiatives is uploaded onto an online resource for Youth and other resource users in the community. The Online Communications Portal enables the sharing of a wide range of information, programs, and services available in the community – all at the touch of a few keystrokes. The portal allows navigation through a whole host of topics from interactive community maps to youth events calendars to programs and more. “We’re building the social capacity of our youth participants,” adds Katie Shaw.
YouthCore is making efforts to partner with other organizations in the community as a means to creating a practical youth asset mapping guidebook that can be utilized by various community providers and organizations.
The Victoria Foundation’s grant to YouthCore facilitates the funding of youth leadership roles and pays for such practical tools as digital cameras and GPS systems that are required for community mapping applications. One strengths of the program is how initiatives and programs are driven and operated by the youth themselves unlike other community efforts that merely provide services to youth. Much of the hard work and development of interactive community maps and community specific actions are the result of the teamwork those involved in YouthCore.
Not all projects and initiatives in search of funding can provide measurable outputs as in production and industry. Katie Shaw and her partners at LifeCycles were pleased with the positive response and streamlined granting process afforded by the Victoria Foundation to YouthCore; or as Ms. Shaw deftly put it, “The Victoria Foundation was one of the first to see the potential of the program and provided the funding to make it happen.”
