Hello, my name is Tyler and I’m working as a summer intern at ICA Canada’s Toronto office. I was very intrigued and impressed by ICA Canada’s focus on research, youth, and leadership and was very excited to have been selected for the summer position! Today I’ll be writing a little about a project that I’ve been working on with many other youth for a little over a year.

The Canadian Youth Assembly (CYA) is a non-profit organization with three focuses: education, volunteerism, and connecting youth to decision makers. We spent a great deal of time planning and structuring the organization (which took longer than I assume is typical as we brought our members (the youth of Canada) into the creation of our bylaws) and incorporated federally as a non-profit organization early November 2008.

The CYA is open to everyone, though participation in some ventures is limited (to participate in our elections as a candidate or voter you must be 14 to 24, inclusive). There is no age limitation on volunteers and we’re looking for some individuals devoted to helping their peers!

Briefly I’ll go over a few programs we’re running:

CYA Elections – in 2010 (the date is looking to be around February) 177 youth will be elected throughout Canada. These youth will be responsible for working with their peers and will trained to be effective leaders in their community.

CYA! Volunteering – having recently been through (or currently in) high school, our volunteers ran into the problems of not having a great deal of volunteer opportunities which were new and exciting. Thus this program was born. Essentially we’re looking to connect organizations that need volunteers with youth who want to fulfill their required volunteer hours (or who want to volunteer generally) in new, exciting, and relevant ways. Thus far we’ve received support from school boards and organizations. http://volunteering.cya-ajc.ca

CYA Model Parliament – The name pretty much says it all. There are a few changes (ridings and parties aren’t model), but by and large this is a great learning exercise for youth who want to learn how parliament really works (though our members seem to be a lot more friendly than politicians can be on occasion ;) ). (Website is coming…..I’ve been busy ☺)

The website for the CYA (which has links to all our projects) – http://cya-ajc.ca.

Now I’ll pull back into ICA Canada (I’ll call it ICACan for simplicity). Even though I’ve only been here for a couple of days, I’ve already learned an incredible amount. I’ve been shown how much work and effort youth have put into the various projects run by ICACan, this gives me tremendous hope that no matter what we throw at youth, they’ll take it and make it better without skipping a beat! I’m very much looking forward to working on the projects running here and I’m sure I’ll be writing more about them soon.

All the best,

Tyler