A few weeks ago we put on an event called Loving the Bay. In preparation for the evening we did interviews with some of the people in our community who are working hard to make Thunder Bay the kind of place we all want to live in. The five people interviewed had some inspiring things to say and we wanted to be able to share a little more of their perspective with you. We’ll be posting bits of the interviews over the next little while, starting today.
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Scott Penner, Youth Worker
For the last 7 months Scott has been running the New Hope Youth Centre in Fort William. We showed up one afternoon to see what Scott and New Hope are all about.
People for People Café: What kind of work are you doing here?
Scott Penner: Coordinating the centre. Facilitating, programming, looking for funds, fund raising, applying for grants…we did a youth service the other day at a church…getting the word out about the centre, paying bills (I’m kind of like a landlord, I need to take care of the building). A lot of just day-to-day stuff, and a lot of future planing too, because we do have awesome volunteers and people in the community that really wan to get involved, so I need to look for funds for that and then just budget for the next couple of years and follow our plans for the future.
p4pcafé: How do you feel Thunder Bay is responding to your work here?
Scott: Slowly well! (laughs). The drop in centre has been around for three years and we haven’t had a consistent coordinator or director throughout that time. They’ve come for a couple years and run out of money and end up having to leave because there hasn’t been much financial support for the centre and for staffing. I’m pretty accustomed to living in poverty, so I don’t mind living on a meager budget. But Thunder Bay has responded amazingly well, most people saying it’s needed. People I run into say “yeah, this is good, and needed.” Getting the word out still needs to be done, because there are so many churches and people that would want to help out, but just don’t know about it.
p4pcafé: How do you think your work will impact Thunder Bay in say, five years?
Scott: Thunder Bay is exploding in Aboriginal population, double the birthrate of people of European descent in Canada, and in Thunder Bay it’s so obvious. Native people are moving into the city left and right, and it’s a rough transition for some of these kids, being apart from their family. Boarding parents are alright, but they’re only here for a few months so they don’t really plug in. And a lot of these kids come into the city kind of confused and are expected to pull off really decent grades to keep their funding to stay in the city, and just on their own do homework and keep up with their studies and stay out of trouble when there’s just a mass of confused youth all in the city together. And they’re expected to keep out of trouble and all they’re given for entertainment for a week is like twenty bucks or something. And there’s just not so many great activities to keep them occupied while they’re here, so many of them end up dropping out and have to leave. So transitional community is really needed for so many of the kids ‘cause it’s really easy to get distracted…
p4pcafé: What would you say to people who are frustrated with Thunder Bay and who have a negative view of transitional Aboriginal youth coming into the city?
Scott: I would say come and see how awesome these kids are, ‘cause first, I had my reservations about how I was going to dive into Aboriginal culture, but you know, these are just kids, just really interesting, awesome, fun kids that are like any other person trying to figure out their identity, trying to figure out who they are…experimenting and getting into different things that maybe they shouldn’t be a part of, but they’re just really honest kids that, if people would meet and get to know, would just fall in love with.
p4pcafé: What are the inspirations and motivations that have kept you going and brought you to this place?
Scott: Um…the bible? (laughs) For a long time I really wanted to get into the minor prophets [of the Old Testament]. And Ezekiel was a big one for me. Just how God’s people were being repressed, they were in captivity and they had an occupying force that was in their land, that was subjecting them to poverty, that was bringing them to a devastating point culturally and God speaking in to them, and not denying what was happening, but speaking into the issue. It’s not necessarily an outside force, it’s how you react to it. Building a broken nation from within captivity, and just how much the minor prophets speak to that, because that situation is huge. Some different authors as well. Tony Campolo is the only Christian author I’m in love with, and he speaks about social need. One of my mentors back home in Winnipeg. I lived in an inner-city community and he was so game and put stuff into my life for about a year and was very influential. There are really awesome people in this town too, that have supported me, that see the need but are just at a point in their life where, whether it was a pastor or just someone working full time or a family that see the need but just don’t have time to devote to the centre, but have been praying for us and supporting us.
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We’ll be posting Part 2 of Faces of the Bay in the coming days. Keep a look out!
I was looking for a picture to include with my blog post, so I fired up my computer and typed “office” into a search.
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