On the day the U.K. was voting on Brexit, Toronto’s Anayah Phares was in London being honoured by the Queen for her effort to make the world a better place.
“It was an incredible time to be there,” said Phares, 26, who was among 64 young people from across the Commonwealth receiving this year’s Queen’s Young Leaders Award.
“I’m still so pumped and energized by the experience,” she said in Toronto last week after a whirlwind 10 days in the British capital, networking and being mentored by some of the country’s top business and political leaders as part of the prestigious prize.
Phares, who recently changed her name from Rosimay Venancio to reflect her African heritage and new-found activism, was supposed to receive her award last year, but was barred from travelling due to a passport snafu.
Phares, a refugee from Angola who became a foster child after she was abandoned by her parents in Toronto, won the award after surviving a suicide attempt and homelessness and using that experience to develop a peer mentorship program so that other youth leaving foster care won’t face the same struggles.
Research shows youth leaving the children’s aid system are more likely to experience poverty and homelessness, suffer mental health problems and become involved with the criminal justice system. Just 46 per cent of Ontario children in foster care and group homes complete high school, compared to about 85 per cent of their peers with permanent families.
Phares’s program, called CHEERS, an acronym for Creating Hope and Ensuring Excellent Roads to Success, aims to change that by matching youth leaving care with mentors from the system who have already moved into adulthood. It includes academic and career counselling as well as general life coaching to help with housing, banking and budgeting. Mental health counselling is available for both mentors and youth in recognition of the childhood trauma many of them are still processing.
The program has garnered praise from the Catholic Children’s Aid Society of Toronto, Covenant House youth homeless shelter and Ontario’s child welfare secretariat.
And in a first for Ontario, and perhaps even the country, Phares will get the chance to pilot CHEERS starting in September as part of a five-year $600,000 Children’s Aid Foundation grant funded by the Bank of Montreal.
“As far as I know, it’s the only time a young person from care has been supported to enact their idea of a mentoring program run and led by young people from the system for kids in the system,” said Irwin Elman, Ontario’s Advocate for Children and Youth.
Elman and Children’s Aid Foundation executive director Valerie McMurtry both say they have been approached by many young adults who grew up in the care of children’s aid who want to help their younger peers.
“We know the need is great. But we haven’t seen a very credible program,” McMurtry said.
“It has all the wraparound supports, from navigating post-secondary education to life skills and . . . support on the employment side,” she said.
McMurtry was impressed by the leadership training Phares received in London last month and a recent eight-month fellowship at the MaRS centre for innovation where she fine-tuned the program.
Phares has found a community agency to act as her trustee and is already field-testing the concept by mentoring a former foster child currently transitioning into independence, McMurtry noted.
“We’re really excited about backing a former youth in care and showing her that the community will take a chance and get behind good ideas that are well planned and developed,” she said.
Queen West Central Toronto Community Health Centre, which is acting as Phares’s trustee, is delighted to be supporting the pilot and will provide access to family doctors and counselling services these young people often lack, said executive director Angela Robertson.
After struggling for more than a year to fund her mentorship program, Phares is anxious to get started.
50: Percentage of Canadians between the ages of 20 and 29 still living with their parents.
60: Estimated percentage of youth “aging out” of foster care and group homes who become homeless.
46: Percentage of youth in Ontario’s children’s aid system who compete high school.
85: Percentage of all Ontario youth who complete high school.
8,300: Number of Ontario children and youth who have been permanently removed from their families due to abuse or neglect.
3,400: Number of youth “aging out” of foster care and group homes between the ages of 18 and 21.