I recently completed a survey that was sent out by Windsorite.ca to all municipal candidates. I felt it was important to focus this post on my response to one of their questions in particular: Windsor’s youth make up a significant portion of the population. What would you do to make Windsor a better place for our youth: children, teens and young adults?

The focus of my election campaign has been to put the focus back on Windsorites and reinvest in our communities and neighbourhoods. An important part of many neighbourhoods are the municipal community centres located within them.

While they may have the word ‘community’ in them, the way they are currently functioning hardly make them inviting places for all to walk in and use. Many community centres act for the most part as rental facilities, rather than a place for neighbourhoods and communities to enjoy. If you don’t have the dollars to spend, you don’t get to enjoy them. How is that something that benefits a community?

I believe in reinvesting and revamping community centres to be modern hubs of activity with computers, sports leagues and more taking place within their walls. The key to providing all these activities to all community members regardless of who can afford it or not is to offer these activities for free or keep them as inexpensive as possible.

Here are some of the items I would propose in making our community centres more open to people of all income levels:

• Implement recreational sports leagues that span multiple weeks and are free or of very minimal cost to join. This would give our youth the opportunity to be involved in team sports and learn the value of teamwork.
• Set aside one room in each community centre as a computer lab. Cost could potentially be zero to minimal by working together with the Computers for Kids program offered by CAW Local 200 which assists the children of our community with computer access. This would provide anyone in our community, regardless of income, access to a computer to learn, complete school work and further their job skills.
• Free “trial runs” of programs scheduled at community centres for people to try out to see if they like it. Once a week, offer a single class from a different program to allow individuals to try. What many people are unaware of is that a large amount of the courses offered in the Parks & Recreation Activity Guide are cancelled due to low registration numbers. Allowing people to sample these courses could make them realize they enjoy a program they would otherwise have thought they wouldn’t and increase registration.
• Provide one hour of free, organized gymnasium time per day. For example, Mondays would be an hour of free pickup volleyball, Tuesday would offer basketball, and Wednesday could be floor hockey and so on. The days could also be organized by age groups allowing youth and young adults their own days to the free hour.

As the individuals chosen to lead our city, councillors are responsible for creating an environment that residents are happy to call their home. As a small business owner I understand the need for fiscal responsibility, however, I also believe that there are certain things in community building that you just cannot put a dollar figure on. Getting youth off of the streets and into supervised activities where they can form friendships through teamwork and camaraderie is one of those things.

By providing youth and young adults a place to enjoy and express themselves, you can help eliminate the possibility of any conflicts occurring in the neighbourhoods. What this also does is help instil municipal pride and a mindset that our neighbourhoods, communities and city are an enjoyable place to be.