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Council of Agencies Serving South Asians

Grantee
Council of Agencies Serving South Asians
Program
Youth Engagement – Building Organizational Capacity for Youth Engagement
Project
CASSA’s Youth Initiative (CYI)
Website
www.cassa.on.ca
www.rajweb.com/cassa/index.html

At a time when the rhetoric of ‘social inclusion’ is bantered about frequently, we see few examples of how inclusion actually plays out in communities and agencies. The Council of Agencies Serving South Asians (CASSA) provides one such concrete example. CASSA’s implementation of a youth initiative that effects organizational change proved to be a tremendous challenge and at the same time an incredible success.

Successes
CASSA’s ability to integrate youth issues into organizational programming; youth representation in structures of governance, staff, and volunteer base; and youth focus in future planning has all been initiated and is well underway. The organization has:

• Over the past two years, increased exponentially its ability to engage youth in organizational activities. Over 500 youth have been involved in different activities both of the Youth Initiative specifically and CASSA generally.
• About 20 core youth as part of the advisory committee that focuses on arranging and building certain programs in CASSA over the year.
• 2 youth representatives out of an 11 member board.
• For the first time in its history, a strategic plan that includes youth as a critical component of future planning and direction.
• Other strategic partnerships (for example, the Alternative Planning Group – a partnership between CASSA, Chinese Canadian National Council Toronto Chapter (CCNCT) and Hispanic Development Council (HDC)) that have begun to integrate their individual youth projects with CASSA’s into a collaborative process of engaging inter-ethnic communities.

A high level of commitment and support at the Board and management levels has resulted in many of these successes.

Challenges
The youth engagement initiative was embraced by CASSA as a tool for organizational change, rather than a special project. The Laidlaw Foundation’s learning has been that an organization’s ability to continue to achieve a high level of success and to produce systemic change both organizationally and in society needs to be sustained over a long period of time. CASSA mobilized incredible human and skill-based resources to lay the foundations of a successful endeavour, but it is clear such efforts must be sustained by adequate and diversified financial resources to ensure the CYI is consolidated and expanded.

CASSA has taken an organizational “risk” to walk along this path. With limited resources they began to create a program that has required fundamental organizational shift in focus, structures and core capital. This “risk” has been undertaken in the hope of making a difference for community and society as a whole.

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