Port Colborne's Uberyouth
The Laidlaw Foundation promotes positive youth development through inclusive youth engagement in the arts, environment and in community.
Youth Social Infrastructure Program
Rationale:
Youth organizing is about grassroots social change led and championed by young people. Youth Social Infrastructures are the sustained strategies that support community and specifically youth, to initiate effective social change.
Purpose:
This program stream works with grassroots youth groups and institutional partners to identify, plan and implement deliberate support for the development and maintenance of infrastructure (systems and resources). We contribute to building infrastructure that will enhance skills and sustainability of youth-led initiatives so that they can be more effective in their immediate and future work.
Funding:
The Foundation considers applications for social infrastructure initiatives by invitation only.
Grants support intermediary organizations that have the means in place to provide necessary supports to youth-led groups, emerging groups and youth organizations that have a well established history of working effectively with youth-led organizations and initiatives. Intermediaries might also include groups that can work with youth at the level of advocacy, institutional and structural change.
Contact Program Manager, Violetta Ilkiw by contact form or 416.964.3614 ext. 308 for more information.
Funded Social Infrastructure Initiatives
What is Social Infrastructure?
Social Infrastructure refers to various capacity-building elements that help develop and maintain resources designed to build skills among youth leaders that they can use to be more effective in their organizing work. The fundamental principles that drive the elements of this infrastructure must be grounded in social inclusion, building trust and shifting traditional institutional power dynamics leading to increased self-determination among young people in their communities.
Social infrastructure and intermediary support includes:
- Support for core administrative capacities
- Training and professional development and supports
- Access to resources and tools
- Networking opportunities
- Access to intermediaries
- Physical space