Troubled teens are a tricky bunch to deal with. Do you punish them? Should you leave them alone? Should you teach them how to behave? One man decided to empower them, and the results have been entirely positive.
The warm-up shelters of the Interlake Snow Trackers in Gimli, Manitoba, were being damaged. “We had some issues with vandalism of some of our shelters over the years,” said Mike Chudd, vice-president of the club. “Even though you can’t catch people, you hear who it is. Quite often it was the younger kids partying it up.”
There were a variety of ways Chudd could have sought to fix the problem: involve the police, get parents on the phone, confront the kids or utilize them. Chudd chose the latter. “I was trying to find a way to get them engaged, have them take a bit of ownership in the project so that they’d be a little less likely to want to go and vandalize it and also to renew our shelter system,” he said. “Basically I was trying to find a way to get more youth involvement.”
Chudd’s idea stemmed from the old adage of killing two birds with one stone. He wanted to cease the defacing of the snowmobile shelters and upgrade the already obsolete units that were in need of repair anyways. “A couple of our shelters were getting pretty long in the tooth,” he said. “It was time to look at something to do to replace them.
“I started putting proposals together, trying to get some grant money and whatnot,” he said. “I talked to the local high school shops teacher here in Gimli, he ran it by the school administration and they were all pretty happy to do it. It went onto the grant as donated labour, so that made the grant people happy.”
But Chudd also needed blueprints for the grant proposal, so once again he turned his focus to the kids. “I talked to the same shops teacher who also ran the drafting class at that school,” Chudd said, “and the students ended up doing everything from blueprints to speccing out the materials list to building it. Now it’s all set and ready to move on-site.”
The students’ pride in their work might be more valuable than the shelter itself. “They were pretty stoked about it,” said Chudd. “They could actually see it happen from start to finish. It’s something that they could be proud of that would benefit the community. They could basically pump their chest and say ‘we did this’. They were really happy to do it.”
Another positive impact from this initiative has been higher turnout from the youth.“We’ve had a few more youth show up to join the club, and some who’ve showed up to do a lot of the legwork like marking trail systems and taking down markers from last season,” he said.
Now that Chudd has established a fruitful template on how to corral youth towards snowmobiling, he has some final words of warning and wisdom for others. “To do it as just a make-work project probably wouldn’t have carried as much weight,” he said. “Knowing that it was an improvement, with grants in place, that automatically threw deadlines at us. It gave the students a real-world scenario to work with. It helps the younger crowd buy into the fact that even at their age, what they’re doing in school does matter, and it does make a difference in the real world.”
