A drum making workshop during the Carrier Sekani Family Services weekly Walk Tall program, aimed at vulnerable youth.

A drum making workshop during the Carrier Sekani Family Services weekly Walk Tall program, aimed at vulnerable youth.

For the last five years, the Walk Tall program has helped at-risk aboriginal youth connect with culture and build stronger community relationships.

Carrier Sekani Family Services learned Wednesday the program got $100,000 from the province.

“The youth program’s going to be able to maintain its service for at least this year,” said Mary Teegee, CSFS executive director.

Until Wednesday, Teegee didn’t know if the program would continue. It’s year-to-year now.”

The grant came under Youth Anti-Gang and Crime Prevention, pulled from the province’s civil and criminal forfeiture programs.

Walk Tall is a weekly program offered separately to boys and girls considered vulnerable, at-risk or gang involved.

“It is based on cultural activities so that they understand who they are as an indigenous young girl or young boy and just to have that sense of pride in who they are,” she said.

All of Carrier Sekani’s programming has to have a traditional underpinning to address historical trauma.

“We’re looking at overcoming the impacts of colonization and overcoming the impacts of residential schools and how we do that is all the programs that we do is based in culture.”

For many Walk Tall offers the only safe space they have, she said, and a place where they can start to form relationships with youth workers.

“They build trust and rapport with the youth workers,” Teegee said.

Teegee said she’s made funding requests to the Ministry of Children and Family Development (MCFD), which she thinks are natural partners for a program, but has never been successful.

“I think with MCFD, given the concern around the outcomes for children in care a program such as this, you’d think would automatically be funded but as of yet we haven’t received any funding from MCFD to maintain this program.”