Catch Up with YESS Champion Boston Pizza

Boston Pizza has been a long-time champion of YESS and youth in Edmonton! For the past few years, they have focused their donations to the YESS overnight shelter, which has an immediate and positive impact on the prevention of youth homelessness. At YESS we focus on prevention and diversion out of youth homelessness, ensuring that the youth who access our programs have the connections back to family or safe housing situations as well as life skills, emotional regulation, relationship building, and trauma healing support to help them safely and appropriately integrate back into the community.

With the 2019 Boston Pizza Charity Golf Classic, Boston Pizza donated $15,000 to our overnight shelter program! In addition to supporting our programs, Boston Pizza also supports the spirit of connection by providing pizza dinners for movie nights and other special events we host with youth in our overnight shelter, daytime resource centre, and supportive housing programs. Moments when our youth can come together like this are truly special.

Boston Pizza was also among the restaurants who stepped up to provide meals for our youth while our Whyte Ave kitchen was being renovated!

Over the years, Boston Pizza has donated  $125,000 to various YESS programs and impacted the lives of thousands of youth. They have demonstrated amazing leadership in the cause of youth homelessness, and we are honoured to have them as part of our community walking beside youth on their journeys towards healing and appropriate community integration.

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Major TLC for the YESS Kitchen

In December our Whyte Ave kitchen underwent a major renovation. This kitchen is instrumental in providing nutritious meals for the hundreds of youth who access YESS every year across our overnight shelter, daytime resource centre, and supportive housing programs. Providing meals is a huge part of our trauma informed care practice and is an important aspect of creating an environment of felt safety for the traumatized youth in our programs. This renovation was made possible with a grant from The Home Depot Foundation, who are committed to supporting initiatives that prevent and end youth homelessness in Canada, and an amazing donations from our friends at the Community of Christ Church.

“This is a great expensive gift for Christmas!” says YESS Chef Reddy Manikyala. “Along with the new kitchen team members, our kitchen is now running smoothly and able to make all new creations. The kitchen looks 100% commercial now compared to the old one. We also got a new grill and we plan to make good use of it.”

This renovation project was an incredible opportunity for all of the YESS departments to work together to keep the agency organized, across Kitchen and Facilities, Programs, Funds Development, and Administration. We also got to work with incredible collaborators at Allegiance Mechanical Inc., Amalgamated Food Equipment, The Carpet Studio, Interspace Construction, Nordic Mechanical, Tricom Electrical Services, and WHA Industries.

While no renovation is ever easy, the hard work has already paid off as the Whyte Ave kitchen takes on another role in the lives of youth: classroom. YESS Chef Tiffany Sorensen is our Program Kitchen Coordinator and leads the culinary practicum for youth in the Youth Education and Employment Program.

“The new kitchen renovations have made a world of a difference not only for us as chefs, but also for the student chefs that are part of the Youth Education and Employment Program,” says Tiffany. “The youth in the placement can now learn out of a more professional work space, and with the new equipment we have more options to cook and teach on. Youth are able to learn a variety of cooking techniques and can receive hands on training with using commercial equipment like the grill, griddle, steamer, and gas stove. The renovations are really helping to give the youth a more realistic experience with a variety of skills and will set them up for success to work in future kitchens and/or restaurants.”

As Reddy said, this renovation was an amazing Christmas gift that will be an incredible asset to our youth and our programs for years to come. We have found that cooking and sharing meals has always created an incredible sense of community, and it means so much to grow that community with all the partners who made this renovation possible!


A HUGE thank you to these restaurants who provided breakfast and lunch for youth in our programs while our kitchen was being renovated!

Meals are a huge part of creating felt safety for our youth and it meant so much to us to see so many restaurants step forward to help!

A&W

Barb & Ernie’s Old Country Inn

Boston Pizza

De Dutch

El Cortez

High Level Diner

McDonald’s

Oodle Noodle

Original Joe’s

The Parlour

Popeyes

Subway

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Letter from Margo – Spring 2020

Hello everyone and Happy Spring!

YESS started 2020 with a very strong financial profile and a lot of excitement about the momentum we are gaining. We spent the winter months taking care of each other, celebrating some of our wins, and continuing to build upon our growing foundation of structure, processes, and trauma-informed practice. We have seen significant successes with the work of our Trauma Support Team (we have delivered over 100 individual therapy sessions and many informal group sessions since April 2019, and we have seen our EPS and crisis calls decrease) and we have been thrilled with the success of our new Youth Education and Employment Program that provides a low-barrier entrance into life, education, and employment skills as well as job shadowing and work experience with corporate community partners. We have also been working hard with our youth agency and homelessness partners to develop and improve our city strategy for the prevention of youth homelessness. In the coming year, we will begin initial planning around evolving YESS to fit within a municipal and provincial strategy for the prevention of youth homelessness. Prevention can be both early prevention (ensuring a young person never becomes homeless) and later prevention (ensuring a young person doesn’t become further entrenched in homelessness). At YESS, we are focused on late prevention—ensuring that the youth who visit us have the connections back to family or safe housing situations as well as life skills, emotional regulation, relationship building, and  trauma healing support to help them safely and appropriately integrate into community.

As the sun shines and the new shoots and bulbs grow outside, we are furiously growing our capacity and our knowledge to prepare for the big work ahead of us.

This spring, I invite you to join us in our excitement about the future—celebrating is much more fun together!

YESS Executive Director Margo Long's signature

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