Have a Heart Day 2026

Youth Programs

There are several Indigenous youth organizations, such as the Assembly of Seven Generations, that are doing much vital work towards Truth and Reconciliation. Truth and Reconciliation is the process of creating a fair and equal society where Indigenous and non-Indigenous people can live with happiness and prosperity. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a team of experts who did a lot of intense research on how to make this vision a reality, published their Calls to Action, and one of the Calls to Action was for Canada to start adequately funding Indigenous youth groups. They explained that the voices of young people must guide reconciliation and bring us to a better future.

So what do these groups do? They help and support young Indigenous people to advocate for themselves and their communities to decision makers. They help young people to be involved in political, economic, and social decisions that affect them and their communities. They gather and share research about what young people want and need. On top of that, they create and maintain many programs, camps, classes, networks, etc that help young people learn their Indigenous cultures and that promote and provide cultural healing. They also provide resources, funding, services, and support for youth in crises, poverty, trauma, homelessness, and other struggles.

All of this is really important because Canada often tokenizes and undervalues the voices of Indigenous youth when it comes to decision making. Which of course leads to decisions that do not meet the needs of young people and aren't appropriate for them. Young people often feel like the services that do exist are not for them. And the services they need are often not available or accessible. This is made worse by the fact that many non-Indigenous organizations claim that they provide many services for Indigenous youth when they in fact do not. Government research involving Indigenous youth is also often unethical, with the young people not being paid for the large amount of time and effort they put into projects and with them not being contacted after the research is done so that they can know what happened with the research.

While these organizations are doing great work, they do not have the funding to do as much as they should be and want to be doing. The funding models for Indigenous youth organizations are made without consultation and oversight from the youth themselves. And the current system, where you have to apply for a grant for each specific project, is very time consuming, confusing, hard to navigate, unreliable, and does not provide nearly enough funding.

If the funding system was better, these organizations could do much more research and advocacy, provide many more services, and devote their time and energy to their main goals.

What they need is enough guaranteed, reliable funding. They need guaranteed core funding which is enough to keep their organization running. They also need adequate multi-year funding for the programs, services, research, and advocacy they do. This funding needs to be plentiful, reliable, predictable, and easy to access. There needs to be transparency and accountability for how the government is funding things. And young Indigenous people need to be empowered to fight for their rights and heal their people.