The CBYF Journey: Celebrating Impact and Looking Ahead

“The youth of the community are the literal future of that community. If the community wants positive change, working within the community is the way to go. Only the youth know what they want from the future and just need help in making that happen.”

Youth participant in Communities Building Youth Futures

About Communities Building Youth Futures (CBYF)

The Communities Building Youth Futures (CBYF) network was uniquely formed around the commitment of communities to support young people as they express their ideas and play a pivotal role in catalyzing positive community transformation related to education, health, employment equity, and a sense of agency and belonging. Funding from the Government of Canada’s Support for Student Learning Program allowed the Tamarack Institute to develop a cohort of 20 small, rural, remote and Indigenous communities across Turtle Island to work with them for five years as they centred youth in collective impact work that supports the creation of new pathways from high school to post-secondary, training, employment and community leadership opportunities.

CBYF’s Six Main Themes

In this first CBYF cohort, communities benefitted from starting in similar phases of their work and embarking on a parallel journey towards goals that they all shared. This opportunity to learn and innovate alongside other collaboratives of similar context created amazing scalable solutions that have addressed many of the six core themes, identified by cohort members. They are:

• Employment and mentorship
• Accessible education,
• Identity and social connections,
• Service navigation and access to supports
• Youth engagement and leadership
• Holistic health and wellbeing.

We celebrate the leadership of young people who developed and supported the implementation of innovation fund projects and strategies across the communities, including a Roving (mobile) Campus in Portage la Prairie, a Territorial Youth Strategy in the Yukon, alternative pathways for students to earn high school credits in Prince Albert, a tutoring program in Corner Brook, and hackathons in Prince Edward County.

Ongoing Successes

Following the completion of the five-year program, communities’ youth strategies are diverging and growing in many different and sustainable ways, including:

• Building a community-wide, youth engagement strategy in partnership with their municipal government
• Implementing an inclusive, multi-year territorial youth strategy that connects the full spectrum of youth services and resources, from basic needs such as food and housing, to community services, government supports, higher education, career opportunities, and community safety
• Researching community-specific, youth employment experiences, identifying skills and opportunities needed for youth to succeed, and creating community strategies to address those needs
• Developing diverse high school credit pathways through youth recreation programming where secondary students deliver the programs and gain work experience as well as credits
• Creating safe, inclusive, and accessible spaces where young people can thrive including access to integrated youth programs and services

Tamarack continues to support the CBYF network by providing coaching for the communities to navigate their unique challenges and celebrate their successes, hosting webinars on topics around centring and supporting youth to spread emerging ideas, convening a Community of Practice that allows communities to connect and lead meaningful conversations about their work, and sharing emerging resources, research, and opportunities across the Tamarack network for additional communities that are interested in learning about engaging young people.

Introducing the new CBYF Cohort

Building on the success of the first CBYF cohort in learning and advancing strategies together, Tamarack has collaborated with communities to create a new, more focused cohort. Starting in 2025, six communities – which include Yellowknife, Grande Prairie, Sudbury, Chatham-Kent, Moncton, and the Yukon Territory – have embarked on a journey together around understanding and addressing the issue of youth employment. For three years, these communities will respond to new and emerging systemic challenges within the youth employment sector through strategic, cross-sector partnerships, by using research and development approaches, and centring youth voice.

The goal for the communities is to develop and test innovative solutions to complex problems around youth employment, ensuring that they are scalable and sustainable. Tamarack will share these innovations across the membership and broader learning network to build organizational and sectoral capacity to improve outcomes for youth. Through the innovations, communities will help youth develop skills and gain the experience they need to successfully transition into the labour market. This will be done by supporting the needs of all youth – especially youth facing systemic barriers to success – to develop skills, knowledge, and networks through education, skills development, and meaningful work experience.

Through this cohort, Tamarack will:

• Support young people and adult allies in place through six small, rural, and remote communities of the CBYF network
• Strengthen community connections between youth, employers, and the social impact sector by collaboratively facing challenges around youth employment in their communities
• Rally hope and optimism in taking collective action on the things that matter most to young people around youth employment
• Facilitate learning when it comes to practicing and embedding best practices for engaging young people through collective impact work on youth employment
• Engage and elevate the voice of youth – those who are most impacted by employment issues and who have the greatest insight into possible solutions
• Support communities to take action on youth employment and focus on impact

As we move into this next phase of Communities Building Youth Futures, we are excited to grow the capacity of changemakers through ongoing network supports and cohort-focused action, shift policy and advocate for systems change in how we engage and meet the needs of young people, and drive large scale change by supporting communities to develop youth-centred innovations that are scalable and sustainable.

Take Your Learning Further

Explore the Communities Building Youth Futures resource page to find:

• Case studies
• Impact and evaluation reports
• Community youth strategies
• Toolkits and guides on supporting youth employment into the future, creating diverse credit pathways, youth service navigation, collaborative sustainability, and how to meaningfully engage young people