WATCH: A B.C. teen’s school project highlights what he says is a lack of support in his community. Nadia Stewart reports.
It has been nearly two months since a safe house for at-risk teens in Maple Ridge closed its doors. Many advocates were worried the closure would force vulnerable teens onto the streets and 15-year-old Lynden Meadus decided to find out if that was true.
The Grade 9 student created a school project that tried to outline the impacts of the recent closure of Maple Ridge’s Iron Horse Youth Safe House, which took teens aged 13 to 18 and provided a safe home for them for up to 30 days.
“I just saw in the newspaper that the safe house was a big topic around my community right now and it just so happened that I had a school project coming up, so I decided it would be it would be a good topic to do,” says Meadus.
For the project, Meadus says he posed as a youth who needed a place to stay in Maple Ridge after getting into a fight with his mother.
“When I got to my youth centre, I spent about an hour with them…if I had no place to go, they couldn’t leave me, so they ended up calling the North Vancouver safe house and they referred me to there, walked me to my bus, waited until my bus came,” he says.
Meadus eventually got to North Vancouver after staff drove to the Coquitlam bus depot to pick him up.
Iron Horse, which is operated by the Alouette Home Start Society, was one of the few options for at-risk teens in Maple Ridge.
When it shut down Last December, staff said its federal funding contract had come to an end.
A spokesperson for Employment and Social Development Canada said that was the case, but that Iron Horse could still be eligible for funding through the Greater Vancouver Regional District, but they didn’t submit an application.
Maple Ridge Mayor Nicole Read said their partners believe that “if they had submitted a proposal for funding for the safe house, they would not have been successful.”
Read says they did approach the province for help, but in an email to Global News the Ministry of Children and Family Development says “the ministry does not have the budget necessary to provide the funds for Iron Horse that the federal government has taken away.”
Still, Meadus says the need for a youth shelter in Maple Ridge is there and will continue to be there long after his school project is handed in.
-with files from Nadia Stewart and Paula Baker
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