International Youth Day 

The United Nations recognizes August 12 as International Youth Day. The goal of this day is to “bring youth issues to the attention of the international community and celebrate the potential of youth as partners in today’s global society.”¹ 

At CHV, we celebrate the potential of youth every day! We nurture the potential of the youth we serve by designing programs that teach the life skills youth need to build a meaningful life.  

CHV programs teach life skills that many of us take for granted but that youth may not have acquired growing up. Learning the basic skills of daily living can help youth successfully transition to housing and employment in the community. 

The Rights of Passage program and the Crisis Program, for example, focus on 10 categories where life skills can be developed: 

Kiera, who is the Life Skills Coordinator for the Rights of Passage program, explains: “We slowly figure out what the youth don’t know and what support they need before we start working on the big picture stuff. What that looks like at first is just really basic day-to-day stuff.” 

In her first meeting with a client, case planning is combined with life skills planning. Kiera attends, along with the social workers and the key youth worker, and she introduces her clients to the 10 life skill focus areas, noted above. 

Life skill acquisition is self-directed as youth choose which skills they want to acquire, for example, how to email their landlord about getting a leaky tap fixed or how to set up a dental appointment. 

A life skills orientation 
To help youth learn practical life skills, Kiera has set up several rooms in CHV’s newly renovated building on Pender Street. These rooms include a laundry room orientation, cleaning room orientation, and a kitchen orientation. 

In these spaces, youth decide which skills they want to learn. In the laundry room orientation, they may learn to wash clothing so they can put their best foot forward at a job interview. In the cleaning room orientation, they may learn how to clean a toilet or wash a floor, and in the kitchen orientation room, they may learn how to use a knife to cut vegetables or how to handle food safely. 

Learning these skills builds confidence and positions youth to successfully navigate life in the community. 

Youth-driven group drop-ins 
Desiree is the Life Skills Coordinator for the Crisis Program and she coordinates biweekly group drop-ins to help youth acquire life skills, based on the 10 life skills categories above. 

The youth suggest things they’re interested in and then Desiree comes up with an activity that promotes the life skills involved. 

“A lot of the activities that I do are fun activities that are loosely rooted in life skills,” Desiree says. “I might do [a workshop on] smoothie bowls and have a conversation about the affordability of the recipe or just the skills involved in making smoothies.”  

One activity the youth enjoy is making soap. Desiree uses soap making as an opportunity not only to teach soap-making skills but as a springboard to talk about hygiene, wellness, and self-care. 

Desiree usually meets with three to five youth a day in meetings that range from one to two hours. These one-on-one meetings focus on a variety of situations that help youth learn life skills. For instance, in one meeting, she helped a youth learn how to track down a government ID card that he’d applied for but hadn’t received. 

A long-term impact 
Kiera reflects that before you can teach life skills meaningfully, youth have to feel safe and that means building their trust.  

“It can sometimes take over a year for them to really start opening up to us in a way where we can really do some long-term work,” Kiera says. “Creating those connections is, in and of itself, a life skill. Having youth here, getting to know the staff, and feeling that they can have healthy relationships with adult figures who are not their peers is a huge life skill that we support through the interactions we have with them in our building.” 

Kiera and Desiree agree that they may not see the impact of learning life skills in the moment or during youths’ time at CHV but they find out later, when youth return to visit, just how much they learned. 

Kiera sums it up: “When we see how they’ve grown and what they’ve been able to take on after they turn 25, it’s pretty amazing to see what they’re doing. They remember their time with Covenant House so fondly and feel that they took a lot away from it that we didn’t even realize they were soaking up at the time.” 

Thanks to dedicated workers like Kiera and Desiree, youth at CHV learn the life skills that can help them reach their full potential.