 My name is Joanne Helgeson. I am the Crime Prevention Coordinator for Manitoba First Nations Police Service. I've been in this position for 15 years. Our headquarters is in Portage La Prairie and we police six First Nation communities. As a Crime Prevention Coordinator, I am a civilian member of the service. So I assist our police officers in a number of different events that that we do on behalf of the police service in the communities. So as Crime Prevention Coordinator, I'm involved in a number of activities. Some of the things that I have been involved with are attending career fairs and health fairs in the communities, career fairs for recruitment. We get our young people interested in policing in the future, health fairs for safety initiatives and safety information to community members. I'm in the schools. I'm doing presentations on what is requested by the schools and communities in terms of bullying, drug awareness, distracted driving, impaired driving presentations like those. I also assist in community meetings and planning groups and writing proposals for our First Nations Police Service. We have had a summer student program for about eight years where we hire students from the community to get some policing experience at our detachment and in the community relating to crime prevention as well as since we do not have a dedicated First Nations Victim Services Coordinator that every year we get funding through the Department of Justice Canada to run a Victims of Crime event. It is known as the National Victims and Survivors of Crime Awareness Week occurring at the end of May. So we have been running an event once a year during this timeframe on different topics of interest to our communities in terms of victims of crime, their families, and we just generally do a conference and invite members to come and to just increase their awareness and understanding. So the topics are varied and activities that I do for crime prevention. But the main areas that I think has shown a lot of success for our police service is our youth programs that we have been running over the last number of years. So we started our first youth program in 2010 in the community of Sioux Valley decodination and we called it the Sioux Valley Cadet Corps. And we had, at that point, it was our initial program. So there was a lot of work in planning and developing the program. Part of the key things with this youth program was the partnerships that we developed in the community. So we were certainly a partnership with the school, which is where the program would occur, and the health center in terms of resources and being a partner in this, and also recreation and sports. We needed to develop a partnership with that. We based it on the Army Cadet program, the successful model of the Army Navy Air Cadets, as well as originally, at the time, there was a program that came out of the Carry the Kettle First Nation and the RCMP, Working with the Elders for Youth. And it was more of a community policing program. And we had heard a lot of news regarding Habima at that point that they were operating this community cadet program to help steer kids out of the gang initiations and deal with positive learning and positive experience with the police. And so, thus, we began this program in Sioux Valley, which was very successful the first year. And then we took it to Sandy Bay in 2011. And then in 2015, we had the program in Long Plain First Nation. Currently, we have the Sandy Bay Youth Corps and the Long Plain Explorers, both coordinated by our police service, and both our after-school programs that occur once a week. So, the Sandy Bay has been running for almost 10 years. And Long Plain, Long Plain, we started the program just before we initiated policing that community. Prior, it was RCMP. And we had a transition. The community had a transition to an Aboriginal Police Service, which was ours. And that school year of 2015, we started our youth program even before our members were stationed there in Long Plain in, I think it was January, February of 2016. So, yes, so these programs initially with the military, they're based on the four Rs. Rights, Responsibility, Respect, and Rules. And we incorporate them into our weekly work with the students. And we've also incorporated, we call it the three Ss, which is Skilled Staff, Supervision, and Structure Programming. So, we have all of those incorporated into the programs. Now, you see the programs, we have two that we operate, and we have requests for more. We have a request now for Burntail Sioux, the coordination to have a youth program as well. Both our youth programs focus on kids in Sandy Bay. We deal with the age group of 12 to 17. So, we have to deal with older kids. In Long Plain, we go 10 to 15 years. So, we have a little bit of a younger group. We have approximately 30 to 35 that start the program. But we always usually end up with a core group of about 20, 25 kids that maintain themselves throughout the whole school year, which is when we run the programs once a week after school. So, our program has an emphasis on sports, culture, education, and healthy living. So, we try to include all of those aspects in our programming. We do a number of activities relating to those. So, one of the things that we do have is in our partnerships that are required for these programs, we do have a partnership with Aboriginal sport and recreation. And they supply us with sports clinics. And so, we have regular clinics with both groups in archery, in lacrosse, and more recently badminton. So, these are clinics where we have an instructor who comes out to the community, works with the kids. Now, these instructors are skilled. They're either coaches or players. They're skilled people that work with the kids in skill development. So, they, and it's usually about once a month. So, the youth are able to practice and improve their skills. And that's what we are doing with those areas. Also, in our youth programs, we do field trips and tours. Not that frequently, but those are something that, of course, the youth enjoy to do. As well as we have different presentations come in. And we do understand the kids have been in school all day. So, we're not going to be, they're not sitting there listening to a presenter. It's all active learning. For example, our partnership with the health center, the local health centers is working very well. And we get the health centers to come in. And in terms of nutrition and healthy foods, if they're going to instruct something like that, they'll make it into like a competition or a game or a relay race to get the right answer in terms of how much sugar is in pop and that kind of thing. So, it just, it goes to the next level in terms of learning. We've recently had our diabetes session. And it's not just talking about diabetes concerns, but it's talking about that with the kids while they're preparing a healthy meal and a healthy snack and how you can actively do that and recognize how you take care of yourself and that. So, that's part of the healthy living aspect in our program. Culture is, we do have elders and other community members. It's almost built in all the time in our program, but we do also have different awareness and information sessions on that from people that want to share some information to the youth in our program. And for that, it helps us with the youth just develop a sense of belonging into the program, some pride, some confidence that they are a part of something strong and to be proud of that. And learning about the history and a lot of times they do learn about things that they weren't aware of. Of course, as a police service, we do offer the police studies aspect into the youth programs. I mean, one of the initial reasons why we decided to do the youth program is youth programming is because we wanted to build connections into the community. We wanted to give our members a place where they can actively participate with the youth while developing positive relationships with the youth. And that's needed because really the result of this program is programming is building these connections and relationships. In turn, it would help the youth have more respect for authority and the law, meeting our members in a different capacity in just an environment where they're either playing sports with the kids or they're sharing information about themselves, their choices of career, or whether we have the canine unit out and doing search and rescue activities. We kind of think we've got some cool stuff and we've got to keep the kids interested to keep them coming. So we try to offer many of those things. So our programs, as I had mentioned, they occur once a week and after school on Thursdays in Sandy Bay and Tuesdays in Long Plain, and part of that is to be reliable in having these programs. So the kids know that on Tuesdays we are there and we are there with the exception that school is canceled due to weather. So we want to develop this consistency and reliability with the kids. We offer a supervised and structured program that's safe that parents know that they can send their kids to after school or they stay there after school and they will be returned home after we are done. It's a program that's available in their home community. So they're not traveling into the surrounding towns to have a program of similar nature. So we also have a free canine and meals for the kids. We provide bus transportation home because we want to reduce barriers to attendance. So this is provided so they stay after school. They are provided by a bus driver and they get opportunities overall. We just want to try to increase, provide them with new opportunities to meet people, to learn, to discover their talents, to learn new things, to be aware of services that are available for them. But we all, we really have to keep it in a fun and engaging way. We do hire youth leaders in each of the programs and these are from the community and they serve as mentors and role models to the kids and so they provide supervision, assistance, but also motivation, some enthusiasm to keep things moving because we do operate the full school year. Indigenous education means to me is, I think just looking from our youth programs is developing a youthful potential in all areas. So having a balance of learning opportunities. So that's what I see doing in these youth programs. So I'm not an educator per se, but I do really understand the importance of education for our Aboriginal students. We work with career choices for the kids as well and we always offer that, especially in terms of our police members. In the future I see our police service fully expanding. We are an Indigenous police service and I see us policing many more communities and I see our young people from the communities applying and many more First Nations police officers and many more First Nations professional people pursuing their post-secondary education. I see a very strong direction towards Indigenous policing. So a lot of our young people now and I see in the future will be looking towards policing as a possible career choice in policing their home communities or any First Nation community. It's just a natural fit. The communities want their own people policing and the young people are ready now to take that step and begin doing that in their communities.