Ottawa’s mayor is holding a youth summit next month to hear from young people about concerns and ideas for improving the city to better serve their needs.
Jim Watson will be hosting the first Mayor’s Youth Summit for 200 Ottawa youth, ages 16 to 25, on Oct. 12.
The city debuted a similar event last October for seniors. Watson said he hopes to replicate the success of the Seniors Summit with a different demographic.
“I thought we should go to the other end of the age spectrum and ask young people,” he said. “A lot of the students stay here after school to work. We’ve never really had a dialogue with students.”
The Mayor’s Youth Summit will take place at city hall from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.
Registration is free of charge on the city’s website as of Sept. 10. Since registration is limited, the summit is being broadcast live through Rogers and can be watched through the city’s website.
“The purpose of the summit is to engage young people in a wide variety of subjects [like] arts and culture, safety, health, employment, transportation, and find out how we can do a better job,” Watson said.
The mayor has tried to advertise the summit to a diverse audience “so that it’s not just a homogeneous group of people from the city, it’s going to reflect the entire city,” Watson said.
Watson and the summit committee are approaching rural, urban, and suburban school boards as well as street youth organizations like Operation Come Home directly to recruit youth.
Like the Seniors Summit, the Youth Summit agenda will include a question and answer period with the mayor, small discussion groups, and a resource fair.
However, the ideas generated from the summit will be handled by city council in a different way.
With the youth summit, city councillor and summit facilitator, Mathieu Fleury said he wants to focus on more specific issues in order to create tangible results quickly.
The Seniors Summit resulted in the development of an Older Adult Action Plan. Fleury said this policy, which incorporates issues like housing and transportation, will be released later this year. Fleury said he hopes the process will move faster than it did last October.
To do this, city council has decided to narrow their focus.
“This time around we’re looking for five to 10 very specific things that the city can do,” he said.
