Stay Informed

• Who We Support

• Current Investees
  • Autism Aspergers Friendship Society
  • Calgary Youth Justice
    • SVP Involvement
    • Opening DOORS
    • If You Build It...
    • Website
  • Connections Counselling
  • EvenStart
• Investee Alumni
• Evaluation and Outcomes
• How to Be Supported
• What We've Done

And come they did!

Last year SVP jumped onboard to spearhead the development of DOOR's (Database of Opportunities and Resources). This tool allows Youth Justice Committees to easily access and isolate available resources to meet the unique needs of each individual young person they work with. Data about the young person and their circumstances is entered into the system by the volunteers, then applicable local programs and innovative responses created by youth justice committee volunteers from across the city are narrowed down to only those most suitable to the young person. This innovative technology has received much attention from stakeholders and has the potential to be applicable for youth justice committees across the country.

This year, with support from SVP, we were able to enhance this great initiative even further and continue to move in an exciting new direction thanks to a donation of funds for net-books. Committee members can now remotely access the resources in the database exactly when needed - when they are in the interview with the young person and their parents.

Imagine our sense of anticipation when we made the announcement that each Youth Justice Committee was going to be provided with their own net-book, and the feeling of gratification that followed, upon hearing the response of excited disbelief:

"The Calgary Youth Justice Society is doing what?!"

See this through our eyes... an organization with a small team of staff supporting a large city-wide program with a huge volunteer base, suddenly capable of developing and implementing an innovative approach, substantially influencing the effectiveness, efficiency and quality of our service delivery. Connecting volunteers to each other and to other service providers through technology is producing immediate and lasting results: time and effort of volunteers is maximized; knowledge and expertise of volunteers is captured, shared and implemented, building valuable intellectual capital in the form of 'creative consequences'; consistency and quality of service to young people is enhanced; volunteers are directly connected to youth programs offered by other service, increasing awareness of available programs, suitability and ease of referrals and participation rate of referred youth.

The new interconnectedness of Youth Justice Committees and the service providers they rely on has created a 'smarter community' - a collaborative effort based on effective communication that helps our young people grow from their experiences in the Extrajudicial Sanctions program. In fact, the significant scale and impact of this smarter community attracted a new partnership with IBM Canada, who recently expanded our IT infrastructure to maximize the benefits of this new technology, increasing our organizational capacity even further.

Thanks to the seeds planted by Social Venture Partners Calgary, we are on the cusp of making contributions to Calgary Youth Justice Committees that were mere dreams only a short time ago.