????Tannin Driedger-Bradshaw
Special to The Lake Report
Members of the Lord Mayor's Youth Advisory Council are especially excited this year to again play a part in helping our community.
This is our youth council's fifth year and it's the fourth year I have been involved. The council has made some important contributions to our town and we are pleased to see a growing number of young people who want to be involved in our council.
During these still difficult times, we have made plans to help Niagara-on-the-Lake be happy and healthy in 2022. To do this, we have split the council into three main groups: advocacy, outreach and wellness.
One aspect our advocacy group plans to address is the upkeep of our town parks, which should always stay clean and beautiful.
Several parks, including the St. Davids Lions Park and Queen’s Royal Park, need attention. We hope that through the next year we will be able to organize NOTL garbage clean-up days that will help tidy these public garden areas.
Furthermore, the advocacy committee wants to create a campaign focusing on Black and Indigenous history in NOTL for Black History Month in February.
As a part of this venture, our youth council intends to design information videos about local historic sites for the benefit of both residents and visitors. We hope this helps people around our town learn about and acknowledge those who helped NOTL become what it is today.
For the upcoming year, our outreach team hopes to keep people in town up to date on the innovative ideas and plans we have for the near future.
This will mean more social media postings as well as publishing more articles like this one. We hope these actions will allow our fellow townsfolk to monitor and keep current on our progress.
The outreach group also plans on organizing a sit-down with Lord Mayor Betty Disero to be streamed on Facebook Live. They will discuss, debate and acknowledge what we hope our advisory council aims to achieve for our town this coming year.
The wellness committee looks to focus on helping teens around our area with their mental well-being and physical health, especially throughout the extremely difficult, stressful and sometimes lonely times of this pandemic.
This will include making reels, or short videos, for the community to view on our advisory council's Instagram page, as well as organizing and holding our version of a mental health and wellness conference.
Finally, the wellness group will be arranging another “You Got This Bag” event to boost the spirits of NOTL teens. We found this was a great success for those who received the bag last year.
While we all live in our small town of Niagara-on-the-Lake, we at the Lord Mayor Youth Advisory Council have big plans and are aiming to help kids and teens around town have a safe, great, healthy and prosperous year in 2022.
Other members of the youth advisory council are: Michaiah Ivri (chair) and Mateo Gruosso (vice-chair), Samantha Fretz, Ezekiel Ivri, Julia King, Kaitlyn Lambert, Treesha Ray, Ella Roat, Hope Tsuji, Iyla Williams. Mentors for the subcommittees are: Lord Mayor Betty Disero, Amy Casey and Catherine Goerzen.
