Finding My Path is a program offered at Stella’s Place, that aims to work with young adults (16 – 29 y.o.) to develop skills toward meaningful employment. Through peer support, navigation, job counselling and weekly Gatherings, we support young adults to make empowered choices with regard to their career development.
This fall, Finding My Path is BACK and better than ever! Well, the truth is, we never really stopped. We did, however, take a break from our Monday evening Gatherings over the summer to ponder over what we have learned in an effort to make our program even better. What emerged was this:
Finding My Path Gatherings have moved to every week, a change from the bi-weekly schedule that we originally started with.
The Finding My Path team revamped our “curriculum” for the Gatherings and created a session schedule that we thought would make more sense. We tried to focus on workshops that would be most useful to young adults, offering them in an order that would foster the kind of gradual skill development, anxiety management tools and community building capacity that we are aiming for–and after three sessions, it appears to be working!
Our first three sessions have experienced a growth in attendance and have focused on: more effectively sitting through our anxiety (via my favourite work-related improv game, PowerPoint Karaoke); diving deep into strengthening our resume building and job search strategies; and having awesome guest speakers. As you can see, we’re off to a great start.
The Finding My Path team also wants to RE-emphasize that the Gatherings aren’t all that we do! Venessa is available for one-on-one Peer Support sessions and they are an expert at moving through adversity and goal planning. Julian is also available for one-on-one Navigation support, helping young adults with applications and connecting them to useful resources all over the city for whatever it is they need.
And finally, Lisa joins our team, replacing Joey as our Job Coaching support from YMCA, supporting participants with aptitude assessment, choosing a career path, and maintaining a job once you find one–Lisa will also follow participants for up to one year!
With these changes, we believe that Finding My Path will be better than ever at supporting our participants in finding the careers that they want and deserve. We are super determined to continue growing and getting better at supporting the life journeys of young adults.
Finding My Path is made possible by Scotiabank and by many generous families.
Click here to find out more about Stella’s Place programs.