The Bowen Youth Himalayan Odyssey
This was a program I developed for Bowen Island Municipality in BC, Canada, where I worked as the Youth Services Coordinator for 5+ years. This is the story of how it came to be.
I remember being interviewed for the job in the local youth center. I’d just got residency in Canada and was excited to make my mark. My wife and I had just moved to the Island having returned to Canada to “settle” after many years of Himalayan travel and adventure.
Bowen is a small, quiet forest-covered island off the coast of Vancouver. The population of just over 4000 is extremely family-oriented. People move out of the city to raise their kids there. Its safe – like, really safe – in fact the only reason most people put up a fence around their property is to keep out the marauding deer. Nobody locks their doors because there’s no property crime. But despite the trees and tranquility and healthy social fabric of the community, for many local teens there seemed to come a point where they needed more. It seemed there was a generation of teens drifting around in the woods, unobserved and unobservable. BC is saturated in marijuana and other drugs, most of which are cheaper and easier to obtain than alcohol. The upshot of this was a sub-culture of drug and alcohol abuse amongst a minority of bored and marginalized teens. Or at least that was mainly what the adult population seemed to talk about when they spoke of Bowen youth; they were concerned and the Municipality (i.e. me) was supposed to do something about it.
So as the manager of the local youth center and local outreach worker I dived into the fascinating Bowen youth sub-culture. They were, like in most other Canadian communities, an extraordinarily creative and fun loving bunch. I made connections and did what I could to offer mentorship and recreational opportunities and at some point in this process I decided to go for gold, to develop a Big Hairy Audacious Goal, as they say and decided to take a shot at the community’s perception of teens. It was time for a counter attack; for teens to be given an opportunity to voice a different message about who they were and what they were capable of. We were going to the Himalayas.
Over the following four years I developed what became known as the Bowen Youth Himalayan Odyssey (BYHO). In short, it brought together local teens in an audacious goal to journey to the top of the world. I worked with a maximum of 12 students every year and slowly, with their help and the help of West Vancouver youth workers and colleagues from Capilano University and Vancouver Coastal Health, I developed a series of leadership initiatives and fundraisers that got British Columbian teens to the Himalayas.
By year 3 of the BYHO, the trip to Sikkim (in Himalayan India) had become a central feature of youth service provision on Bowen Island and something much talked about by local teens and the community.
I’ll post details of specific events and activities in subsequent blog entries.
