Regent Park Focus Youth Media Arts Centre thrives

30 September 2011 No Comments

Adonis Huggins

By Stephanie Pollard

Since 1990, Regent Park’s youth have been using media arts to express themselves and explore their community in a clean, air-conditioned haven, thanks to the Regent Park Focus Youth Media Arts Centre (RPFYMAC). Located on the lower level of 38 Regent St., the centre boasts the latest in equipment and education tactics that allow Regent’s youth to create print, broadcast and online materials that promote positivity while shedding light on community issues they feel are being overlooked.

The RPFYMAC was established through a provincial government initiative to support vulnerable communities in terms of health promotion. According to executive director, Adonis Huggins, a focus on the youth is what the Regent community wanted when the centre came into existence.

“What was unique about that funding was the government basically said, ‘We want the community involved in setting the priorities of where it wants the funding to go.’ So the community identified the youth as its main priority.”

However, because young people weren’t coming to community meetings, print and video were used as tools to engage them. “It was a process of using media to bring them to the table to get them to talk about their issues and things they wanted to see in their community and in their lives, and how we can make changes around that,” Huggins says. “That’s how we became who we are.”

Today, the centre has become an outlet that is used to show the rest of Toronto the youth perspective of Regent Park, versus what is generally perceived about the area. The projects in which youth participate also help them to develop skills that will serve them in day-to-day life.

“We’re mostly about their social development, their ability to work as part of a group, the ability to set goals and objectives, the ability to express themselves through different venues,” Huggins says, “whether it’s writing skills or social hosting skills through radio, and being able to understand media and critique media as well.”

And while the RPFYMAC is confronted by a number of challenges, Huggins expresses gratitude to the people of Regent and other organizations such as the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, which believed in the initiative enough to keep it thriving for so long.

“I feel great that we have been able to sustain the program for as long as we have,” he says. “If you look at our 20 years, it’s one step leading to another and we’ve come to a point now where we have a full radio studio, and are able to begin our own television broadcasting. I’m really proud of where we first started to where we are.”