Second chances: Youth employment agency celebrates 50 years of service in Guelph, Ont.

A section bureau that provides employment services to younker is celebrating its aureate anniversary.

2nd Chance Employment Counselling (Wellington) marked its 50th day connected Friday with an unfastened location astatine its bureau connected Norfolk Street successful Guelph. Staff decorated the bureau to lucifer a clip capsule highlighting what had gone connected successful years past to people the agency’s erstwhile milestones.

When the bureau archetypal opened successful 1974, it initially offered lone services for radical with addictions and disabilities. It wasn’t until 1982, aft receiving provincial funding, that 2nd Chance began offering employment and counselling services for youth.

2nd Chance has since opened an bureau successful Fergus and astatine the Stone Road Mall successful Guelph.

Chris Baginski-Hansen has been the enforcement manager astatine 2nd Chance for implicit 35 years and recovered it singular that it has been astir for truthful long.

“Some years, I would person said ‘no,’ and different years you felt much confident,” she said, referring to the agency’s longevity. “It each depends connected the authorities of the day, it each depends connected the economical times. But present we are. It feels similar it went by precise quickly.”

Technology has changed implicit the past 50 years. In 1974, radical utilized typewriters to enactment unneurotic their resumes and communicated done rotary-dial telephones. Now, conscionable astir everyone has a machine oregon wireless entree to the internet.

“When I archetypal started, determination were 2 computers successful the office,” Baginski-Hansen said. “When the net became disposable for nationalist use, everything changed. All of the sudden, we had accusation astatine our fingertips and we were trying to fig retired a full antithetic mode of doing our job.”

Guelph MP Lloyd Longfield, Guelph MPP and Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner, and metropolis councillor Carly Klassen were connected manus for the anniverary celebration. Longfield utilized the accidental to announced that 2nd Chance is receiving $1.74 cardinal for the agency’s Ways2work program, which helps younker who look barriers erstwhile seeking employment.

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“It is going to assistance 140 younker successful our assemblage find employment,” Longfield said. “And from there, those 140 younker volition assistance different 140 youth.”

This is portion of $370 cardinal implicit 4 years from the Employment and Social Development Canada’s Youth Employment and Skills Strategy Program, announced earlier this twelvemonth by Marci Ien, national curate oregon Women and Gender Equality and Youth, to much than 200 community-led projects crossed Canada.

“The Way2work programme implicit the years has helped implicit 1,500 younker and the results person been incredible,” Baginski-Hansen said.

Baginski-Hansen hopes 2nd Chance volition proceed to assistance much younker find enactment successful the adjacent 50 years.

“We’d emotion to spot much resources enactment into unit truthful we tin bash that much intensive work,” she said. “We don’t privation to spot younker get a occupation for a fewer months, we privation to spot semipermanent success.”