TNYF 12 Days of Giving – Day 2
December 6, 2022 9:00 am
YOU can give youth important mental health resources
Though Project 11’s curriculum is typically delivered by schoolteachers, when it comes to mental health, it takes a village to support and encourage the youth in our community. Thanks to the generosity of donors like you making the program so widely available, Corporal Steven Brushett, Acting Detachment Commander for Flin Flon RCMP recently delivered Project 11 lessons to a Grade 5 class in the northern Manitoba community.
As a police officer, Cpl. Brushett comes at Project 11’s lessons from a different perspective than most teachers do. Through working in the community, he sees on a regular basis how handling emotions and feelings in healthy and unhealthy ways plays out in people’s lives.
Cpl. Brushett may have been delivering school presentations to students for 15 years, but he’s found Project 11 to be the best resource by far. The lessons have helped to set a stage of compassion and empathy in the classroom and have helped students build positive communication skills. They’ve also encouraged students to reflect on past situations where they’ve faced decisions or feelings that they didn’t know how to process or understand. Cpl. Brushett found that those hit home the most. He noticed that as they progressed through the program, the students became more self-aware and more comfortable with expressing their feelings and improved at applying the practices of the program to situations they had recently faced in their lives.
For Cpl. Brushett, delivering these lessons really is an investment in his community. The students became more emotionally intelligent and confident, and it’s his hope that the coping strategies taught by Project 11 are lifelong applications that the students can incorporate into their lives now and as they grow and develop. His superiors in the RCMP are taking notice too. They’ve requested feedback on how the program is going, with the potential that RCMP officers can incorporate the program in their community policing initiatives in the communities they serve in.
“I was able to engage the students with links to policing and community and from both experience and education. Being a police officer, I was able to connect with the students and build a rapport based on trust and respect by offering personal connections to the accuracy of the curriculum and share examples of how many of the lessons are applied to everyday lifestyle choices.” – Corporal Steven Brushett, Acting Detachment Commander, Flin Flon RCMP
YOU can make a difference this holiday season by giving more youth the chance to access valuable mental health lessons by donating to the TNYF 12 Days of Giving campaign HERE! All donations directly impact the lives of Manitoba youth.