It looks like a typical Thursday night at the St. Albert Youth Community Centre.
There are about 25 people gathered in its drop-in centre in Grandin mall, a healthy mix of teenage boys and girls. There is a roar of several voices talking at once, and those voices are mostly happy, excited and laughing.
This upbeat tone is in contrast with the reason everyone has stopped by in the first place. Tonight is the final night the youth centre will be open for these teens. Come Wednesday it will be gone for good.
"I'm really upset," says Corrie Ayers, 15, who has been coming by since she moved to St. Albert from Florida. "We fought for this place to be open and now they are kicking us out."
A dispute earlier this month between Vancouver-based developer Amacon, which owns the mall, and the youth centre board over who was responsible for a $33,000 roof repair bill led to its closure. Amacon, which has plans some day to knock the mall down and build high-rise condos in its place, told the centre it had to pay for the roof. When centre officials pointed out the section of their lease agreement that said Amacon was responsible, Amacon told them to leave.
A frantic search ensued for a new space, but board chair Doug Campbell said earlier this week that the spaces they found were either in a less-than-ideal location or were too expensive.
Ayers' dad Craig is also upset about the closure. When he moved his family to St. Albert three-and-a-half years ago, his daughter had trouble finding friends until she started going to the youth centre.
"What landlord tells a tenant they have to pay for a roof?" Craig asks incredulously over the phone. "You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see through that. If my landlord told me I had to pay for a roof, then I'm going to challenge it. The city hasn't backed them up at all."
The fight with Amacon will go down as the final chapter in what has been a difficult year for the youth centre. In the spring of 2012, council endorsed a recommendation from its community services advisory board that denied grant funding for the centre, funding it had received annually since it opened in 1997. Worth approximately $100,000, the decision almost caused the centre's closure in 2012. Council, however, filled a portion of the funding gap by topping up its budget contribution and centre officials decided to soldier on.
It's a safe place for Ayers and her friends that has no equal in the city. Asked what she'll do now, Ayers shrugs and says she'll be spending more time at Lions Park with other youth that congregate there late at night. It's not ideal – some teens bring and consume drugs there. One night Ayers ended up in a confrontation in which she was injured with a metal bat.
"I know if I was an adult and I had a kid, I wouldn't want my kid to go there," Ayers says.
One girl suddenly dissolves into tears and rushes away. Ayers follows her to console her while the rest of the teens on hand continue to enjoy themselves. One group plays a dance game on an Xbox while another group shoots pool. Mostly the teens just stand in groups and talk.
Second home
Kathleen Bell, 29, has worked as a youth worker at the centre for the last nine summers. She laughs as she fights to hold back tears, recounting what this place means to the young people and to her.
"A lot of them will describe it as a second home," Bell says. "We get a lot of youth that come in and they'll come in every day and every night."
Adults have the luxury of separation from the everyday problems that teens can experience, Bell says. That perspective can seem helpful, but when a young person is going through something that adults treat as trivial or temporary, it can be hard for them to find someone to talk to.
"It's a place they can go to talk to a mentor, an adult that has some perspective they can talk to. They need someone who will listen to them and take their emotions seriously," Bell says.
There is a sudden shriek of surprise and delight and cries of "Allyson!" Several girls rush to the door to hug Allyson MacIvor, a longtime cornerstone of the centre.
Now 21, MacIvor started coming by when she was 11 years old and didn't leave until she had to at the age of 18. Even then she worked as a youth worker during the summers until this year.
In the time she spent at the youth centre, she received work experience by volunteering for numerous centre functions. In fact, she became so synonymous with it that in 2008 she was named a Leader of Tomorrow for that work.
"You come in here during a normal day it was pretty much like a home," MacIvor says. "Everyone knows each other. Everyone's like siblings. All kids are welcome."
MacIvor is now a student at the University of Alberta, studying percussion in the music program. She is also an executive on the Music Students Association. The first time she picked up a pair of drumsticks was at the youth centre when she would bang on the drums they still have.
"Without this place, I wouldn't be the person I am today," MacIvor said. "Slowly, people here and the youth workers became my friends and the youth workers became my mentors and then they all became my family. Even to this day they are my family still."
Everyone agrees the closure is sad. Many are upset and several teens openly state they don't know where they will go in the future. Some come here to do homework during the school year. Others come to escape less-than-ideal environments at home.
But MacIvor said that family feeling she describes doesn't evaporate just because there is no longer a building for it.
"Hopefully the kids realize this feeling doesn't end here when the youth centre closes," she says. "It carries on when they turn of age and can't come here and they'll all be friends for a long time. It's obvious. You can really see the impact it's had on these kids here."
