That’s a wrap…

April 12th, 2010 by playing-it-safe

Those previous two videos were the last of the bunch. It’s been a wonderful project, and we’ve been lucky to receive such strong support from so may groups in Canada and abroad of spreading the word about this website and the Playing It Safe project. If you want an idea of who has helped spread the word, just take a look at our links side bar – we’ve been adding our supporters’ web addresses there.

I’ve personally enjoyed having the chance to explore and write about the project and the amazing, powerful people who participated. The stories that they have shared are intimate and personal, but also speak to universal themes and situations. Hopefully it’s helped to open eyes a bit more to what life in at-risk situations means to the many who live it out everyday, and gives an idea of what kinds of services and support are needed.

Some of you have written about whether we will be doing a second run of videos, or how you can do your own local version of Playing It Safe. If you want more information, post your questions below and we’ll write back to you. There are no plans for a follow-up to Playing It Safe just yet, but we hope that it’s provoked enough thought and discussion that other projects putting cameras in the hand of youth will follow.

A big thank you again to all the film makers, the peer support team, and to the producers and directors who helped make this happen. And feel free to keep exploring the site, sharing the videos and posting your comments to the site!

Best,
Tim, for the Playing It Safe team

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Health matters

March 21st, 2010 by playing-it-safe

The last two films are now up on the site, and while they deal with two very different topics, they share a lot of similarities. Both Lulu & Dan have and continue to face struggles with thei health in very different ways. Dan, with mental health issues and Lulu with HIV/AIDS.

The impacts of both diseases are vey different physically, but listening to both of them speak, it is clear that they can result in many of the same feelings and emotions: exclusion, loneliness, misunderstanding. Both mental health and HIV/AIDS, although much more publicly discussed, continue to face stigmatisation in our society. Lulu and Dan though have been able to find the support in their communities that they need to push forward.

Take a look below, and share your thoughts on helth and community support – we’d love to hear what you think.

A Dose of Life

In My Head

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Theatre and homelessness

January 18th, 2010 by playing-it-safe

A quick follow-up to the last blog post… There’s an interesting new post up on the Downtown Calgary Blog: an interview with Aviva Zimmerman on that other great moving visual art, theatre. Zimmerman works with This Is My City, a City of Calgary funded initiative working to put “the tools of the theatre into the hands of Calgary’s homeless population, ” as blogger Will Knoll puts it.

From This Is My City:

“This is My City does not pretend to be a solution to the homeless crisis. Rather, the project intends to enable homeless citizens the chance to speak on their own behalf.”

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Getting it all out

January 15th, 2010 by playing-it-safe

It’s easy when we’re talking about harm reduction to stick to the straight and narrow: medical services, shelter, education, counselling. But there’s another venue that can help build confidence and provide an outlet for people who have felt marginalised, powerless or disconnected. Wesley puts it well in his latest film:

Music provided me a way to express the emotions that I felt and kept bottled inside; the emotions that basically were the destruction of myself. I got it out on paper and then I got it out on track and turned it into music

Art can provide a powerful outlet for self-expression in a way that sometimes even one-on-one counselling can’t provide. Art therapy as a practice isn’t new, but there’s a growing movement of providing art courses, workshops and training to homeless and at-risk youth. This isn’t simply restricted to the classical fine arts either – it includes new media, film, photography and music too. And just it case it isn’t obvious – Playing It Safe falls squarely in that group too! Here’s a list of some of the diverse programs being offered across the country. Have any that aren’t on the list? Post them in the comment section below!

Homeless Nation: http://www.homelessnation.org/
Sketch: http://www.sketch.ca/
Troisième oeil/Third Eye: http://www.itineraire.ca/magdvd/
Art from the streets: http://www.artfromthestreets.com/
Streetwise Opera http://www.streetwiseopera.org/
Cardboard Citizens: http://www.cardboardcitizens.org.uk/

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Switching

December 16th, 2009 by playing-it-safe

Briony has been living through some major life changes, not the least being her switch to a methadone treatment to try and get off heroine. While just that switch is major, she wasn’t expecting the emotions that come with it. In her latest film, follow as she moves away from heroine, into a new home, and comes face to face with emotions she has been trying to numb.

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Mapping your city

December 4th, 2009 by playing-it-safe

Geography and location has a significant impact on our actions & habits, sometimes much more than we think. When Dan arrived in Vancouver, he started creating his own map of where he wanted to be, both geographically and personally. In his latest video, Dan walks us through his map and how he sees Vancouver today.

What maps do you create for yourself? How do you interact with your city?

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Community vs Incarceration

November 26th, 2009 by playing-it-safe

The debate between the effectiveness of punishment versus rehabilitation is a difficult one. Many, though, believe simple punishment, including jail time, needs to be reconsidered, particularly among young people. Programs emphasizing community, reflection, education and treatment have proliferated.

One such program is the Edmonton Drug Treatment & Community Restoration Court, commonly known as Drug Court. According to the EDTCRC website, the ‘principles behind this program include recognized drug treatment court concepts, the concept of problem-solving courts, and restorative justice.’ It provides a venue for communication, treatment, reflection and forgoes simple incarceration.

A central tenet of Drug Court is community justice. Again from the EDTCRC:

[Community justice] can take many forms, but at its core, community justice is about partnership and problem-solving. It’s about creating new relationships, both within the justice system and with outside stakeholders like social service agencies, NGOs, hospitals and clinics, residents, merchants, churches and schools. And it’s about testing new approaches to public safety.

Growing up, Wesley found himself in and out of foster homes, constantly searching for himself, and also ending up in and out of jail. But ending up at Drug Court helped him turn things around. Wesley tells his story above, in his latest Playing It Safe film, The Graduate.

What do you think about Drug Court and alternative judicial systems?

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The Source: ‘Playing it Safe’ helps youth in high-risk situations

November 23rd, 2009 by playing-it-safe

There is no room for melodrama. Instead, these young people are proud, courageous and generous in sharing their daily struggle to stay safe and alive. The testimonies are touching, profoundly human and highly inspiring.

Alain Assailly on Playing It Safe on The Source website. Read this great interview with peer filmmakers Hywel Tuscano and Renaud Boulet here.

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‘I need to be clean to be off the streets; I need to be off the streets to be clean’

November 2nd, 2009 by playing-it-safe

Three new films are up on the site:

‘Aging out’ is the video above; the quote in the title comes from it too. At 29 years old, Briony can hardly believe she’s been on the streets for 15 years. Lately she’s found support at Vancouver’s YouthCo, but she is worried about what will happen when she ‘ages out,’ and hits 30 when she is no longer considered a youth in many programs.

As she and partner Chase try to find a way off the street, though, they come face to face with preconceptions and stereotypes. Even after signing a lease and movning in, they find themselves evicted by a landlady who believes they would ‘be more at home on Hastings Street’ in the DTES. It raises the troubling question that while their lease should clearly stand, when you have been on the streets, are dealing with addiction, and the cards are stacked against you, who do you turn too for recourse in these types of situations?

There are plenty of groups trying to provide that kind of support. On the front page of the blog, under ‘Resources’, we’ve been posting some of them. It isn’t comprehensive, and we’d like your help. Post a comment below with the name and website of any organisations you think should be listed too.

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Lulu: As the Moment Passes

October 26th, 2009 by playing-it-safe

Lulu’s second film, As the Moment Passes, is now up. In it, Lulu is up front and clear about where is she coming from and where she wants to be headed: she has struggled with addiction and was homeless for a period; at the time of filming this latest video, she was clean 11 months, had an apartment and was back in school.

Her path hasn’t been an easy one, as her latest piece shows her struggle to find community and support as she moved off drugs and dealt with her HIV-positive status. Lulu is from the Nisga’a First Nation now living in Vancouver, and is also transgender; as she related in her previous film, Lulu had just begun hormone therapy as Playing It Safe began.

Her route, like each of us, is a personal one. But she also faces a shared reality with many trans people, who can face stigmatisation that often leads to isolation, substance abuse, depression, and transphobic harassment and/or violence. This is particularly clear among youth. A recent study by Egale Canada found that, at school:

  • Nine out of ten transgender students were verbally harassed, and almost two in five reported being physically harassed, because of their expression of gender.
  • Three-quarters of LGBTQ students and 95% of transgender students felt unsafe at school, compared to one-fifth of straight students.
  • Transgender students (over a third) were twice as likely as LGB students to strongly agree that they sometimes feel very depressed about their school that they do not belong there, and four times as likely as straight students.

Outside of school, trans-phobia and related violence are as great a concern. Nov. 20th is the annual Transgender Day of Rememberance for victims of transphobic violence, which is still rarely discussed. Numbers are hard to come by in Canada because hate crime studies ask for sexual orientation or gender, but do not specifically explore transphobic related violence. And to date only the Northwest Territories explicitly lists gender identity in their charter of rights. A recent report, though, warns violence against transpeople around the world may be on the rise.

This violence and stigmatisation has clear impacts, putting transpeople at greater risks in other areas. One study (PDF) found 18 per cent of trans youth in Chicago were homeless. An article in the Spring 2008 issue of The Positive Side found there’s growing recoginition and resources of transgendered people dealing with HIV positive status and AIDS. The piece presents an extensive list of resources across the country, including many for trans youth like Vancouver’s The Centre, AlbertaTrans.org, Toronto’s 519 Church Stree Community Centre, Montreal’s Project 10 and Halifax’s The Youth Project.

Lulu has found her own support through YouthCo in Vancouver, and is now studying to upgrade her coursework so she can become a Pharmaceutical Technician. You can watch all of Lulu’s films here.

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