Kerry McCluskey
Northern News Services

NNSL (Nov 16/98) - Between the programs for children and the activities for elders, a whole age group of people keep getting lost in the shuffle.

But not any longer.

Thanks to federal dollars that became available this summer, through a new project called the national crime prevention strategy, Clyde River's Beverly Ilauq has devised a crime-prevention project that addresses the problem by targeting youth specifically and their families more generally.

"It allows us to approach the group of people who are between 16 and 40 or even 50 years of age. Those people get lost...that's when life decisions take place," says Ilauq, the co-ordinator of the Ilisaqsivik Society in Clyde River.

Known for its excellent multi-faceted drug and alcohol treatment projects, the society plans to use the federal grant to put two counsellors in place at their facility every afternoon. The pair will hold a variety of life-skills and esteem workshops and will also train other community members to become counsellors.

"Low self-esteem is probably the number one reason why people get into crime. It doesn't allow people to succeed at lifestyles that are good," says Ilauq.

Many of the other projects around Canada have accessed money from the same strategy plan and use it to target fetal alcohol syndrome and fetal alcohol effects, but Ilauq says those issues don't present a huge problem to the residents of Clyde River.

"We feel that we have people who need healing and without it, their lives can be as debilitated as if they had FAS/E."

The counsellors will help community members heal from their pain, much of which is brought on by grief or cultural confusion, and this should help to prevent them from engaging in criminal activities.

Ilauq is certain that Ilisaqsivik's crime-prevention project will be a success and she says similar sessions in the past brought community members out in droves.

"Healing is a long and ongoing process. We keep fitting the programs to what we see as needs. One of the strengths of the program is that it's us doing it for us."