His recreation and mentoring program for youth in Morningside Heights has fresh municipal support, but Rob Rogers says his neighbourhood’s biggest problem remains the lack of a local community centre.
A former provincial athlete, Rogers founded the 3T (Toronto Teen Track) Program in 1996, and has run it, more or less, on a shoestring budget since.
When city councillors stopped grants he relied on for a decade - a few thousand dollars a year to cover insurance and school board permits - Rogers started paying out of his pocket, he said, rather than disappoint 20 young men who expect him to be a mentor.
The past several months has seen things turn around for 3T. A new city recreation grant "helped us to keep the doors open," and Rogers partnered with Toronto’s Youth Action Network to share its charitable status.
This made 3T a youth-led organization, said Rogers last week, explaining five of the program graduates, ages 18 to 21, are directors on the group’s board, as are four youth still in the program.
"They’re running the business and are kind of my bosses."
But though 3T remains "the best youth program that you’ve never heard of," and this week started its summer activities, Wednesday to Friday at Brookside Public School from 1 to 4 p.m., Rogers said he’s still looking for sustained core funding.
And the northeastern Scarborough neighbourhood’s lack of youth facilities, which convinced Rogers to keep 3T going as a volunteer, is still the top local complaint.
The 3,500-house area west of Rouge Park seems to have more children than ever, and the school on Oasis Boulevard, Rogers said, has three portables now and is renovating to add classrooms on its roof.
"The kids are still coming, but we don’t have enough space or funds."
Rogers, who wants to start a youth employment program for the area, said Malvern’s busy community recreation centre is too far away for children in Morningside Heights.
The neighbourhood was third on the city’s prospective list for community centres in 2007, when it spent $17 million on seven acres of land off Sewells Road, an approved subdivision site known as Village Securities, because it bordered Rouge Park and was thought to contain a First Nation village site.
Toronto council decided the land could not be used for a community centre, and during the debate Rogers and the now-inactive Morningside Heights Residents’ Association warned against leaving local children and youth with no future place for recreation.
The land is not slated to be included in the federal Rouge National Urban Park, and remains as open space.
This week, Scarborough-Rouge River Councillor Raymond Cho agreed Morningside Heights needs a community centre but the city has to go through a Toronto-wide assessment process and find the money - not to mention a location.
"I don’t think it’s going to be built in the foreseeable future," said Cho, who is running for re-election against 10 other candidates in the ward.
He said he supports Rogers’ program and made a "token contribution" to it on a visit to Brookside last week.
Malvern Family Resource Centre recently completed a headquarters building at Sewells and Littles roads containing a gym and other facilities it has promised to let the community use.
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