Blueprintforlife and Blueprint Pathways have been delivering 5-day intensive engagements, with youth in remote communities, alternative schools, and maximum-security youth prisons for over 20 years.
Our staff are all incredible human beings, social workers, educators, and most importantly artist, often with international reputations.
We utilize bucket drumming, street dancing, music creation, rap and spoken word, journaling, games, meditation, art, traditional culture, ceremony, and traditional drumming. All building towards creating honest relationships, so we can also talk openly about the complex things going on in the lives of youth. Esp those with trauma.
Blueprintforlife started in 2006 doing one project in Canada’s Arctic and grew by word of mouth, with parents and elders in northern communities reaching out to us, to see if we could come to work with their youth. Our work has grown by reputation and by our relationships with communities, not by marketing.
To date we have worked with over 6000 youth in 60 communities, with many of these being remote fly in First Nation and Inuit villages.
Our model has always been one of partnership, where communities help develop the priorities relevant to their own specific needs. We then often become the replacement school for an entire week, having the teachers, parents, social workers, public health, police, and elders being directly involved.
Blueprint has been recognized for this work with many national and international awards and has been the subject of a number of documentaries.
In the past 10 years we have also been focusing on our youth justice work, delivering healing programs to youth incarcerated in maximum security facilities across Canada. We have been told that we are quite likely the largest group therapy projects in the history of all of Canada’s corrections systems.
Blueprintforlife teams have been honored with community feast, invitations to ceremony, and had honor songs created as community gestures of thanks. We have received incredible gifts such as star blankets and carvings, and have been presented many community flags. But the greatest gift has been the one of communities sharing their culture openly with us, and trusting us to work on healing with your youth.
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Delivering an in depth social work message and giving the youth a voice through the vehicle of HipHop the approach of BluePrintForLifes programming is appealing to youth and is community focused. We have impacted approximately 5000 youth in over 120 projects carried out in First Nations and Inuit communities, as well as Canadas Inner cities. The demand for the program is immense and the benefit is not only heard in the voices of the youth themselves, but from elders, teachers, law enforcement agencies, government officials, public health and social workers. Eight documentaries and a book have been produced on the projects and have been shown on national television and at film festivals. Arctic Government officials have described the work of BluePrintForLife as “the most substantial youth engagement programming in 20 years”. Blueprints work has been a featured story in Readers Digest.
