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Troubleshooter for teens carries office on his back Nigel Levy's office is black, tattered and canvas. Inside, he carts pamphlets and information sheets on everything from HIV testing to how to get your criminal record cleared. There is a CPR mouth mask, TTC student tickets, condoms and his yellow cellphone, which rings incessantly with teens looking for summer jobs or a place to crash that night after being kicked out of home. What's conspicuously absent is what you'd expect to find in the bag of a parks and recreation worker: gym clothes. “At first, they called me the bagman in the plaid shirt,” he said, fishing out a flyer for Scarborough addiction services. “I'm also known as the condom guy.” Levy is one of the city's 22 parks and recreation youth outreach workers. But to hear his average work shift, you'd think he was trained in social work. He helps teenagers in “G-Way” — the Galloway area of Scarborough — get into drug rehab programs, secure cheap child care for their kids, study for school, find jobs and complete their court-imposed community service. Right now, he oversees 50 young offenders serving out their sentences for first-time drug possession or petty theft. “I don't replace a social worker. They're seen in a different light. Recreation isn't scary to youth. I look like them. I know the area. I used to live here and I know exactly what's going on,” said Levy, a former professional football player who spent his teenage years living in Malvern. The city's parks and recreation department hired 10 youth outreach workers five years ago to address the plummeting youth enrolment in their programs. “We wanted to find out what ways we could meet the needs of youth,” said Phyllis Berck, Toronto's parks and recreation strategic issues co-ordination manager. Instead of waiting for teenagers to come and tell them what was missing, they sent Levy and others out into malls and subway stations in the city's poorer neighbourhoods to ask them. And what they found was youth didn't just need basketball courts and swimming pools to blow off steam in. They needed to know how to get a job, where to get clean, what to do about pregnant girlfriends, how to deal with the schoolyard bully. “The needs of youth are very complex. Our traditional programs weren't enough,” said Berck. It fit the department's modus operandi, not just to provide programs to entertain kids, but to help mould them. In 1897, Toronto started the first organized recreation program for the children of poor immigrants living in squalid Cabbagetown. Since 2000, the number of youth outreach workers in the city has doubled, although most work only part-time. About half of them, like Steve Martin, come from the communities they work in. Martin is a 29-year-old outreach worker in mid-Scarborough. Levy grew up in a stable household. He has a university degree. He played professional football for four years and got a job as a computer analyst. He left it and took a large pay cut to help kids. Operating out of both the Morningside Mall and Heron Park Community Centre, Levy sees up to 800 young people every week. As part of its new strategic plan which focuses on youth, the parks and recreation department wants to hire youth outreach workers for all 140 of the city's community centres. It also fits in with Toronto Mayor David Miller's community safety plan, which seeks to prevent crime by investing in youth in at-risk neighbourhoods, the parks and recreation department's general manager Brenda Librecz says. "This is the first time any city in the country has done anything like this. It's been a truly unique pilot project," said Librecz. “Now, we're saying it's worked and let's value it.” Martin and Levy just hope it finally means they will get full-time employment so they can become true role models in communities like G-Way, and Scarborough and Kennedy. A 15-year-old girl tells Levy she can't get a job because she doesn't have a social insurance number. Levy advises her to come down to his office in the mall tomorrow to fill out a form. Then, he'll direct her to the government office to drop it off. Amazingly, he's forgotten his bag. But he says, after five years on the job, he doesn't need it. CATHERINE PORTER CITY HALL BUREAU. "That bag used to be 25 to 30 pounds," he said. "But I cut it down because I have most of the information in my head."
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