Retiring Steve Cordes looks back at 40 years of helping London's youth
Youth still too often turned away from systems put in place to help them, Cordes says
After almost four decades, a London-based organization that helps young people will have new leadership.
Steve Cordes will be retiring from Youth Opportunities Unlimited (YOU) in August after 35 years as executive director, and a total of 41 years of overall service to the organization. Under his direction, YOU launched a number of different initiatives including the recently-opened Joan's Place.
Cordes sat down with London Morning host Andrew Brown to reflect on the impact he's made.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
AB: Take me back. Do you remember your first day and what it was like?
SC: Vividly. I just graduated from Western, so I was looking for work and the economy wasn't great. I walked into what felt like a gritty 1970's TV show. The place was pretty haphazard. It was in a not-for-profit incubator in the Dundas and Colborne area. I remember seeing three young people sitting there. And I remember all three had very different struggles on the go.
Somebody had some sort of addiction. Somebody else had just become homeless because of a mental health diagnosis. And the third person was just somebody looking for work. It's kind of indicative of what you might see now.
I remember thinking, you know what, this is a really special place. It was the way the staff interacted with people. And I saw employment counsellors coming out, and somebody looking so relieved to see this person that looked like a lifeline. And I thought, I really love this place.
AB: Did you know that you were stepping into the thing that you would be doing professionally for the rest of your career?
SC: No, I had no idea. Nobody at YOU stayed longer than two years at that point, and the more I got into it, the more I loved it. I left the organization for a short while to work somewhere else and my heart felt heavy.
It made me deeply appreciate how much workplace culture matters, because I worked for a great organization outside of YOU, but they didn't have the same culture. They didn't have the same drive to focus on the clients that they were supporting. I never wrapped my head around the work itself. So when the job came up at YOU for the CEO, I jumped at it and then thought, I'm not going through that thing again. I'll just stay.
AB: The kids you met more than 40 years ago on that first day - one kid had an addiction and another was becoming homeless. How common were those stories back then?
SC: The homelessness wasn't so common for sure. I think at that point we were always seeing a pretty significantly needy clientele. I remember the stats we used to collect that time. We don't collect anymore, but 25 per cent of our clients had no high school education. That's significant if your last earned credit was in Grade 8, right? So literacy levels would have been very limited.
But, there was a drive to get something and there was a sense of hope that if I work hard, if I get the right opportunity, I can land a job and build a career and build a future and so on. The difference now is that drive is still there, but that sense of hope is not there so much.
AB: What happened to that sense of hope?
SC: I think back then, if you're on public assistance, you had enough income support from what was welfare at the time, now Ontario Works, that you could pay rent and there was housing stock available. There were still rent-geared-to-income opportunities. There was co-op, there were affordable housing projects, but there was also affordable housing stock.
I'd say not having housing stock available just slams people in terms of their hope. And I think it leads to mental health issues, much of the addictions issues that we see. So you start having to build that sense of hope. And I'd say that the organization for the past 35 years, 40 years, has dug deep into not expanding the clientele that we serve, but deeper into how can we support them in those other ways to get them in the position so that they are ready for employment, they are ready to go back to school and so on.
AB: Have you seen the young people change over the years?
SC: I'd say yes. The biggest change is there's so many young people now who don't see themselves as a member of the community. So it's almost like a counterculture kind of thing, right? And that really wasn't evident, you know, 35, 40 years ago for sure.
AB: So as you walk away, Steve, how are you feeling about the state of things in London and, and the situation for young people here?
SC: I feel very good about the organization. It's in a great spot. With Joan's Place and the opportunities that are there with the hub that we've got at London Health Sciences Centre, the partnerships with other not-for-profits with healthcare and so on, there's a really robust and a really strong service model there.
However, I say a concern for me is that beyond that there's a lot of unmet needs. There's not enough leadership in our community to really push for change. I think we need to be looking at things differently.
I gotta brag about YOU, I've been doing it for 40 years and it's heartfelt, but it shouldn't be the exception that you walk into a place and you just say, 'OK, something's different about the culture here'. People that are walking in, it's low barrier, they have access, they're supported right through to the end of their levels of need.
We have too many organizations, too many systems that are turning people away. We have an Ontario Works system that gives people $400 a month for their housing allowance knowing that that will get them absolutely nothing.
AB: Do you think we'll get there, Steve?
SC: I wish we'd get there faster, but I think the groundswell is there. The fact is homelessness is the number one issue in communities all across Canada, as well as addictions and mental health. It's not just those significant needs, it's all the other supports. Other than that, we're on a good path, but we're baby steps on that path