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In fulfilling the commitment I made to keep you all informed about changes that are being made to the organization, I am going to let you know about some more changes we’re making to better the CYA in reaching its goals.

We are considering making some alterations to the bylaws. As you may recall, we were to make some adjustments to the bylaws a year after they were finished; however this simply didn’t happen as we were caught up in so many other things. We apologize for this lapse in our efforts, but we will be correcting the situation through accomplishing this task as soon as possible. The changes are posted so that anyone can make comments/suggestions; but the goal of this is to reflect the shift in responsibility from the members to the volunteers.

As I have mentioned the members have not and should not have to take the lead in running the organization itself; they have enough of a burden in representing their peers. Also, I very much doubt many people would sign on for a role such as assisting in running the organization; I think it’s a fair assumption that the members would rather stick to representing, discussing, and debating rather than the operational side of things (though we welcome new volunteers with the passion to help us run the CYA!).

We will be providing a great deal more structure and method to how elected members fulfil their role. Right now our Youth Representatives (YRs) are talking and discussing, which is wonderful, but unfortunately the organization itself has absolutely no contact or connection with them whatsoever which completely prohibits us from taking steps to reach our goals. Furthermore the discussions which have taken place, while good and useful, will not maximize the ability of the YRs to represent their peers and provide information that is useful for analysis and presentation. Essentially, while it is good to outline the wants and needs of youth, there needs to be more discussion as to the: who, what, where, when, and perhaps most importantly why and how.

We will be holding round-table discussions and establishing other means through which our YRs will be able to answer more specific questions (so as to provide us with more specific information) which will compliment the information gathered from our surveys. Together this information will become vastly useful not only to us within the CYA, but also to educational and other institutions outside of the CYA and all over the world.

The bylaws have been adjusted so as to reflect the fact that the volunteers will be running the organization and the members will be representing their peers. The volunteers will handle the development of the CYA, events, developing results, partnerships, etc, and the members will represent their peers at events, in CYA run roundtables, etc.

We will also be structuring participation much more thoroughly so as to involve more youth and help drive results!

This is not a finalized document and we are open to incorporating your comments, concerns, and suggestions. If you have any questions/comments, please let me know through email at sommerst [a t]cya-ajc.ca (replace the centre with @).

The proposition document can be downloaded in PDF format RIGHT HERE

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