You already light fires in your classroom. We just help you take them further.
We’re not a stand-alone program. We’re one answer to a national call.
Call-to-action 62: Build the curriculum
Where HIP fits: we can’t write provincial curriculum, but we can hand you and your students the lived, on-the-land learning that a textbook chapter can’t.
Call-to-action 63: Keep the commitment year after year
Where HIP fits: intercultural understanding is the whole point of Y2Y. It’s not a unit we teach once; it’s a relationship your students carry home..
Call-to-action 64: Widen the lens on faith and belief
Where HIP fits: Elders and Knowledge Keepers lead that kind of teaching directly, on their own terms, at every gathering.
Call-to-action 65: Fund the research
Where HIP fits: twelve years of Y2Y gatherings is its own body of evidence – what happens when you actually put youth from different backgrounds around the same fire.
Call-to-action 66: Fund the youth organizations already doing it
Where HIP fits: this one’s us, by name. Y2Y is exactly the kind of community-based youth program Call to Action 66 describes – which is also why sustained funding for it matters.
The Youth-to-Youth Experience
What actually happens there
- Youth from Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities are brought together in one place, on the land, for a shared week of learning.
- Elders and Knowledge Keepers lead the teaching – this isn’t a curriculum written by a committee in an office far from the fire.
- Participants leave with a lived experience you can’t fully replicate in a classroom: a relationship, a story, a changed sense of what’s possible between people.
Why we’re asking you specifically
You’re the one who spots the kid who’d get something real out of this – the quiet one who asks good questions, the one who’s already curious about the world past the school parking lot. A nomination from a teacher carries weight that a poster on a bulletin board never will. If you know a student who’s ready, tell them about us. Better yet, tell them yourself why you thought of them.
Who benefits?
For Indigenous youth, Y2Y is a chance to stand in their own history and be met with respect instead of pity or blank stares. They spend the week in an environment they are comfortable with, learning alongside Elders and Knowledge Keepers who carry knowledge that doesn’t live in a textbook, and they get to see non-Indigenous peers actually listen – not perform listening, actually listen. That matters. For a lot of these kids, it’s the first time being Indigenous has felt like an asset in a room full of strangers rather than something to explain or defend.
For non-Indigenous youth, the program does something a classroom can’t: it takes reconciliation off the page and puts it in front of them, on the land, with real people telling real stories. They come away with something sturdier than sympathy – an actual relationship, a friend, a memory of a fire they sat around. Most of them arrive not knowing much about residential schools or Treaty history beyond a paragraph in a textbook, and they leave understanding it’s not history at all – it’s still being lived by the person sitting next to them.
For the school, Y2Y sends a student back changed – and that ripples outward. Because the program costs a participant nothing to attend, we believe in reciprocity: every youth who takes part commits to giving back by presenting their experience to their school and to a local Rotary club. That means a gym full of classmates, or a staffroom of teachers, hearing directly from one of their own about what reconciliation actually looks like up close – not from a guest speaker, but from someone they sit beside every day. Schools get a built-in ambassador for truth and reconciliation education, at no cost, delivered in a voice their students will actually listen to.
For Canada, the return is quieter but longer-lasting. These are fifty youth each year who won’t need convincing in twenty years that reconciliation matters – they’ll already know it, because they lived it at fifteen. Multiply that over a decade, and you’ve got a growing number of adults across the country who understand each other a little better than the generation before them did. That’s not a program outcome you can put in a pie chart. It’s just what happens when you get people around the same fire early enough.
Who we’re looking for
We’re looking for youth – Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, aged 15 to 17 – who already show up for their communities in some way, big or small. Maybe that’s a student council seat, maybe it’s coaching a younger sibling’s soccer team, maybe it’s just being the one who checks in on people when things get hard. Grades don’t tell us what we need to know, so they’re not the deciding factor here. What we’re really after is character: kids with real leadership potential who might not otherwise get a chance like this one, and who’ve earned some kind of nod from their community — a teacher, a coach, an Elder, a neighbour — someone willing to say “this one’s ready.” Bring us that, and we’ll bring the fire, the land, and the people to help it grow.
Y2Y Experience: A Note on Readiness
The Y2Y Experience is open to every youth who meet the requirements and wants to take part – that hasn’t changed, and it won’t. But we want to be upfront about what the program asks of participants, so you can make a good decision going in.
This isn’t a passive experience. Youth travel to and stay on Indigenous territory, guided by Elders and Knowledge Keepers through conversations about truth, history, and reconciliation that can be heavy. Participants need to manage daily personal care, follow a group schedule, and travel independently, without one-on-one support staff.
So we ask every participant and guardian to think honestly about readiness before registering. If you’re going through a hard chapter – mental health challenges, a recent loss, an unstable home situation – that doesn’t rule you out. It just means we should talk first. Reach out to info@HIPAlly.ca before registering, so we can figure out together whether this is the right time.
“Can I come to the gathering with my student?”
Gathering sites have limited capacity, and that capacity is reserved for youth participants and our screened, trained staff and Elders, not family members or chaperones, however much we’d genuinely love to have you along. We know that’s not always the answer a parent or teacher wants to hear, especially the first time you’re sending a fifteen-year-old across the country on their own.
So here’s the honest trade: what we ask you to give up in proximity, we make up for in structure. Every part of your student’s week – who supervises them, where they sleep, how they get there and back – is built around a level of oversight most youth programs don’t come close to.
