YouthLink Calgary
Overview
The YouthLink Interpretive Centre is an innovative Calgary police museum with a mission to change lives by allowing youth to make better life decisions. It is powerful and impactful, playing a major role in the lives of Calgary’s youth.
Details
- Client
- Calgary Police Service
- Project
- YouthLink Calgary Police Interpretive Centre
- Size
- 25,000 sq. ft.
- Project Delivery
- Design-Build
- Scope
- Exhibit Design - Culture
- Location
- Calgary, AB, CA
- Year Completed
- 2015
The
Goal
The YouthLink program is innovative and groundbreaking. It seeks to empower elementary school students and create a safer community by helping kids to make informed choices and become better citizens. Their goal is to build greater resilience in Calgary’s youth by building improved relations with the Calgary Police Service. Paired with the student program, YouthLink celebrates and demystifies the roles of the police force to build trust and a positive connection between police and the community.
Aimed primarily at youth aged 10-14 with a secondary audience of parents, teachers, and families, the challenge for this project was to deliver messages in a way that is compelling and authentic to an audience with a limited attention span.
The
Result
YouthLink is incredibly successful. Since opening, it has expanded its programs to include police training initiatives, camps, weekend events, adult evenings and other groups who are booking onto its very long waiting list. R&P is proud that the power of this innovative approach, good design and critical stakeholder input along with a very forward-looking client team can achieve its goals.
Already, YouthLink is attracting international attention as other law enforcement agencies tour the facility, hoping to emulate its success and impact with youth. YouthLink has become a valuable resource for the community and for the Calgary Police.
Behind
The Scenes
Working with the youth advisory council was a memorable part of this project and gave us invaluable advice as we developed the exhibits and graphic look and feel. Their input had a fundamental impact on our work, helping to shape the content and media development. They were outspoken and decisive in a way that was refreshing. They requested nothing fake, no actors, no stock photography, and no long paragraphs of text. Instead, they wanted information parsed out into small pieces with bold graphics. Most impactfully, we used only real people from Calgary including incarcerated criminals. The YouthLink team used their connections with police officers to source individuals willing to be photographed, and interviewed in order to tell their stories. The resulting authenticity is palpable in the raw emotion that the exhibitions evoke.
