Sophie Kuijper Dickson, LJI Reporter

Ethan Paulin is a huge fan of Taylor Swift. At 14 years old, he loves all music, but Taylor Swift, at this moment, is his everything.
“I’ve liked her for most of my life, but only became a big fan in 2022,” Paulin explained. “Her songs are really good, and a lot of them are really poetic. And I just also love her voice.”
He loves her so much, in fact, that he’s working a full-time summer job at the Jardin éducatif du Pontiac to save the money he needs to buy a ticket to the last show on her Eras tour, scheduled for Vancouver this December.
Paulin loves to sing, and write songs, often sad songs.
“I find it’s a fun way to get sadness out. I wake up in the middle of the night and I have an idea, and I just write.”
But it’s not often he shares his songs in public. He said his mental health sometimes prevents him from sharing his creations, and pursuing his passion for singing.
“It’s not good, but I’m getting better at controlling it,” he said. “It’s not going away, that’s for sure. But I can help myself control it.”
Part of this work overcoming his mental health challenges involves intentionally putting himself in situations that make him uncomfortable.
This spring Paulin played a central role in Pontiac High School’s rendition of In the Heights, and even performed a solo on stage. He also took a job at Quyon’s Clarendon Café on weekends, which forces him to interact with people he doesn’t know.
But the latest in these personal challenges is signing up to spend five days a week, all summer long, learning to grow vegetables with a group of teenagers he has never met.
Weeding? “It’s horrible,” he says. Socializing with strangers? He’s not a fan of that either. But he’s warming up to both.
This summer he is one of 23 Pontiac youth who have decided to tackle their mental health challenges head on through Jardin éducatif’s first youth summer job program.
Jardin éducatif du Pontiac is a non-profit organization in Campbell’s Bay that runs vegetable farming programs for at-risk youth as a way to teach them critical life skills.
For many years it ran summer camps for youth that had been referred to the organization by social service workers.
“This year we did it a bit different. We decided to give minimum wage to all youth that come,” explained Martin Riopel, the organization’s director general. “Why we have decided to try this pilot project is because we have seen that a lot of the youth that have been referred by social services, they don’t want to be here.”
Hiring the youth as summer employees, rather than simply accepting them on the basis of referral, offered new possibilities for engaging youth in the programming.
“The idea behind the kids applying is to put the responsibility in the hands of the youth,” Riopel said. “We wanted the youth to try the process of getting a job.”
About half of the youth hired this year were still referred by a social worker, but the difference is that in order to be accepted into the program, they had to express their desire to participate.
“They need to have a personal goal, so something they can work on individually, something that could help them as a human,” explained Mélissa Langevin, head gardener and youth worker with the organization. “So that was the first thing we were asking for [when hiring], because if the goal of being here was just money, well then that’s not a good fit for us.”
In this pilot year of the summer job program, Jardin éducatif received 50 applications from youth across the Pontiac. After interviewing every single applicant, the team hired 23 youth, seven more than they had originally planned for.
“Still it was really hard, because if we could we would hire them all,” Langevin said.
The youth spend four days a week in the garden, doing everything from planting and weeding to, starting this week, harvesting the produce they’ve grown to sell at market stalls.
On Tuesdays, they can be found in Fort Coulonge at the corner of rue Baume and rue Principale, on Thursdays outside the CHSLD at the Shawville hospital, and both days at the kiosk at the garden in Campbell’s Bay.
Each of the youth chosen for the program have identified something personal they are hoping to work on over the course of their employment. For some, it’s social anxiety. For others, it’s an eating disorder, or self-harm.
Over the course of the summer job, they will participate in a wide variety of programming designed to support them and help them achieve these personal goals.
This includes skills-building workshops from service providers across the Pontiac, including cooking workshops that teach them to transform the vegetables they are growing into full meals, as well as workshops that offer guidance on everything from building healthy relationships to budgeting to addictions prevention.
On top of all this, Jardin éducatif youth workers meet one-on-one with each youth consistently throughout the summer to check in on how they’re doing, both in the program and at home.
“We have a lot of kids having different kinds of issues that they need to work on,” Langevin said.
Last Wednesday morning, before the heavy rains began, the young gardeners were out in the field, sitting in the dirt, weeding the beds of vegetables.
Fifteen-year-old Campbell’s Bay resident Cameron Crawford had his ear phones in as he plucked weeds from a patch of cucumbers.
“It’s not too hard, it’s not too easy, it’s kind of perfect for what I was looking for,” he said. “Normally we do a lot of weeding throughout the week. Sometimes I help cut the grass, and whipper snip and all that.”
Crawford, who has been working on a dairy farm for three years, said he applied for the job because he wanted to improve on his work ethic.
“I feel I’m getting more used to getting up and getting to work at the time that I’m supposed to,” he said. “And I’m more active during the day rather than sitting at a desk. It’s a lot better.”
A few rows away, Teagan Dutson and Kyanna Beauchamp were working together to tackle the weeds in another bed.
Both Dutson and Beauchamp grew up in Quyon, but Dutson attended the English elementary school, while Beauchamp attended the French one, and so the two never crossed paths.
They’ve found, however, that they have a lot in common when it comes to their respective mental health challenges.
“Here, you get to talk to people, and the person I talk to, she really understands me and what I’m going through,” Dutson said. “It’s really calming.”
“It’s really calming and people here don’t judge,” Beauchamp agreed. “My therapist at school told me to apply here because it would help me, and it really does help.”
Beauchamp said a big thing she thinks she’ll take away from her time at Jardin éducatif is the experience of getting support after asking for it.
“I asked for help and I got it. I’m not alone in this,” she said. “I was always scared to ask for help. I thought I would get rejected or laughed at. So I won’t be scared another time if I need to.”
Once it started to rain, the group migrated from the garden to the covered picnic tables. Alex Belair, Kaydan Lévesque and his brother Rylan gathered around some snacks at one table.
Like Paulin, both Belair and Lévesque applied for the job with the ambition to work on their social skills.
“I wanted to get better at talking to people, while also getting my hands dirty and getting out of the house,” Belair said.
No matter what the youth want to work on, the staff at the garden are there to help them, even when they might not realize they need it.
Eden Beimers is one of these staff members.
“When I see a kid a little bit off, oftentimes I’ll pull them away and have a chat. Because sometimes that’s what they want, but they don’t know how to ask for it. As a kid, I didn’t know how to ask to talk to somebody.”
She said, laughing, that the youth have often accused her of being too nosey. But she makes it clear they can tell her they don’t want to talk if they’re not interested. This, she finds, rarely happens.
“I always wanted to become the person I needed when I was a kid,” Beimers said. “I needed somebody who was easy to talk to and understood I wasn’t going to be good one hundred per cent of the time, and understood that when I do screw up, it doesn’t define who I am.”
Now 22, she’s found a job that allows her to be the support for others that she needed as a teenager.
“There are a lot of things that some people think are taboo to talk about, but the more I’m in this position, the more I’m realizing how many kids confide the same thing in me, and how many people are similar.”
The funding used to finance this pilot project is not guaranteed to be renewed in years to come, but the Jardin éducatif team is determined to find ways to continue to motivate youth to work at the garden.
“It’s the beginning of something because we would like to have a full program all year long with gardening, cooking, and selling the veggies,” Langevin said, explaining that the vision is that this could be run through the schools, and that youth could get credit for it.
“It will probably be a smaller group in the next years, but we want to try to continue this kind of thing, because we think it could be a good program for the kids who really don’t like school.”