Career Trek is a registered charity that helps young people discover the importance of education and career development. Career-oriented programming, complete with hands-on activities, ignites participants’ passion for learning. Career Trek inspires young people to recognize their own potential.
Q1: What do people need to know to understand who your organization is?
Career Trek works to support children and youth who face barriers to education, employment, and social participation. Due to these barriers, participants in our programs tend to be under-represented in university, college and the labour market as a whole. Through the use of an interactive and engaging program delivery model, Career Trek provides participants with the opportunity to explore a variety of careers across a number of key sectors while at the same time working with them to develop and enhance important social, emotional and employability skills. By working in this way, Career Trek is able to give participants the tools, resources, and experiences they need to become their own education and career champions. Why is this important you might ask, by empowering students to identify their likes, dislikes, skills, and strengths and to reflect on what they’ve learned positions them to make informed decisions about their future, a future that is full of endless possibilities.
Q2: What excites you about what you do?
Career Trek has the tremendous honour of working with individuals, schools, communities and organizations throughout the province who are all working towards the same thing…creating equitable opportunities for children and youth in Manitoba so they have the tools and resources they need to reach their full potential.
Q3: What’s been the biggest obstacle you have overcome?
The biggest obstacle was transitioning an entirely hands-on, in-person program model to the virtual space and ensuring that the virtual programming maintained the high quality, high impact benefits it had in an in-person setting. The second biggest obstacle Career Trek is working to overcome is trying to survive COVID and the impacts its having on the funding, sustainability and viability of Career Trek as a not-for-profit organization. The space for funding was already competitive prior to the pandemic, it is even more so now with roughly 86,000 charities in the country doing good work and vying for similar pots of money.
Q4: Who do you help with what you do?
The primary recipients in Career Trek’s programs are children and youth who face barriers to education, employment, and social participation. Due to these barriers, participants in Career Trek programs tend to be under-represented in university, college and the labour market as a whole. When we look just over the shoulders of the participants who engage in Career Trek’s learning experiences we also see families, friends, neighbours and communities who, now, also have a connection to Career Trek and the successes experienced by participants.
Q5: What’s next for you?
We will…Keep Calm and Career Trek On! The organization will continue to adapt, adjust, pivot and will take on the challenges still to come with integrity, grace and determination to overcome. Career Trek will continue connecting with children, youth, families, communities, organizations, schools. Staff will continue to create career learning opportunities that will inspire participants, giving them the tools, resources and experiences they need to make informed decisions about their future and reach their full potential.
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