Founder of Western Arctic Youth Collective honoured for work promoting culture, mental wellness

Alyssa Carpenter says it's all about providing the sort of things she wishes were available to her, when she was growing up and sometimes struggling with her mental health.

As lead founder and project director of the Western Arctic Youth Collective (WAYC), Carpenter now works to empower Gwich'in and Inuvialuit youth in N.W.T.'s Beaufort Delta region to be change-makers. Through the collective's cultural programming, facilitators speak openly about mental health. 

It's for this work that Pauktuutit Inuit Women of Canada recently named Carpenter as its 2024 "Young Inuk Woman of the Year."

Carpenter says she has faced many challenges in her life, and she was particularly emotional when she received the news that she'd been honoured with the award. 

"I just started crying," she said, adding that the phone call came when she was dropping her child off at daycare.

Carpenter, who has studied social work at Aurora College, Yukon University and the University of Toronto, said she had initially planned to work with seniors and elders after finishing her undergraduate degree, but about six years ago, she became drawn toward supporting youth.

"The more and more I was recognizing and understanding just how trauma impacts our family … [and] the younger we get folks to understand themselves and that it's not their fault … [then] we are able to find ourselves and heal and understand what's happening in our community on the social level," she said.

In 2020, Carpenter founded WAYC, a non-profit that relies on grant funding, and which now employs several people. The coalition organizes camps, gatherings and workshops based on what young people request, such as tattoo gatherings, drum-making workshops, and land-based camps. It also includes youth in the planning and execution of the programming in order to build community capacity, Carpenter said.

Through WAYC's programming, Carpenter and the other organizers create space to talk about mental health and trauma. Carpenter also shares some of her own journey with the youth — and spoke about it in an interview with CBC News.

Carpenter, who's now based in Whitehorse, grew up between Sachs Harbour and Inuvik, N.W.T., and while she had access to learning on the land and sports in her youth, she still had struggles. 

"My mental health was not great as a kid and it wasn't great as a teenager. But like many young people, we're really good at hiding it until you kind of reach a breaking point," she said.

"I reached my breaking point when I was 21, when I had a plan to end my life, and not a lot of people know that," she said.

Through this period, Carpenter said she struggled to get the support she needed, in part because she didn't understand what was happening in her head, and because mental health wasn't something people around her were talking about.

"We're getting better at understanding and showing compassion and care and patience with what some of us are trying to understand about ourselves, and trying to communicate that we need help," she said.