Port Dover resident sees advocacy at the heart of Lansdowne Children’s Centre board position

A lot of public advocacy work comes down to building personal relationships in the community, noted Lansdowne Children’s Centre board member Rick Rozak.

Hailing from Port Dover, Rozak joined the board in 2018.

“The majority of my career, I worked with young people in the youth justice system,” he said.

When he started out, he would have a caseload of two or three youths at a time, and a big part of his job was mentoring them through their plan of care, which he would also help to design.

Near the end of his career, Rozak shifted to a different area where he wasn’t working with youth anymore, and “I discovered I missed working with kids and the people work worked with kids.”

Which is what brought Rozak to Lansdowne.

“What struck me with kids in the youth justice system was the fact that a lot of those kids were caught in a system where they never had a really big voice,” he said.

Rozak saw something similar happening in the healthcare and education systems with the clients of Lansdowne and their families, which is why he wanted to put his efforts into supporting the organization.

“We need agencies like Lansdowne to advocate for kids,”

he said. Part of the board’s work is to speak on behalf of Lansdowne to society and its structures at large, so the staff can better advocate for their clients on an individual basis.

Rozak noted that a lot of his work on behalf of the board has come down to “meeting people and talking about Lansdowne.”

For a while, Rozak noted, a lot of people didn’t realize that Lansdowne operated in Haldimand and Norfolk.

“It’s getting better now, because we’ve got our satellite (offices) here, but prior to that, a lot of people didn’t know,” he said.

One of his ongoing goals on the board has been “to see that we do a better job of outreaching in Norfolk and Haldimand.”

Part of that work includes being aware of the unique challenges clients and potential clients in those areas may face, Rozak said.

For instance: do people in those areas know about the services Lansdowne offers? Do they have limited access to transportation to get there, keeping in mind that Norfolk has limited public transit options, and Haldimand has none? Do they have poor internet connectivity, such that they can’t easily access Lansdowne’s virtual services, programs, or resources, where applicable?

“We’d have to figure that out,” Rozak said.

That’s why he sees a lot of strength in the composition of Lansdowne’s board.

“Over the last number of years, we're starting to look more and more like our community in terms of the representation on the board. … We have to reflect our community; if we don't, we're not going to be effective,”

he said.

By having board members who are various ages, from different areas, and with different skill sets, it all comes together to create a stronger unit that’s better equipped to address larger projects – such as the upcoming capital campaign for the new building in Brantford.

“We have a really solid mix of different areas of expertise,” Rozak said.

While he isn’t a member of any of the financial committees, Rozak knows that as chair of the governance committee, he has an important role to play nonetheless, namely “supporting my peers who are on those committees. … being part of that big, holistic networking picture.”