Our home is your home
Here at Sun Youth
by Nicolas Carpentier
When thinking of Sun Youth, most people picture the old Baron Byng high school of St-Urbain Street, home of the organisation since 1981. With 65 rooms and a gymnasium, it houses all of Sun Youth’s emergency assistance programs, sports and recreations activities, as well as programs related to crime prevention. While the former educational institution is now commonly identified with Sun Youth, it is the third locale the organization has occupied. It all started in 1954 on St-Cuthbert Street, in the back room of a shoe shop.
Back in the mid-fifties, Sun Youth was known as The Clarke Street Sun: a small hand-written newspaper created by a group of young people (most of them living on Clarke Street) whose goal was to keep themselves busy and out of trouble. Only two copies of the document were made every month and the paper would be rented out for one hour at 3 cents a copy to families in the neighbourhood. To make sure their paper would raise money (which would eventually be used to organize sports activities and buy sports equipment) the creators of The Clarke Street Sun would write stories about their friends, neighbours or family members. In its first year of existence, this group of young people, led by Sid Stevens and Earl de la Perralle, raised $500 with their small hand-written newspaper.
Ten years later, The Clarke Street Sun became The Sun. Printed instead of hand-written, the new paper sold for 5 cents a copy and featured in-depth articles and pictures. The original goal still remained: to assist the community in combatting juvenile delinquency. In 1967, the St-Cuthbert site was getting too small for the teens of The Sun Youth Organization. To solve this problem, the city of Montreal granted them the use of a bigger locale at the corner of Parc Ave. and Mount-Royal. For the next 14 years, Sun Youth would evolve and create new programs to assist the young people in the neighbourhood and their families. Though this building consisted of 8 rooms, Sun Youth, with its expanding needs, eventually outgrew it. In the summer of 1981, the organization moved into its present location, the former Baron Byng High School — now our home.
