Hamilton City Council votes in favour of creating Youth Wellness Hub

Hamilton city councillors voted in favour of creating a Youth Wellness Hub in the city Wednesday afternoon, after Mayor Andrea Horwath brought forward the motion.

It comes after a number of shootings involving teen suspects and victims.

The concerns around youth safety and gun violence has been top of mind for a while now but has increased within the last month because of shootings involving youth.

“It’s very clear we have a number of young people in our community that are in crisis,” said Horwath.

Many are worried about the existence of guns on the streets, mental health, trauma, gang recruitment and lack of access to support.

Four shootings in particular are referenced in the motion — all of them involving youth gun violence and young offenders.

In 2025, two innocent bystanders were killed, Harsimrat Randhawa and Belinda Sarkodie, whose deaths shook the community.

Most recently, a 14-year-old boy faces a second-degree murder charge in connection with the fatal shooting of 16-year-old Nabil Askafe on April 24.

Just under a week later, 19-year-old Talon Williams-Parkin was shot and killed at a building in downtown Hamilton on April 30. Police recovered the gun used in the shooting but the two suspects remain at large.

“Lots of Hamiltonians are concerned about the engagement of young people, very, very young people — kids that are 14 to 15 years old, not only in terms of these latest events, but we’ve seen car thefts for example and those kinds of situations also involving very young people,” said Horwath.

A Youth Wellness Hub would offer a wide-range of support and would be tailored to the needs of young people in Hamilton between the ages of 12 and 25.

There are already 32 of them across the province, with one of them being in Welland, Ont. So if this motion passes on Wednesday, staff would work to create a wellness hub that aligns with the city’s specific needs.

WATCH MORE: Parents hope teen’s violent death leads to changes that make Hamilton safer

Council passed the motion for the hub unanimously.

Hamilton’s mayor says an important piece of the plan is how to actually get youth to use the service.

“The motion also asks for engagement with city councillors, because there are lots of smaller community-serving groups — having that grass roots input on what might be successful with connecting with youth,” said Horwath.

Mayor Horwath’s motion also calls on the province to provide funding to support the initiative.

“Since 2019, nearly 80,000 youth have made over 423,000 visits to Youth Wellness Hubs across the province,” a spokesperson for the Minister of Health tells CHCH News in a statement. “To build on this success, we are investing an additional $8.3 million into the program to expand the number of Youth Wellness Hubs to 32.”

The Mayor’s motion says that the need for youth support is even greater now that federal support for the city’s “Building Safer Communities Fund” ended on March 31. That affects nine youth-serving agencies including The Boys and Girls Club, the YMCA and the YWCA.

Meanwhile for the past five years, a different group in Hamilton known as The Hub say they’ve been running a program focused on community violence intervention.

“Which works with those at the center of gun violence in the community and looking to interrupt and detect cycles of gun violence in meaningful, and restorative pathways using a public health approach,” said Elisabeth Pfisterer, the director of youth services at The Hub.

The hub says that interruption in gun violence, especially when it comes to getting youth support, relies on what you call “credible messengers.”

“Credible messengers are peers in the community that have a weight and they hold credibility and trust within their neighbourhoods,” said Pfisterer, “and empowering them to be the change, empowering them to be the peacekeepers — empowering them to be the mentors in those spaces.”

The Hub says people like this are vital to addressing the issues, specifically in young men, that can lead to violence.

“We know that we are living in a paradigm right now where we have done a very unfortunate job at raising young boys into grown men, where they do not have the skills to be interpersonally effective — they don’t have the skills to navigate distress, and their emotional reactivity is extremely high and concerning,” said Pfisterer.

The discussion of youth violence is only going to continue this month when Hamilton police Chief Frank Bergen sits down with community leaders on May 27 to discuss youth violence and safety.

READ MORE: Hamilton police find weapon used in downtown shooting of 19-year-old