Yukon's Shakat Journal sets up business side to fund expansion

The people at Shakat Journal in Whitehorse are expanding their role in 2019 with a business arm of the organization called Shakat Media.

Both are programs fromthe Youth of Today Society.

"I think itsustains a training program that we work with the youth," said the society's executive director, Lancelot Burton.

He said generating revenue increases the number of youth the society can work with.

The Shakat Journal was revived about a year ago after a long hiatus. Its goal is to give young people multi-media skills they can use to help "break the cycle of hopelessness, unemployment and racism many youth face," its website says.

Burton said the business is looking for contracts that would make use of those skills.

"So social media, photography, telling stories the Journal will be involved with that as well. And sound recording, anything to do with giving youth a voice," he said.

The editor-in-chief ofthe Shakat Journal, Paige Hopkins, said it's exciting.

"It means we're going to get more experience in the business world which is really important," said Hopkins. "For us and for the magazine as well as our own futures.

"It also means that we'll be able to do a few more things with that," she said."I don't know what those things are, but we'll figure that out as we go along."

Jeremy Linville coordinates the Journal's recording studio and runs programming out of it.

He said his work at the Journal and some of the opportunities that are opening up for him is not the future he saw for himself when he was younger.

"That's kind of the way I felt growing up here, was that everything was very segregated," said Linville.

"You were given a choice between a few different paths in life and that's the way I felt growing up," he said. "But after getting a job here, my mind is expanded a lot more for the work field at least and now I think this is a great thing."

Contributors to the Shakat Journal are being rewarded for their work publicizing the role of Kate Carmack in the discovery that led to the Klondike Gold Rush. They've been invited to Carmack's induction into the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame in Toronto in January.