[LINK] Malls and town centres

[rfmcdonald]

In the latest issue of eye, Allison Martell's article "A tale of two malls" contrasts and compares the community relations of Scarborough Town Centre and the Dufferin Mall. It's not with a small sense of neighbourhood pride that I announce that the Dufferin Mall is being praised as a role model.

"There were a lot of youth that were intimidating the customers and the storeowners," says Lana Vukelic, general manager of Dufferin Mall. Violence was escalating and revenues were dropping. But instead of beefing up security and kicking the kids out, the mall hired youth workers.

"Simultaneously, there was a group of service providers in the west end who recognized there was a lack of services," says Wolfgang Vachon, the current program supervisor of Dufferin Mall Youth Services (DMYS), one of the projects that grew out of a partnership between the service providers and Dufferin Mall.

Over the years, the mall has hosted a huge variety of programs, from support for parents to recreational programs to job-search help. The mall's transformation became a case study in community building and has been credited for a whopping 38 per cent decrease in community crime.

Today, Dufferin Mall is bustling -- and not just with business. DMYS, in its original storefront space in the mall, offers counselling, employment services and work placements in the mall, free recreational basketball, yoga and more. Programming is approved and expanded on by a youth council. Besides donating the space, mall management recently started an annual fundraising golf tournament to support DMYS.

Across the hall is The Family Place, which advertises drop-in sessions with a public health nurse three days a week. At another entrance, a number of employment agencies cluster around a branch of Human Resources Canada.

Dufferin Mall benefited from a wider perspective. Everyone agrees that their programs are good for business -- Vukelic points out that youth are customers, too, as well as "customers of tomorrow." Youth also form a large part of the employment pool for retailers in the mall.

I'm not a mall person, I admit. The Dufferin Mall does strike me as one of the better ones out there, though.