growing up together
Youville Centre helped young mother accomplish her dreams

By DONNA CASEY -- Sun Media

OTTAWA (Sun Media) - A quick glance to her white leather watch tells Tooneejoulee Kootoo-Chiarello she's running late for an 11 a.m. meeting. Out of the blue, tears well up in her dark brown eyes.

The petite 31-year-old woman is thinking about a photograph. It's a picture of a young girl posing inside an Ottawa home for teenage mothers.

The 17-year-old is holding her baby girl on her knee. The chubby-cheeked baby is decked out in a frilly pink dress and white wide-brimmed bonnet.

The mother is just a girl herself. She's alone in a big city filled with strangers, alone with her seven-month-old daughter.

"Oh, I look so young in it!" says Kootoo-Chiarello as she clears a lump from her throat and dabs the tears from her eyes.

The picture is a window to a time when the accomplished and poised government policy adviser was a teenage girl who was knocked up and written off with no future.

"I look at that picture sometimes and say 'Wow.' We pretty much grew up together, Steph and I. Yeah, I haven't looked at that picture for a while," says Kootoo-Chiarello as a broad smile creeps across her face.

Next month, she will return to the Youville Centre, the Sandy Hill school for teen mothers, and recount how she graduated 11 years earlier with her high school diploma and a boundless sense of possibility.

ON RIGHT PATH

"This school gives so many opportunities that dreaming is endless," says Kootoo-Chiarello, sitting in a conference room at the Mann Ave. education centre.

As an Inuit relations adviser with the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, Kootoo-Chiarello has a dream job and a happy home life as a wife and a mother of two.

But when she thinks of how far she's come, she knows it was a tiny baby girl who put her on the right path.

"All these friends and opportunities and her brother and my husband -- I wouldn't be here today unless it was for her," says Kootoo-Chiarello of her 14-year-old daughter Stephanie.

Kootoo-Chiarello was 17 and living with her parents in Iqaluit, Nunavut, when she learned she was pregnant.

"They kind of felt like 'This is it, she's not going to do anything,' " she recalls of her parents' view of her future.

She didn't want to leave her home and her family but Kootoo-Chiarello knew her unborn child deserved a mother who could show her how to help herself.

After doing some research, she contacted the Youville Centre in Ottawa. The day school program offers classes for young teenage mothers toward their high school diploma while their children go to an on-site daycare .

Leaving a northern landscape of no roads or highways and landing in Canada's capital was "an interesting and scary time" in her life, says Kootoo-Chiarello.

'FELT LIKE HOME'

Over the next three years as Stephanie learned to walk and talk, Kootoo-Chiarello juggled math, English and parenting lessons. She grew close to the centre's teachers who worked to live up to the school's motto to "motivate, educate and nurture" young moms and their children to be independent, contributing members of society.

"I think that's why I succeeded and completed the program -- because it really felt like home," says Kootoo-Chiarello, who starting working for Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, a national organization representing Canada's Inuit, shortly after her 1996 graduation.

When she stands up to speak to this year's class of 19 graduates on June 7, Kootoo-Chiarello will tell the young mothers about the virtues of patience and perseverance.

TRAVELLED THE WORLD

"If you're a teenage mom, you sort of think it will come but it won't unless you work toward it," says Kootoo-Chiarello, who has travelled the world with her work and hosts a teen-oriented current events show on the Native cable channel APTN.

She often marvels at how her daughter "is growing into this little woman who's calm and collected and a really nice little girl."

Sometimes, Kootoo-Chiarello talks to Stephanie about their early days together, just the two of them -- "the little team" who moved to Ottawa 14 years ago.

"I tell her about when I had her at such a young age, that I would never turn away from her, that it was my responsibility to make sure she was okay and had opportunities in this world."