Jerome Bouvier helps troubled youth

Jerome Bouvier, 28, turned around to pick up a brush from a horse’s stall in New York. The barn was quiet compared to the loudness that went with the racing earlier in the day. All that can be heard is horses snorting and the chatter of two young boys walking towards the doors.

As Bouvier moved his wheelchair to begin his usual end-of-day routine, one of the boys turned to look at him and said, “You need to be doing something else with your life.”

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Bouvier, now 54, quit school when he was 16, hopped onto a horse van and moved west to British Columbia. He had been abusing drugs since he was 14 and had no academic goals. He started racing horses at the Cloverdale track when it opened in 1976, and kept doing so until he moved to California at the age of 19.

Once there, his cocaine addiction increased and his partying lifestyle consumed him. In 1983, he had a horrible waterskiing accident that left him in a wheelchair. Soon after he went back to his old lifestyle of drugs and racing.

Bouvier became famous for being the first horse racer in a wheelchair. His popularity led kids to ask him for advice, and he slowly realized that he wanted to do something else with his life.

“So, I ended up from the injury 1983 until 1989 getting my crap together,” he said. “A lot of stuff happened by then. I got shot in L.A. I found a friend’s daughter dead. A lot of stuff happened to me that got me to a place of going,’Hello, not a way to live.’”

His next step was coming back to B.C. in 1990, when he decided to enrol in the child and youth care program at Douglas College. His decision was influenced by a career counselling test that said he should be helping people.

Access youth worker talks with youth. Photo provided by Jerome Bouvier.

The first time he went to apply to the program he ended up leaving. He felt like he was too old, at the age of 30, especially considering he’d left school in Grade 11.

“It scared the hell out of me. I’m wheeling up there and I said screw this. I turned around and I left and I went back to the racetrack and continued racing horses,” he said.

Six months later, he decided to try again and was accepted into the program. He graduated within a year and a half and even became the president of the student society during his time there.

After graduation he started a bus program for runaway and homeless youth in California. The program was modelled on a similar one that was running in Australia, called the Chatterbox Bus.

“What they would do, they would go out and travel throughout Australia. You know Sidney, the main areas, and connect with homeless youth. There are over 30,000 homeless youth in Australia ’cause of the weather,” Bouvier said.

The people who had created the program were franchising the bus model. Bouvier got the rights to use it and then went back to California, bought a HandyDart bus and converted it into a drop-in centre. Staff drove it around the different neighbourhoods in Redwood, California.

Bouvier came back to Coquitlam in 2003 and noticed that the province had cut back on funding for outreach workers.

“There was very limited after-hours services, to almost none for the kids,” he said.

His next career move was to take over the non-profit organization called PoCoMo Youth Outreach Services (now called Access Youth Outreach Services) which was about to shut down.

Access Youth Outreach Services Logo by Trevor Brown at Artrageous.

After two years of writing grants and putting the word out about the bus program, Bouvier got his first pilot grant in 2004. He launched the successful program for about six months, four to seven days a week.
Bouvier who wanted to continue the program, searched for more grants while doing school-based prevention at Pacific Community Resources and Alouette Addictions.

On top of these jobs, in 2005 he begrudgingly began taking a masters in leadership at Rose Royal University. New job requirements state that youth care workers must at least have a bachelor’s degree.

“Just because you have a degree – you can have 10 degrees – but if the kids don’t like you, you’re wasting hot air. You’re in the way. You’re useless,” Bouvier said.

The prevalent issues he has noticed with the bus program is mental anxiety and depression. In fact, 80 per cent of their caseload is kids who have either harmed themselves or tried to commit suicide.

“I’ve held kids dying in my arms,” Bouvier said.

The Crisis Centre for British Columbia reports that “70 to 90 per cent of people who have made a lethal attempt, or died by suicide, were suffering from one or more unmanaged mental health issues – such as protracted depression or anxiety, bi-polarity, psychosis, and/or substance abuse.”

The bus program has managed to save some of those suffering from these issues.

On one of occasions, they helped change the life of Brittney Fader, who is now a youth care worker on the bus. They found her at the age of 15, passed out drunk under trees in a park. From then on they would see her every weekend.

“She kept babbling on about wanting to be a youth mentor on the bus,” Bouvier said.

Eventually, through the leadership of the youth care workers on the bus, Fader decided to go back to high school and got her diploma at CABE Secondary School.

When she graduated, Bouvier invited her to be a volunteer youth mentor on the bus. Nine years later, she has her diploma in child and youth care from Douglas College (she is working towards her degree), is one of the leaders for the bus program and coordinates school programs for Access.

Another youth the program helped was a 16-year-old girl who almost died of alcohol poisoning. Youth workers stopped at a park in Coquitlam and saw some youth running away. They chased them and called an ambulance as soon as they learned about the girl. The doctors said that an hour later and she would have been dead.

It took a lot of hard work but the bus program is now successful and helping over 2,000 kids a year.

“Now nine years later we have three buses serving a population of 32,000 kids 12-18 in five cities,” Bouvier said.

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On Oct. 18, Bouvier sits in front of his youth care workers and listens intently to a horrible story about the events that happened that evening.

That night, the bus youth workers stopped a man in his 30s from beating up his girlfriend in a park. The woman was rushed to the hospital and was saved, but she ended up having a miscarriage.

A smile crawls onto Bouvier’s face as he looks around at his workers. He realizes the enormity of the situation and how far his life has come, when he hears what the woman had told the workers: “I know it’s tough, I lost my child, but you saved my life.”