A boy in Grade 8 showed up to an after-school program one evening last year not quite sure why he was there.
By the end of the night, he had something he’d never had before.
“I made a friend tonight and I’ve never had one before,” Laura Lee Marin recalled the story to Lloydminster city council June 15.
Marin, a health promotion facilitator with Recovery Alberta and one of the driving forces behind the Lloydminster Area Drug Strategy, was presenting the organization’s 2025 annual report to the Governance and Priorities Committee. Twenty years after a group of agencies first gathered to confront the city’s growing drug problem, LADS is still doing what it set out to do – and it starts with moments like that one.
“That program had such a great impact,” said Marin. “We made sure that young man and the other friend he made were in every group together so they could build that friendship. And then we connected them with the Lloydminster Community Youth Centre so that they could continue that friendship and grow that friendship and get to know some other friends.”
The Soaring program, which brought together four youth from Avery School identified as at risk of gang recruitment, was one of several initiatives LADS presented to council. The students had flagged gang recruitment as a concern themselves – and became the architects of their own intervention, participating in activities designed to reduce every barrier to their attendance and surround them with trusted adults.
The program sits under a broader umbrella of work funded partly through a federal Building Safer Communities grant secured by the City of Lloydminster through Public Safety Canada. That investment gave the drug strategy the capacity to run three major programs, including Heroes, which reaches 1,100 Grade 6 and 7 students across Lloydminster with resilience and leadership programming. Grade 7 students in year two of the program move into project-based learning, taking on community service initiatives as part of their participation. A companion stream, Heroes are Warriors, serves Grade 8 and 9 students in Indigenous programming.
The funding also allowed LADS to train 50 people in a violent threat risk assessment protocol and develop three trainers within Lloydminster to sustain that capacity locally.
Marin said the origin of much of this work was a question she didn’t expect.
“City Clerk Doug Rodwell invited me for a cup of coffee one day and he said, how do we prevent youth recruitment to gangs?” said Marin. “And the cup of coffee is pretty cheap. But I said, well, we build their resilience and we build their connections.”
Co-presenter Melody Oliver, program manager for the SHINE Mental Health Capacity Building Program, described what that looks like in practice through Paint the Town Positive, LADS’s signature summer initiative. Each year, youth from across the community – including the Native Friendship Centre Youth Group, Catholic Social Services, Newcomer Youth, Residents in Recovery, and both school divisions – paint stencil games and pathways at parks and the downtown parklet.
“A painted sidewalk is more than a path,” said Oliver. “It becomes an invitation to connect.”
Oliver said the Youth Council established a Mental Health Committee in 2026 to develop a centralized resource for youth mental health supports in Lloydminster, which will be housed at LloydminsterMentalHealth.ca.
LADS’s Influential Generation program trains high school students to deliver classroom presentations on vaping, alcohol, and mental health to Grade 4 through 7 students in both school divisions. The program produces an annual podcast season and video series through the Youth Council’s YouTube channel.
Coun. Michael Diachuk said the thread running through the drug strategy’s work is the same one he’d been thinking about all morning.
“The opposite of belonging is fitting in,” said Diachuk. “When you have to change yourself to be part of something, then you’re no longer being genuine and you really aren’t being involved and included. These opportunities that you’re creating where someone says they found a friend – that is an opportunity for them to be themselves and be included.”
Marin responded with a number that stopped the room.
“The return on investment for investing in youth in the early years is about $26 for every dollar invested,” said Marin.
Coun. Michele Charles Gustafson asked her to repeat it directly into the microphone.
“I want to know the monetary upside and get it on the mic so people hear,” said Charles Gustafson. She said those returns show up as avoided costs in health care, the justice system, and social services – savings that are real but rarely visible in the moment.
Coun. Justin Vance asked about LADS’s relationship with school resource officers. Oliver said SROs sit on the LADS board and meet quarterly, feeding real-time information about what’s emerging in schools directly into the organization’s planning.
“The school resource officers are instrumental in helping us notice what’s going on with youth in Lloydminster, and being able to come up with some solutions to address that,” said Marin.
LADS also hosted a watch party last February for the documentary Love Letter to Man, drawing participants from Frog Lake First Nation, Onion Lake Cree Nation, Residents in Recovery, and the broader community – on a night that hit minus 38.
Marin said communities across Alberta regularly reach out to ask what Lloydminster is doing. LADS produced a mini-documentary on its model, called The Heart of Youth Engagement, and hosts a bi-monthly neighboring conversation with roughly 90 registered participants from across the region.
She closed with a timeline that puts everything in perspective.
“This is our 100-year plan,” said Marin. “We won’t live long enough to see it, but we know that we have this whole group of young people coming behind us to carry it on.”
Read more: Lloydminster RCMP charge two residents after hotel drug bust
