The Katimavik program has a saying, "It's not a year off, it's a year on." And as Stephanie MacDonald tells me, "...it is a very intense year on".

Stephanie is one of the many applicants randomly chosen to participate in Katimavik, the leading national youth volunteer program for Canadians. In Katimavik lingo, Stephanie is now a KatimaKid who will live with 11 other KatimaKids in 3 different KatimaHouses across the country over a period of nine months.

In 1977 the program called Katimavik, which is an Inuktitut word for "meeting place," was the dream of retired senator Jacques Hebert who, with the help of his friend Pierre Trudeau, saw it as a way to give Canadian youth a chance for intercultural exchanges within their own country.

Hebert also saw a need for young people to communicate and get to know each other. His goal was to educate these young people by having them work together on community projects between the east and west coasts.

In that first year there were 1,000 participants that worked on more than 80 community projects.
In 1986 the organization's budget was cut and it remained solely as an outdoor recreational and training centre in Quebec. Even Hebert's 21-day hunger strike did little to gain enough public awareness to return the necessary funding.