Five individuals and one organization were honored earlier this month at the 27th annual Community Justice Awards held in Calgary, including a Maskwacis woman who has dedicated most of her life to helping at-risk youth in her community.

Luci Johnson is a criminal court worker, and has spent the last 20 years to putting together a number of programs to help protect at-risk groups, especially youth, by putting together life-skills training programs, drug and alcohol awareness programs, as well as a suicide prevention program through AHS.  

Johnson says she is passionate about being the point person for helping someone in need.

“I give myself to my community where I can go and help them… I’ll get calls at midnight, I’ll get calls at six o’clock in the morning, but at least I’m that connection person that someone can talk to rather than thinking self-harm thoughts, or they snowball their thoughts and it’s going to get all crazy for them.”

She says drug and alcohol abuse, crime, and major traumatic events, such as the deaths of 5 people in a vehicle collision south of Millet earlier this week, has serious and long term effects on the emotional and mental wellbeing of everyone in a community.

“Our community is busy, our community is always in the national news, sometimes we have some good things going on, but a lot of the times in the media we hear about the bad things, and it takes a toll on our community. So that’s what we started with, and anywhere we can put things in place for our youth, a place for them to go, a place for them to be acknowledge, somewhere to belong, that way we won’t see some of our kids in the courtroom.”

Some of the programs Johnson helps to promote and raise money for in Maskwacis include the girl guides, the cadet program, and a girl empowerment group that's been running for 7 years known as Iskwesis, which means ‘girl’ in Cree.

The award presentation ceremony was held on June 1st in front of the McDougall Centre in Calgary, presented by Deputy Minister of Justice Philip Bryden, as well as members of the Calgary Police Service and RCMP.

(The 2018 Alberta Community Justice Award recipients with Deputy Minister Philip )Bryden, and honour guard members from the Calgary Police Service and RCMP)