Photo Credit: Cst. Roxanne Noss

By Shane Clausing

Community

Peace River RCMP officer receives Alberta Community Justice Award

Nov 20, 2020 | 7:19 AM

A Peace River RCMP officer has received the 2020 Alberta Community Justice Award given out by the Province of Alberta.

The Justice Awards are for Albertans who have found ways to prevent crime and promote restorative justice in their cities, towns and neighbourhoods.

Cst. Roxanne Noss with the Peace River RCMP Detachment was given the award for helping build stronger relationships with Indigenous youth and addressing crime prevention in a holistic community-centred way.

The awards were presented to four individuals and three organizations, in four catagories.

The categories ranged from leadership, innovation, community mobilization, and partnerships and collaboration.

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“I was thankful for the nomination and I was lucky and fortunate enough to be selected,” said Cst. Noss who spoke to EverythingGP after receiving the award.

Cst. Noss was nominated under the partnership and collaboration portion of the award by one of her colleagues at the Peace River detachment.

Noss says that she is very active in the community and does spend a lot of time working with Indigenous youth and helping address crime prevention.

“The position that I held for the previous two years at the Peace River RCMP was the Community Liaison Officer position and in that position, my roll was to create and foster the relationships in the community with the RCMP.”

“I had built up some good relationships with the community and youth there and when I switched over to the Community Liaison position, I was able to continue that work with the youth that were in the First Nations community in Woodland Cree and Little Buffalo First Nation.”

Noss taught the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) program to grade five students, which is a program that teaches students skill sets on how to handle pressure and to give them opportunities that they might be faced with, whether they are drug or alcohol related, or peer pressure situations, she would teach students how to deal with difficult situations.

She also assisted with grant writing for the Healthy Relationships Program which was brought to First Nations schools.

This was done at five different schools in the area and was in partnership with Victim Services to secure funding to help bring in guest speakers into the school and help provide more skills to the youth for building good relationships.

“Partnering with different organizations is key. We always have loopholes and gaps in services, and when everybody can come together and sit at a table together, put their heads together and work together, you seem to be able to find those loopholes and be able to offer a better service all around to the community when everybody is working together on the same team.”

Noss and the other award recipients participated in a virtual ceremony with the Minister of Justice and Solicitor General, Kaycee Madu, who spoke highly of the recipients.

“I am honoured to acknowledge the good work of these outstanding individuals who have improved the lives of others and, in turn, made our province an even better place to live and work. I offer my sincere congratulations to this year’s award recipients for their remarkable leadership, collaboration and dedication to community justice.”

This was the 29^th anniversary of the awards. Noss will receive an award plaque in her recognition.

“It was an honour to be recognized for the work I’ve been done,” said Noss. “I don’t feel that I necessarily need recognition, I feel that going to work every day and seeing the success of these programs in the end is recognition enough to see that we’ve come together as a community.”