STR8 UP: 10,000 Little Steps to Healing

September 26, 2025

In 2002, Stan Tu’Inukafe was a youth worker in Saskatchewan helping Indigenous offenders reintegrate into society. He found that gang affiliation was often a major obstacle, especially when it came to securing housing.

“On the application, the agent would ask if they were gang members,” Stan says, recalling that many of the people he worked with would say they were not, even if they were, because their other option was homelessness.

It was then that Stan began to think of how to help them leave gang life behind.

“Why should they have to lie?” he said.

Stan began to ask around to find people working with youth with gang affiliations, and that’s how he met Father Andre Poilievre.

Father Andre was the former lead Chaplain at the Saskatoon Correctional Centre and had been looking for ways to help the Indigenous youth he worked with leave gang life behind. With this common goal, Stan and Father Andre created STR8 UP, a dedicated organization to helping Indigenous youth and adults disaffiliate from gang life through their “10,000 Little Steps to Healing” approach.

Through this approach, STR8 UP offers outreach and support to former gang members looking to rehabilitate and contribute to a healthy society. This involves programs to reestablish connections in the community that they may have lost as gang members, as well as transitional housing, educational and employment support and more.

Father Andre passed away in July at the age of 88, but Stan says his approach to working directly with people remains essential to what STR8 UP does. Stan remembers being amazed by Father Andre’s dedication to meeting and working with everyone. While working in the Northwest Territories, Stan says Father Andre made it a point to visit nearly every community, even several isolated fly-in communities, to work directly with at-risk youth.

“He didn’t mind going to where people were at,” Stan says. “He didn’t wait for them to come to him.”

In 2022, STR8 UP began to work inside Saskatchewan Penitentiary, allowing them to work closer with offenders and bolster the efforts to help them leave gang life behind.

“We knew there was going to be challenges right off the bat,” says Reg Bird, Acting Manager of Indigenous Initiatives at Saskatchewan Penitentiary. “We have an outside agency/partner that’s coming in and working within the institution full-time, so we knew there was going to be challenges, right? Not only with staff's perception from a security standpoint, but also with the logistics of how we were going to make this work.”

Reg and Stan began collaborating to help everyone adjust to this unique working relationship. To address the challenge of having two organizations working toward the same goal in different ways, Stan decided it wouldn’t be about CSC referring offenders to STR8 UP as part of their programming. Instead, offenders would engage with STR8 UP alongside the work they were already doing with CSC staff.

Reg says they were hoping to have 20 or 25 participants over the first 3 years but within a year they had already far surpassed that number.

He says offering direct support outside of the standard correctional structure has opened new possibilities for rehabilitation.

“If offenders are in the Institution, taking programs, using substances and showing up under the influence, a lot of times that may get them suspended from programming. What I've seen with STR8 UP is that they consider that a stumbling block,” Reg says. “That offender has a had a relapse, STR8 UP is right there saying, ‘okay, stand back up. What can we do moving forward? How can we help?’”

Through STR8 UP’s integration within CSC, Stan has become even more familiar with the obstacles gang members can face in their rehabilitation journeys.

Because of the potential for conflict, gang members are often separated from the regular population. Once an offender has been moved, Stan says it’s often difficult for them to reintegrate into the wider population even after they’ve left the gang. This leads many to request transfers, which take them even further from their communities and external support systems.

Stan has begun to work with staff at Saskatchewan Penitentiary to identify alternatives to reduce potential conflicts, while affording opportunities for offenders with gang affiliations to more fully engage in programming. He hopes the strengthening partnership between STR8 UP and CSC will lead to solutions for many of the difficulties offenders and staff face.

While participants must formally leave their gang before joining STR8 UP, the organization will still plant the seeds with active gang members, so they know the option is there when they’re ready.

“Having our STR8 UP reintegration workers on site, being able to meet with these offenders on a personal one-to-one basis, or through their monthly Sharing Circles, that's huge,” Reg says.

For offenders who have successfully disaffiliated from gangs, sharing their stories with others in the same position they once were is an important step. Stan says his conversations with offenders are often very insightful and profound, something Reg attributes to STR8 UP’s status as a community organization.

“A lot of our guys haven't had the best experiences with authority figures in their life,” Reg says.  “Sometimes it might take our Indigenous Liaison Officers or our Indigenous Correctional Program Officers years to develop a rapport with these guys, whereas, with STR8 UP, it might only take them 6 months.”

By opening up in this way, Stan says, offenders are able to truly heal and transform—and even begin helping their communities.

“Trauma that is not transformed is transmitted,” he says. “We want them to be comfortable sharing their stories.”