Back in the early 1990s, Eduardo Castro started working with the West Scarborough Neighbourhood Community Centre, offering a social and recreational program for teens. The centre had a daycare van that sat unused most of the day and Castro came up with the idea to drive around Scarborough and shuttle young people to the centre. The sprawling suburb community was (and is) known for its ability to isolate young people, especially those in social housing, and Castro figured that providing transportation was a good way to create connections between teens and the centre, and among the teens themselves.

"One time I was going around the block and I saw these young people in a fight, so I tried to stop it. When things settled down, I asked them, 'You guys have a lot of energy, why don't you come over to the centre?' At first, they were 'Whatever,'" says Castro. "I went back a week later and found them in the same place. They weren't very trusting but they hopped on the van. At the community centre, I gave them a couple of basketballs and told them to go play. They kept coming back."

Years later, one of those street fighters-turned-basketball player invited Castro to his wedding, thanking him for his help.

"Not only did [the groom] take part in the basketball program, but he took part in leadership initiatives and got work through the day-camp program. I felt so privileged and humbled by the invitation. For him to consider me a mentor made it all worthwhile," says Castro, who himself went on to work as manager of the Scarborough Addiction Services Partnership with the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), vice-chair with the City of Toronto Drug Prevention Grants Program and who is now a senior manager at CAMH.

Most recently, Castro, who is in his 40s, was appointed as a member of the board of directors of the Toronto Board of Health, an appointment that's remarkable partly because of his community-oriented approach to addiction and mental health issues -- which frequently receive short shrift compared to more attention-grabbing health issues -- and also because of the route by which he came to the job.

A former director of YOUTHLINK, Castro had been looking for more challenging volunteer positions and heard of the five-year-old DiverseCity onBoard (DoB) program, which matches qualified candidates from racially and ethnically diverse communities with governance positions in agencies, boards, commissions and nonprofit organizations. A recent Statistics Canada report highlights the need for such an initiative: by 2031, 63 per cent of Torontonians will be "visible majorities," up from 49.5 per cent today. Yet only 13 per cent of the city's leaders are currently from this category, according to DoB, a ratio that drops to four per cent in the corporate sector. As someone dedicated to creating opportunities and making cross-community connections, DoB's mission appealed to Castro -- plus it saved him from having to spend so much time figuring out a way to put his talents to use.

His family came to Canada from Ecuador when he was 10. Along with his two brothers, he was raised by a single mother in a social housing setting in northwest Scarborough that Castro describes as "humble beginnings." Growing up in an ethnically diverse community and going on to work with diverse groups, Castro has quickly learned that maintaining a functioning multicultural society takes a lot of bridge building.

"You can't take a generalist approach when dealing with ethno-cultural groups. You really have to do the one-on-one thing," says Castro. "The old method of parachuting into the community with a solution doesn't work. You have to build capacity within the system by addressing key leaders in the community who can bring the issues forward."

For example, back in 2003-2004, Castro was working on developing a strategy to introduce addiction education programs to Toronto's rapidly growing Afghan community. It was only after talking to Afghani community leaders that he learned that radio, more than flyers, posters or stories in community newsletters, was the best way to reach people. An Afghan youth worker volunteered talk on-air about addiction, which focused a remarkable amount of attention on the issue.

"You always need to take a step back from how you see the world," says Castro, who has two kids, including "a 12 year old going on 20." Even the issue of homelessness has many variations. In Scarborough, for example, homeless youth may couch-surf, rather than sleeping on the street, which is the focus of conventional outreach programs.

Many ethno-cultural groups have deep stigmas around addiction and mental health, says Castro, with families and communities often denying that young people have any problems or ostracizing them until they shape up. Harm reduction is particularly tricky, when outreach workers want to apply client-centred approaches -- that may involved continued drug use but in a more controlled situation -- in a zero-tolerance environment. There are no quick fixes. It's about making connection after connection over long periods of time.

"The solutions have to be owned by the community. You can bring a template but it has to be molded onto something that speaks to people in a direct way," says Castro.

Paul Gallant is a Toronto-based freelance writer who lives in the emerging Brockton Triangle neighbourhood.