Not where you work but what you do

I was once talking to a child care worker who was part of a too-small staff team in a cash-strapped programme on “the wrong side of the tracks". She found her work very difficult in terms of resources, facilities and support. When she compared the environment in which she worked with the better-off organisations around town, she became easily discouraged.

But I hadn't even noticed the peeling paint and the sandy yard – and I don't think the children who lived there had noticed either, because we were all overwhelmed by the warmth of the hospitality, the feeling of safety and inclusion, the respect and the optimism and the fairness ... as a Child and Youth Care worker she was a natural, and the kids got everything that they could ever need from her programme.

Instead of offering to help to find funds to smarten up her place, I invited her to come and talk to other child care workers about her work. It was soon obvious that while the others seemed to have everything she thought she needed (modern buildings, good plumbing, new motor vans) she had something which everyone else longed for – an accurate sense of good child development and a soundness of practice for the youngsters who needed something extra.

Everyone who participated in those talks came to realise that what's most important in our field is not where you work but what you do. It was a time of limited resources, and this experience of coming together to talk about our work fulfilled many of our needs for support and learning. This was, in fact, the beginning of what was to become over the next thirty-odd years the National Association of Child Care Workers in South Africa.

Formal and informal; perspiration and inspiration
We knew that we needed our formal training, the structure of supervision and the discipline of reading, but (particularly in this business of Child and Youth Care which is about people who need to know themselves and feel good about themselves and manage their relationships with each other) our less formal interactions were the meta-practice of our work with the kids. Being exposed to the monitoring and the criticism and the approval of others was also the experience of the youngsters we were working with.

There were times when we needed to be taught and challenged; there were times when we needed to be encouraged and inspired. There were times when we must be held accountable, and times when we could be forgiven. We used the old joke that child care work was 50% perspiration and 50% inspiration.

CYC-Net – daily and on-line
Thom Garfat and I recognised the universality of the Child and Youth Care experience, and the growing accessibility of the internet offered to all of us this opportunity of “coming together to talk about our work" – but across nations and across cultures and across levels of practice. On our CYC-Net e-mail network we are slowly getting used to the exciting reality of on-line workers, students, professors, writers, researchers being able to talk, ask questions, find resources, share opinions – together. I personally find myself moved each morning as I “do CYC-Net", by newbies in the field getting the chance to meet with the old-stagers, first-year students talking to famous academics and writers, people in Africa or Europe sharing information with colleagues in North America or Israel. We will all, no doubt, become more and more comfortable doing this.

And while Thom and I (both involved in the editing of journals in the field) strongly promote formal reading in the field, we felt that CYC-Online would provide the ideal opportunity for less-formal writing and ideas and news and exchange than we would expect in the scholarly journals.

So that's CYC-Online – the beginning of what may become a useful “alternative press" for those around the world who work with troubled kids and youth at risk, offering opinion, ideas, writing and news – and perhaps some of the inspiration to complement the perspiration of this truly remarkable profession of ours which, throughout the world, is like no other profession.

Feel free to participate – read, copy, share what's here – and do let us have your own contributions. (Thousands of our colleagues do not have access to electronic media and rely on printed media. If anything in CYC-Online is of interest please feel free to use it in your local newsletters acknowledge the authors and CYC-Online.)

So it remains true: What's most important in our field is not where you work, but what you do. Share it with us all.