Listen to thisA new school year is always a time for renewal and for hope for the year to come. This past year has been hard in many ways, but for Child and Youth Care there are some very promising and varied advances that occurred over the summer months. I thought I'd start off this year by highlighting some of them that I have been privy to. What are they?
1. Regional Training Academies
Many know the story of how at the International Conference in
Washington, DC in 1988 Ralph Kelly described how he thought that the
model of the police training academy could be useful to the child and
youth work field to prepare its practitioners, and received affirmative
support from Floyd Alwon and myself. I remember gazing at the typical
hotel-meeting room style ornate wallpaper while taking in what Ralph was
saying. Floyd and Ralph went on the implement the concept while I
certainly have continued, as I am now, cheering from the wings. Updating
Ralph's work, it is a major achievement how he, as Commissioner of
Juvenile Justice for the Commonwealth of Kentucky and his indefatiguable
staff have developed and implemented a statewide Regional Training
Academy model for workers in the large juvenile justice system. Hundreds
of workers have received in-depth and consistent preparation for direct
line work, and their delivery system is now reaching supervisors and
community based workers as well.
2. Direct Care in the Life Span
Having long advocated the notion that children and youth are a primary,
but not sole, clientele for our developmental care work, I certainly
would not have missed the international “Direct Care: Making a World of
Difference “ conference held the State University of New York at New
Paltz and the Mid-Hudson Coalition for the Development of Direct Care
Practice. Here, hundreds of direct support/care workers who gathered at
the home of the Direct Care bachelors degree program and shared their
stories of the common work serving a wide variety of people. What struck
me was the “presence" that I felt as I experienced the vitality in the
large clusters of people apparent during the opening reception and other
group times. For the first time ever I really had a sense that the life
span notion is not only happening, but that it has enough benchpower to
sustain itself and grow. The Mid-Hudson Coalition and University
collaboration in offering education for direct care in the life span
(based on the European social pedagogue) to me is a demonstration model
that hopefully will be replicated elsewhere, widely, in the future.
3. Youth Participation in Evaluation “an
emergent field.
This was the topic of a conference I attended at Wingspread in Racine,
Wisconsion, in June. People representing multiple disciplines and
perspectives attended and the discussion focused on why youth
participation in evaluation is important, how youth may be prepared to
effectively provide such evaluation, and on programmatic ways to support
it. There was also some discussion as to whether “youth participation in
evaluation" is a “field". For us in child and youth work, and direct
care in the life span, there are several aspects of the area of youth
participation in evaluation with implications for us. First of all is
the fact that this would be another formal domain of activity to add to
those activities that we traditionally offer.
Curricula to prepare youth for the work, structured and defined approaches to gathering and utilizing their input, collectively could come to comprise an area of activity just as legitimate as art or music. Furthermore, this notion represents an empowerment intent. It offers a way for youth to be involved in designing and assessing the services that serve them, in a way that they learn from as well as experiencing more responsiveness to their needs and perspectives. Empowerment, of course, has always been one of the themes of our work. Then, the issue of whether this is a field or not offers the opportunity for some interesting reflection on the nature of human service disciplines, professions, and their relationship to each other. I intend to do more pondering on this and share my ideas in the future.
The three diverse activities described above seem to reflect the action orientation, dynamism, and potential of our work. They share a common thread of being ways of helping people “come into their own". What, as the winds here mercifully become a little cooler, could be more warming?
