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25th anniversaries, especially one recognizing the 300th issue of CYC-Online is an achievement. Eons ago at National conferences, I would routinely attend Thom Garfat’s workshops on Writing for Child and Youth Care. Often, they would attract and handful or less. When CYCWAM voted me off its board after 20 some years, Thom stepped into the void and asked if I would consider a column for the Relational Child and Youth Care Practice journal that would break the mold of overly academic stuffiness that existed at the time. From March 2004, I took to the task with four columns a year for a few decades as it turned out the last being for a good 23 of those 25 years at CYC-Online. Throughout, my faithful reader was Heather Modlin who marvelled at the output and who was always encouraging and insightful with her contributions. Regretfully, age does have its challenges and health issues for myself and for loved ones has distracted me from writing. Fittingly, it just happens to be 50 years to the year I became employed in child and youth care work, as we called it at the time. This column will attempt to view child and youth care topics from this long view, taking stock as they say.
Looking back, I was so fortunate to have a rather solid foundation. Two University roommates happened to have summer jobs working at the Children’s Home of Winnipeg, a historical foundation institution in the city. They worked with emotionally disturbed children. With graduation, work suggested itself and that agency listed an opening for a Treatment Worker with adolescent girls. My supervisor was a graduate with a master’s in social work from Mount St. Vincent in Halifax. He was one of five group home supervisor’s who in turn were led by a Ph.D. in psychology. Dave McDonald was passionate about the work and an excellent mentor to those open to learning. I mention that as many of my initial colleagues were young graduates who were perhaps overconfident in their assessment of their own knowledge and skill. Six intense years flew by until regime change threw a wrench into things. Several of the supervisors were moving on, senior workers became supervisors, and their job was diluted in that they were to oversee management issues while program supervisors would look after treatment issues. It was too much for me to be thrown into the unknown and away from working with the youth.
As luck would have it, one of those roommates was one half of a live in couple for a group home and their owner operator was very keen to have an experienced hand and at the senior level, so no loss of income. Regretfully, when the initial glow dimmed, I had to accept my friends were detached and not really working for the male young people rather lording themselves over them. I transferred to the girl’s unit. Slowly, it dawned on me the owner operator talked up and to some degree respected good work but essentially based the entire program on power. Our compensation was laid out with the six levels and a corresponding range for vacation time with a top range of 6 weeks at 20 years. A colleague laughed at my thinking that would come to pass. This turned out to be suddenly the case. The boy’s unit was investigated over an issue and closed. The staff were cherry picked for a move to greener pastures of another province. I was advised to keep my mouth shut and live with it all. Another colleague had just won a quarter of a million dollars in a lottery, so he bought the place and pulled together a team. Life went on with a few fine friends suddenly displaced. The girls we cared for voted with their feet initially. There was a brutal testing period which in retrospect never really ended. Without going into the details, the home was investigated over allegations against the owner operator for possible sexual interference with one of the girls. The investigation was inconclusive, the young woman involved was transferred out and the owner’s wife took over being the operator as the entity was half hers. Fortunately, for a former accountant, she was a natural, warm, loving individual with a solid confidence and the home took off earning a sound reputation. A cottage was bought to allow for summer programming. We continued to go on our spring break trips a to fund raise for them with various schemes like making blueberry jam or Christmas ornaments for sales in local malls. The girls experienced retail and profit. We survived a fire on the unit literally taking the girls home for the three months it took to restore the home. Insurance covered the house but not the entire business. Insurance here now includes the ongoing housing and operating needs of the group home. And then as we were just finding our bearings again, the owner operator’s mother passed away and the business was put up for sale. They expected me to take it, but I could not envision that large a mortgage or even a transition. I did explore the process and learned it was that simple, taking on the mortgage and being viewed as experienced in the opinion of the directorate involved. All expectations had to do with the physical property, there were no formal program expectations at all. Another operator who specialized in profoundly vulnerable youth was successful with its bid. Our promised secure employment evaporated as notices went out to the team, informing us we were not qualified to work for said owner. They expected the total compliance of their client population and instead got rebellion on steroids. Installing baby monitors to listen to their charges did not work. By the three-month mark, the group home was closed. As chance would have it one of the individuals exploring buying the business was a supervisor at one of the largest non-profits. I was sought out and hired as senior youth care. A few months later new referrals followed from the former group home.
There are many moments in child and youth care you cannot make up. My fifteen-year dip into the private/for profit system was one of those. There were no anniversaries. When I entered that system conventional conversation put the number of private group homes at slightly over 50, most clustered in the central part of the city. Today, one remains. It has a good reputation. Among that number two were substantial. The one near our second largest city had nearly 200 employees and ran an up to the moment trauma informed foundation. Unfortunately, it was fiscally negligent and shut down for financial mismanagement. The other was one of our oldest private agencies, one unit just across the street from our group home and so helpful with that fire. They had developed a large foster treatment department and one of their foster parents sexually abused a young person in his care. The reaction was public and brutal with the agency being closed. The former Manitoba Association of Residential Treatment Employers no longer exists. There were excellent entities, one in a rural town drawing upon the local community for its programing totally stood out but most fell on their own swords with one infraction or another. My former employer moved out to the coast and divorced her husband. She returned to enter the educational assistance sector to substantial acclaim. Her former husband was arrested, charged and convicted for sexual abuse of a youth in his care. The complainant was not the girl suspected above but another from the group home with whom I was very close. She called, perhaps two decades on to detail her side of the story. It was all so simple it stunned me. This impressively strong, brave and determined young lady was helpless against her perpetrator’s sexual attention and remained in a relationship, as did the other girl. I had remained a caregiver for this girl when the couple needed respite and she told me she did not understand why I never propositioned her! I was stunned and shocked realizing how incredibly alienated our relationship had become with that comment. In that moment the real weakness of the private/for profit system was exposed. Kiaras Gharabaghi wrote: “On the contrary, my patience with bad services in residential care has run out long ago, and I am quite in favour of shutting these down for good, and while we are at it, perhaps suing, or even criminalizing the profit-seeking behaviours of the owners who have caused untold harm to young people for decades.”1 I agree with him on much of this, regretting it is seldom heard or confronted. Child and youth care is NOT work anyone can do and placing young people into home with uncertified, under educated types who can cover the down payment on a mortgage is irresponsible, corrupt even. I looked forward to the day when I could get together with my friend and remember the good old days. Aside from that one opportunity there was never another as she passed away with cancer. Her viewing was incredible as over a hundred attended as her reputation as a leader among educational assistants was so singular.
One of the potential buyers for the group home was a supervisor of a unit in the oldest agency in the city. I was unemployed for a matter of weeks. The agency was operated by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd from France. This was the place where the unworkable youth were referred to including the young lady from my former group home after she helped inspire it to shut down. It felt good to be tested once again. Again, the issue was stabilization of the staff group. Turnover retards a team ever forming. Charlie Appelstein presented a workshop in the mid 80’s to us and he stunned me out telling us the turnover rate was as high as 87% in the United States! At the recent Unity Conference and gathering Michelle Briegel confirmed 80% as the norm. Another person commented that some programs were so impacted by the pandemic, their supervisory levels have six month’s experience. Fortunately, this was not our issue, but it took a bit of verbal contracting to realize. In Canada, one is not to suggest time expectations but if you concede that up front you can still ask applicants to commit to two or more years. To a dedicated youth care practitioner that is heaven-sent as many crave commitment. In any case, our team soon stabilized, and the program settled into a fine maturity that ran for eleven years.
The issue became the agency itself. The first event to celebrate was a 100th anniversary! Yes, it can be done and was done complete with a Vice-regal reception for all involved. Then it was time to get down to business and what I came to realize was the corporatization of the agency. The Sister’s were aging out and needed to transition the agency to its board to continue operations. I had transitioned myself when a regime change was forced upon our group home. Our supervisor had lost her husband to cancer and the new supervisor wanted us gone beginning with me. I had just lost my mother and ended up taking a leave of absence to undertake counselling. When I did return it was as a data specialist tasked with developing database technologies. This gave me a front office seat to a remarkable transition. A treatment centric program that would routinely meet each morning to share information at the client to unit basis would ultimately morph into a single Director of Treatment sitting on a board of hired professionals in human resources, finance, communications, fund raising and clinical supervision. Strategic Planning and the employee manual became board concerns. Child and youth care became an ignored division. Ultimately time ran out for me and a peer youth care practitioner with retirement. The surprizing thing was how quickly the agency changed since then. In its public face on social media fund raising events and A listed keynotes draw the entire care community to a two-day event in the city’s largest room, catered by our kitchen staff, now in its fourth year. Essentially, the profit of a typical youth care conference is earned without all the fuss of workshops and break out rooms. That is saved for now fully and permanently equipped venues within the main campus with events planned monthly. The one-time thriving community of practitioners dwindled down to an entire new staff group within the year. One which is no longer expected to work such events as volunteers from the community are invited in for that. Last week, a chance meeting with the woman who prepared lunches and meals for students, residences, and our selves for the last three decades. A Red Seal certified cook was made her supervisor, and the youth became employed in a catering enterprise. She worked on to her retirement witnessing this transformation. She maintained contact with the Sister’s and endured several incidents that would have not taken place under the Sister’s. The totally remarkable thing was that her salary over all those years never changed! It had not for me as well. The era of meaningful cost of living increases had passed replaced by token percentages so low they all went to management.
Taking stock after 50 years is sobering. The championship of the child and youth care association movement and the global movement did wonders for my mental health but distracted me from the bitter truth is that the professionalization of child and youth care is very shallow indeed. Compensation has been decent, but no one wants to touch the sector in these desperate times when educators and early childcare workers suck up all the available oxygen. In fact, in Ontario the government is closing child and youth care college programs at an alarming pace reversing the truism that investing in the hinterland and its people is sound economic and political sense. The majority of child and youth care practitioners keep their heads down with their focus on their young people and their agency. They avoid organized association and lifting the profile of child and youth care up to the point where it is understood and recognized. It is about identity and numbers, and both are regretfully weak. Like Kiaras, I believe there is a place for residential care. Our three large agencies have units. It helps to have history and a board on your side. For far too many, the child and youth care experience was a passionate, fascinating, intense and ultimately bitter experience with many leaving by the two year point and those in the minority making it to the five year point or beyond having their careers severed by closure events. Adding another pay scale to recognize post fifth year maturity coupled with ongoing learning and an attitude of saving units and agencies with strategic intervention would maintain a therapeutic care system. Looking back, I do not regret becoming a child and youth care professional yet would caution that it can be a precarious experience. Your reputation for good work is noticed by your colleagues, your clients and their social workers and can see you through the rough patches. The number of fine co-workers and young people who have passed through my life is astounding, a blur of well meaning, often very committed and passionate persons who did give back in their moment and youth who matured into marriages, partnerships and families which break the cycle they have endured over generations. Governments clearly need to temper this boom-and-bust approach to the social safety net and strategically manage their investments toward nurturing professional approaches.
[1] The Human Resource Dilemma in Residential Child and Youth Care Practice, Kiaras Gharabaghi, CYC-Online , Issue 243, July 2023
