Listen to this
This year in June, our CYCANL colleagues in Newfoundland and Labrador will be hosting the 2026 Canadian National CYC Conference, alongside the World CYC Conference, all as one event (see https://cycanl.ca/conferences/world-conference-2026). It is a good thing that Newfoundland is doing the hosting. This is without question Canada’s friendliest, most community-minded province, and judging from other CYC events that have been held there (one featuring the musician Sting), the Newfoundland CYC community knows how to host conferences in ways that make everyone feel included and welcomed. The geography of Newfoundland doesn’t hurt either; it is beautiful, features possibilities for whale watching from the coast (ecologically preferable), Gros Morne National Park with its mountains and valleys, fjords, rivers and lakes, more moose than anyone knows what to do with, and along the way to any of these places, cute, friendly, and one-of-a-kind cafes, fish and chips places, and other amenities. And just in case this sounds like Newfoundland is a quaint and slightly dated kind of place, make no mistake about it – it is also a place of enormous child and youth care innovation, dynamic organizations, and bold decision-makers. In short, Newfoundland is the kind of place ideally suited for building community, and in our case, for building communities that allow for entirely different ways of being, doing, and thinking about child and youth care without exclusion or dismissal. This, I think, is just what we need now more than ever.
Throughout my career in child and youth care, I have tried as much as possible to engage and be present in many communities; in fact, I very much like the phrase ‘communities of difference’, which challenges the notion that we need common ways of being, doing, and thinking about things. By moving between and across different communities in child and youth care, my appreciation for the possibilities in our field has been greatly expanded.
I love being part of conversations about relational practices, life space interventions, and making moments meaningful and exchanging stories and approaches to this way of thinking about child and youth care. But it is an incomplete way of thinking, and sometimes the gaps embedded in this way of thinking can do harm in many ways, including by perpetuating the exclusion of different ways of knowing, different lived experiences, and different relationships with identity, culture, ways of being, spirituality, geography, land, and so much more. And yet, these conversations, framed around interpersonal relationships and inspired by the once dominant spatial context of residential care, continue to be centered in most CYC gatherings especially in Canada and a little bit in the US. As a result, this way of being, doing, and thinking gives the impression that other ways of being, doing and thinking are somehow not welcome or fall outside of the field of child and youth care. I am quite certain that this has never been the intention of this CYC community, but I am less certain that the efforts to engage with other communities has been undertaken with full commitment. Still, I certainly feel connected and engaged in that community and I have partaken and contributed to many conversations, publications, and projects that fall squarely within the sense of the self of this community.
I also love being part of conversations about care, not as an institutional concept but as a way of being and structuring social relations, including power relations. I find this way of thinking and being to be especially evident in Black and Indigenous communities in the global North, and to be the norm in many CYC communities across the global South. I have particularly observed and experienced this in South Africa and my experiences with the NACCW, the Isibindi projects and Safe Parks. Conversations about care in this context are not about interpersonal relationships and how caring manifests within these; they are instead conversations about community structures, power relations, gender relations, and fundamental values related to upholding community integrity. There is an amazing community of scholars, practitioners, activists and advocates that has emerged from these conversations, and this community is as central and important to what I think child and youth care is as any other community.
Indigenous ways of being and knowing offer yet another community to engage. Although Indigenous communities are diverse, as are their ontological, epistemological and axiological premises, there are no communities with a longer history of thinking about children and youth and their connections to family and community than Indigenous communities. Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, the ingredients of being and knowing are things that for other communities seem disconnected from the social context of child and youth care, such as land, water, spirits, and stories and fables. And there is unlikely to be a more acute and nuanced understanding of power and its connection to family and community than what we find in Indigenous communities, noting that colonization is an easy word to speak for all of us but a much harder word to feel for most of us. Still, meaningful approaches to land-based practices, which seem obviously connected in very practical ways to child and youth care practice, are found within these communities, which points to an entirely different way of conceiving of relationships and life space.
There are, of course, many other communities that matter a great deal in child and youth care and that may hold answers to some of the most complex challenges faced by our field and by CYC practitioners in their everyday work. Globally, the migrant community seems especially relevant given its entirely different way of conceptualizing space and place, belonging and safety. Also relevant seem gender communities that have upended our binary concepts of gender and thereby expanded the ways in which we might consider young people’s lives beyond the gendered interpretations of normalcy, growth, and development. One might think also of disability communities, faith communities, and many others.
But there is one additional community that rarely enters in dialogue with other child and youth care communities, but that in fact appears to be taking over the world of CYC practice in significant ways. This is the medical model CYC practice community, which is rarely actually led by CYCs but typically directs child and youth care practice within firmly defined constraints and activities. This too is an important community in our field precisely because it is the one that in many spaces in both the global North and the global South has enforced scientific rationalism, medical procedural models, diagnostics and labelling, psychiatric professional culture, and evidence-based practices that support and perpetuate these ways of being, doing, and thinking.
As I mentioned, I am involved across most of these communities in some way. And I have to say that this has been very helpful, meaningful, and enriching to my ways of being, doing, and thinking. It has also allowed me to influence policy and regulation much more than what might have been possible through strict adherence to one community’s orthodoxy. And, perhaps most importantly, living and working across all these communities reflects the tensions, contradictions, possibilities and opportunities faced by young people every day.
I say all of this to highlight the opportunity that Newfoundland presents us with this year. Attempts at bringing together diverse communities of being, doing, and thinking have been made before, sometimes with some success and other times not so much. But I really think that the professional, intellectual, and practice ecology matters a lot, and Newfoundland is the one place (at least in Canada) that I would suggest is ‘safe enough’ to come together across our differences and find new ways of transcending orthodoxies and their critics. We can do better than dismiss one another. At any rate, once we have all been witnessed to kiss a fish, as one must in Newfoundland, perhaps we’ll be humble enough to let go of certainty within our respective positions and search collectively for community that benefits from the richness of our vastly different lived experiences and ways of knowing.
