Listen to thisI have argued before that CYC-Net, when it was first introduced, represented one of the greatest social innovations in the history of the field of Child and Youth Care. Under the leadership of Brian Gannon in South Africa and Thom Garfat in Canada, CYC-Net was introduced in the 1990s as a way of enabling a transnational dialogue about how we are with children and youth, and how we can leverage the profession of child and youth care to offer children and youth facing significant adversities both hope and pathways to a fulfilling future. Almost from the start, CYC-Net involved people in dialogue from several countries, perhaps most prominently from Canada, the United States, Scotland and England, Ireland, and South Africa. CYC-Net enabled a CYC community that was inclusive of scholars and researchers, practice leaders, and direct service practitioners, noting that these groups are not mutually exclusive. 30 years later, CYC-Net continues to do precisely that, bringing people together, but with a much-expanded geographic community that continues to be primarily English speaking but that includes many individuals and countries that are not primarily English speaking as well.
The innovation I am referring to is twofold: First, it is noteworthy to say that CYC-Net was created at a time when the internet was still in its infancy and when it could not be taken for granted that everyone had access. It was incredibly bold to launch a community via the internet that in the 1990s no one could have imagined becoming so embedded into our everyday existence. But it was also an innovation because it was an intentional response to the negligence of care experienced by young people everywhere and the siloed, fragmented, and perhaps intentionally under-conceptualized ways in which child and youth care unfolded. CYC-Net was really the first large-scale project to create collective strength for a movement that aimed to centre life-space practices and interventions as an alternative to either neglect and invisibility or to the criminalization of social and emotional challenges and circumstances experienced by young people across many jurisdictions around the world.
It is remarkable that CYC-Net still exists. At a time when any fleeting thought cooked up over (too many) drinks at some questionable bar is enough to motivate someone to ‘create’ a new online community, be that a web-based one or one that exists on Whatsapp, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn or some other social media, one might have expected CYC-Net to have lost ground in relevance and to come across as slightly dated in its approach and presentation. The thousands of pages now hosted on CYC-Net, including archives, photos, stories, articles, announcements, and discussion forums, seem oddly out of touch with the five-second attention span promoted by current social media. And yet, there continues to be thousands of scholars, practice leaders, students of child and youth care, and direct service practitioners who access CYC-Net every day, be that through the discussion forums, this journal, or the main web site where one can search for current and historical evidence of our community’s deliberations. Somehow, CYC-Net not only disseminates information and ideas, but represents a place of familiarity, comfort, and connection to a global CYC community. I think this is an important observation – unlike social media more generally, the engagement with CYC-Net is not merely momentary. It is a network of relationships that many of us engage in as a way of staying grounded in community.
For us, community is no longer just the group home and who works there, or the agency, or the child and youth care program at a college or university. The world has become much more fluid than that (perhaps it has always been fluid, and we were afraid to engage with that fluidity), and CYC-Net captures our engagement with the complexities of geographic and social diversity, issues of migration and demographic change, and the multiple manifestations of knowledge and experiences that make up the phenomenon of child and youth care. Whereas 30 yeas ago it was interesting for a Canadian practitioner to hear about child and youth care practice in South Africa, today it is indispensable and part of how we think about, challenge, and disrupt service systems ranging from child welfare to education. CYC-Net enables us to integrate different ways of knowing in our understanding of how systems work in different parts of the world, and the range of possibilities to liberate children, youth, their families and communities from the surveillance and containment of institutional structures and processes that have been billed as the one and only truth, as evidence-based, and as universally valid for everyone.
I think that investing in CYC-Net for another 30 years is smart and necessary for a field of child and youth care practice that is experiencing multiple threats. Capturing all these threats is a big task, but here are some of them. First, in many parts of the world, children and youth are once again (perhaps they always were) objectified and seen as problems to be solved. The many ways in which young people experience the world around them are being invalidated and silenced, and themes such as racism, neurodiversity, gender diversity and others are subjected to the normatively loaded parameters of medical intervention and social engineering to conformity. CYC practice is necessary to mitigate this threat and to humanize practice. Second, care around the world is being privatized for profit, and understood as a product that can efficiently be packaged and sold by just about anyone. And third, the world is turning its back on relational ways of being, seeking instead to center instrumental and effective ways of being that support and uphold power structures and inequities that continue to benefit some but harm many others. This is not a time to step away from a profession that is about being with rather than doing to. But to be able to resist these trends, we do need community, and we need a place we can go to when we run out of energy, or new ideas, or disruptive motives. When everyone in North America tells us that we need psychiatrists to do treatment, we need to reengage with our friends and colleagues in Lebanon, in Zambia, in Brazil, and in India to remind ourselves that there are other ways of generating health and wellbeing premised on entirely different worldviews. We need a place that is safe enough to ask questions we cannot ask in our own settings – does treatment really exist? Are evidence-based practices really politically neutral? Do resource gaps prevent us from developing new ways of being with children and youth? Do we need to professionalize in order to survive as a profession?
We also need a place that is safe enough to engage on issues and themes that are increasingly being attacked because they threaten the resurgence of white supremacy. Where shall we talk about racism and white privilege, and where shall we identify the ways in which have betrayed and continued to harm Indigenous peoples around the world? Where shall we raise the alarm about the privatization for profit of care?
CYC-Net can serve as this place. In a way, it always did serve as this place, and it has proven its worth by cementing friendships and collaborations across geographic differences. I would suggest that at this moment of enormous uncertainty, we could focus on three things to ensure CYC-Net continues to provide us with this incredible level of connection: First, given that CYC-Net is a place where we can be together, we should all pay a little bit to contribute to its upkeep; the emphasis is on ‘should’; this can never be mandatory or managed through paywalls. But if those of us with much privilege occasionally transfer what are very minor funds, and those of us with fewer resources transfer what is the equivalent of a coffee per month, we create a cooperative (rather than a corporate) model of sustaining our place. Second, we should direct those who seem placeless or disoriented in their professional lives to CYC-Net so that they can find a place of connection and familiarity that they are invited to shape and furnish based on the newer generations’ preferences, needs and desires. Third, we should make sure that our place is truly inclusive and welcoming to all, and that means a greater emphasis on content that reflects the lived experiences of many more communities in many more parts of the world. This means that we should invite, and then support, people to contribute content who perhaps have not seen themselves or their circumstances reflected on CYC-Net. And finally, we should promote CYC-Net not only as a site of information and learning, but also as a site of connection and being. Both these things are important, although I suspect that we learn better when we feel connected and we can be as we are and still be invited to connect.
