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Ben Anderson-Nathe

Location: Portland, Oregon, USA

Biography
To help pay for college in the mid 1990s, I got my first Child and Youth Care job in a group home. In that program I met many amazing people, some of whom are still in my life today, and felt myself coming alive as a professional. I couldn’t believe my luck, that I had landed in a career where I would be paid to do something I loved so much. Over the next several years, I worked in residential care, community mental health, homeless and street youth work, and religious youth work programs.

Although my undergraduate degree had prepared me well to work with youth, within a few years I saw my relationships with young people being “trumped” by people with graduate degrees (who often had less experience and a qualitatively different understanding of the youth we were serving than I did). Purely out of defiance, I decided, “Well, if letters after your name are so important, I’ll go get some of my own!” And I moved away for graduate school.

Somewhere along the way in grad school, I realized that the contribution I really wanted to make to the field was through teaching and professional development of future CYCs. To that end, I completed my doctorate in community education and youth studies at the University of Minnesota and headed home, to Portland, Oregon. I now live and work in Portland, teaching future youth workers in the Child and Family Studies program at Portland State University. Although I do miss the energy and excitement of residential programs, street work, and camp, it’s the best job I’ve ever had.

How I came to be in this field
I grew up in a mostly-rural county with many problems. If social services had been present in our part of the county (which wasn’t the case when I was a child), many of my friends would have been in care. I grew up in a network of safe adults who genuinely saw and appreciated me; most of the kids around me had a different experience.

I came into this field because all people – young and old – deserve to be seen and appreciated. We are all worthy of support and the chance to craft ourselves into the people we want to be. It is an honor to have been a safe adult in the lives of the youth I’ve known in direct practice, and it’s a privilege now to be modeling that safe adulthood for future CYCs in the classroom.

A favorite saying
“We should carry ourselves in the world as the invitation to a conversation, not the presentation of an answer.”
(paraphrase from Mike Baizerman)

“It is the mark of an educated mind to entertain an idea without accepting it.”
(Aristotle)

A few thoughts about child and youth care

• Seeing youth as full people, not merely potential adults, is countercultural work, and it is essential to the resolution of young people’s marginalization.

• Authentic relationship is the core of youth work practice; to be effective, we must be willing to know and be known by young people. This is also countercultural work.

• We must never take ourselves too seriously, elevate ourselves too highly, or allow ourselves to stop laughing and playing. Child and Youth Care work is human work, and to do it, we must allow ourselves to be human.

Last thing I read, watched, heard, which I would recommend to others
The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak – Written for “young readers” (whatever that means), it’s a sensitive, tender, and heart-wrenching novel of childhood, young adulthood, and the transformation that can come from opening our eyes and hearts to really see the people surrounding us.

A favorite Child and Youth Care experience
I was facilitating a youth group in a behavioral health agency in the state capitol. Advertised to service providers as a therapeutic “anger management” and “life skills” group, the youth and I decided it’d be a non-therapy group with “hanging out” as its main goal.

About two weeks after the Columbine High School shooting, our state governor was about to sign one of the many “zero tolerance,” bills common at the time, which would have a huge impact on the youth I knew. One young person brought up his fears about the bill in group, and the kids started kicking around ideas of how they could respond. Collectively, we decided to take a stroll to the capitol building and see if we could drop in and chat with the governor

Picture one youth worker and about a dozen street-involved, probation-weary, “hard” teenage boys taking a stroll up the main drag through town, on our way to the capitol. We walked into the governor’s office, and the youth introduced themselves as “concerned young adult citizens” to the receptionist, who assured us the governor was quite busy, but that we were welcome to wait. And wait we did. For two hours, until just after 6pm (group ended at 4:00), when the governor left his office for the day. To his credit, he greeted each young person individually and sat with them for half an hour.

The outcome is, of course, irrelevant. I don’t even remember now whether the bill passed. But I will never forget the confidence and pride in those young men’s faces knowing they had the power to force their officials to see them, not through their case workers or probation officers, but as concerned individuals, citizens of their world.

Recommended Child and Youth Care reading link
Youthwork as play by Michael Baizerman: https://www.cyc-net.org/cyc-online/cycol-0500-youthwork.html

My favorite Child and Youth Care related link (after CYC-Net)
www.in4y.com
Jerry Fest’s Web site is a fantastic portal for information on Child and Youth Care practice, with a variety of articles, manuscripts, and other publications supporting adults who work with street-acculturated youth.

www.infed.org
A fantastic collection of resources for informal education, youth work, and community-based intervention.

Influences on my work
So many! In my teaching, bell hooks, Paolo Freire, and the notion of anti-oppressive critical pedagogy. In my youth work practice, Mike Baizerman, Mark Krueger, and the privilege and responsibility of being a safe adult in the presence of the everyday lives of young people. And maybe above all else, my daughter, Sophie.