Come all ye faithful

We have tried very hard over the past year to establish the actual date for International Child and Youth Care Workers' Day. All of our research confirms that it is celebrated in the first week of May and that's as close as we got.

In fact, with Child and Youth Care work being a twenty-four-hour service, the rather blurred date had a ring of truth about it, because in our profession there is never a single day when we can all party together there is always somebody who has to be at home to mind the kids!

So let's do that. Let's rediscover this day that somehow got lost, and let's celebrate International Child and Youth Care Workers' Day in the first week of May whenever you and your team can fit it in, and in whatever way feels right for you. And if we tell each other how we plan to celebrate our day and, afterwards, how the celebration went, we will all have touched hands across continents and cultures in a unique way.

Of course CYC-Net is most pleased to promote this. We would like to reflect the occasion in our various media the discussion group, web site, on-line magazine, news pages ... We would like to collect some thoughts and ideas from our members and readers to share together in the run-up to the big day, so that we are more conscious of each other as we observe the occasion.

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It is right that we should stop briefly to pay some attention to ourselves and our profession. In recent weeks on our e-mail discussion group there have been some moving instances of sharing and networking on CYC-Net: requests for help being met with generous responses, expressions of vulnerability and disappointment being met with support and empathy. And all of this carried along by the powerful undercurrent of Child and Youth Care people always looking for better ways of understanding and working with troubled kids and their families.

It will be interesting to see how creatively we can “do" an International Child and Youth Care Workers' Day.

Thom and Brian