Listen to this
I start this piece with ‘Oh my word!’. The previous special issue I wrote for was the 200th issue of CYC-Online and my first thought was, “but that was the other day”. Actually, it was towards the end of 2015, and that is a bigger oh my word. We have since lived through the unforeseen and overwhelming consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic. At that time, I wrote about commitment and reflected on the interesting CYC road I’ve been part of since 2009. Now it is crawling towards 15 years later. That 200th issue year marked the start of my editorship of the journal Relational Child and Youth Care Practice which ended at the start of 2023. It will be difficult to list all the nuances I have learned from the field through editing many diverse articles that marked the nearly 32 issues during that time. Noteworthy is the supportive relationship between RCYCP and CYC-Online that was always evident, as well as the continued push to keep both sources as relevant to the field as possible!
In the 200th issue of CYC-Online I made the statement that “CYC-Net is one place that shatters the perceptions that people just don’t care enough anymore, or that challenges are too overwhelming to solve”. How rare that I can say the same, nearly eight years later. During these years we lost many people, including one of our CYC fathers, Brian Gannon.
While we won tremendous ground in professionalising child and youth care work in South Africa, we lost one of the degree offerings that was part of me for more than a decade. One feels the loss of the warmth that comes from gathering around the CYC clan. How nostalgic to read the list of giants I spoke of in that 200th special issue. They remain the giants in the field and they are as inclusive as those earlier years I met them. While my roles and positions have changed significantly since 2015, what remains true is that if any of the giants will email me to ask a favour, I will still say yes; they still embody being relational and making moments meaningful; and still show brilliance in connecting people despite geographical distances and philosophical differences.
I am awaiting a publication (in its final stage), where I reflect more broadly on a ‘fledged child and youth care profession’s uncharted thresholds’. Authors publishing with CYC-Online have been key in presenting critical questions about the profession’s challenges and future, on which academic and practice reflections can be based. Some serious shifts are evident in the recognition of indigenous CYC practices and how communities are impacted by generational trauma, as well as frameworks identified for curriculum reform. In South Africa, issues around recognition, low salary levels and positioning within the multi-disciplinary team, remain. Wider international recognition of what CYC entails remain limited, even prompting some CYC authors to ask whether our name is a true reflection of what we do. I believe that we need to show the critical relevance of our profession through connecting to important conversations such as the sustainable development goals (SDGs). Our profession is uniquely positioned to be taken note of more visibly, but there remains much that we are trained to do that will contribute to progress on these targets.
One hundred issues on from that 200th edition, and still the issues are released without fail, with consistently interesting content - and still offered for free to those in and outside of the CYC field. May CYC-Online continue from strength to strength!
