Supported by
ListenIn parts 1 and 2 of this three-part series, I have discussed the concepts of sleep, eat, play and learn as possible ways of understanding quality and developing quality standards for residential care settings. This month, I will explore the remaining two concepts, Be You and Community, to complete this series of articles.
Be You
The concept of Be You is about two distinct things: it is about identity(ies), and it is about autonomy, or the agency necessary to exist within and to operationalize one’s identity(ies). Identity is a concept that has increasingly been taken up in residential care services, albeit in quite limited (and limiting) ways. In many settings and organizations, identity is taken up as an element of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion strategies that aim to acknowledge the diversity of young people and their families that become involved in the setting or organization. To this end, residential care settings have for a long time included programming elements such as ‘culture night’ or ‘global food nights’, which, somewhat absurdly, have featured efforts to serve nachos, jerk chicken, dumplings, and sweet and sour chicken balls to reflect a stereotypical perception of global food cultures. These efforts come from a good place, but they are almost certainly more harmful than meaningful, although probably mostly irrelevant. In general, these kinds of material representations of global culture or diverse identities reflect the hegemonic role of colonial power in the shaping and standardization of differences.
There have been other efforts too; some residential settings feature posters on the walls that depict minority or oppressed identities, including gay couples, racialized peoples, Indigenous people or wisdoms, and more (although interestingly, rarely images of disability). Many settings in North America have activities related to Black History Month, recognized throughout the month of February (the shorted month of the year – just saying). And in some cases, residential settings have even incorporated various cultural or unique group practices, such as smudging (in the Indigenous context in many parts of Turtle Island/North America), drumming (often representing West African practices), and global holiday customs, such as Hannukah, Christmas, Diwali, PRIDE parades, and more.
It is interesting that we think about recognizing diversity in these ways. What all these ways have in common is their focus on aesthetics, on representation of culture and difference through the normative forms of representation generally. In other words, we designate difference and what it looks like and give it space in our setting. We exhibit difference. We make difference exceptional and give it an exceptional place to be viewed and experienced.
Be You is an entirely different concept, and one that aims to avoid the designation of difference or its representation through aesthetics means. Be You is about identity(ies) and its/their strengths and possibilities. The goal is far more than simply representation. The goal is to further the development of self-reflective and critical engagements with heritage, race, gender, sexuality, ability/disability, neurodiversity, and other ways of engaging with oneself and the social world around us such that new forms of agency emerge that are steeped in something other than the containment-orientation of normative behaviours and ways of being. Be You is about emerging and developing across knowledge, spirituality, and relational practices that a young person develops and experiments with as they discover their social, political, and spiritual (his)story.
With that comes a celebration of autonomy. By autonomy I do not mean independence (an impossible concept), but instead the agency to avoid being made to fit into a social context and instead an emphasis on the agency to relate across social contexts based on difference rather than conformity and sameness. Ultimately, Be You is about a young person right and obligation to operationalize their identity(ies) to add something new, something different, something transformative to the life-space where their lives unfold.
Residential service providers seek out community resources/mentorship that can guide and promote the young person’s exploration of identity(ies) and the strengths and powers associated with such identities. Young people are encouraged to and supported in describing their journey of ‘Be You’, the questions still being explored, and the needs that might be associated with such exploration (such as becoming involved in community activities, learning materials, mentorship by peers or leaders from related identity communities, etc.) and all other elements of planning for the care of the young person are connected to and explicitly considered and measured in relation to the evolution of Being You.
Community
The concept of Community is one of the more complicated concepts in relation to residential care and treatment. For the most part, virtually all residential care providers see themselves as being community-based, community-engaged, or at the very least, as ensuring that their children and youth continue to be community-engaged. In practice, however, this is not always the case and there is very little thinking informing what this actually means. For many residential service providers, it is their location in a residential neighbourhood that makes them feel like they are in community. For campus-based residential service providers, it is programming that involves taking the residents into the community, such as going to a movie or participating in a community-based event. But for the most part, this is not what the concept of Community is meant to convey. Going to a movie with a group of residents is not really about community; it is extending the geography of the residence to a place in the community while maintaining the norms and regulations, or the ethos, of the residence. This is about institutionalizing, however temporarily, a community space.
The concept of Community as a quality standard in residential care is about maintaining the fundamental existential context of a child or youth as one born into community. Not necessarily a geographic community; possibly a community of culture, race, gender, spirituality, ability/disability, economics, politics, interests, of differences. Geographically, such community can manifest in physical, virtual, transnational, neighbourly, or in any number of other ways. The point is that the concept of Community is to be understood as the social location of the young person, and the concept of the residence, or of residential care, is to be understood as a temporary adjunct to the child or youth’s community rather than the other way around. Children and youth are always community-engaged and their lives are always community-based. Their placement in a residential program is an extension of their base in community, or sometimes a vacation from their place in community, but we cannot construct residential care as the base and community as the adjunct. In practice, we do this most of the time, which is why we need a quality standard for Community.
Quality Standard
For every child or youth, service providers develop not only a social history of the child or youth, but also a community ecology for the child or youth, which is updated on an ongoing basis and informed by the child or youth or and their families, such that knowing and working with the child in a residential setting as well as with the families associated with the child or youth is understood as working in and with community all the time. In order to be able to sustain this frame for the concept of Community, every service provider develops and can document their relationships to diverse communities (physical and otherwise) independent of specific children and youth in their care. All residential care providers must be community actors and see themselves as existing as one component of multiple intersecting and overlapping communities rather than as an institutional entity that exists in relation to community but outside of it.
And there you have it. Over the past three months, I have provided six quality standards that are quite different from the usual way in which we think about quality and standards related to quality in residential care contexts. Next month, I will synthesize all six standards into an overall framework for thinking about quality in residential care.
Until then, let’s wish for greater quality in humanity at large. This continues to be a brutal world!
