Listen to thisI confess that it might just be me, but I have this feeling of dread for our field of Child and Youth Care that has grown stronger since the pandemic. It has been clear for some time that there were tensions in our field, but many such tensions were healthy and constructive as they focused largely on issues of equity and inclusion, as well as transcending strictly interpersonal contexts of practice to pay some attention to the systemic and structural barriers faced by young people and their families and their communities. Still, within those tensions remained an underlying connectedness and a relational context that not only drove the substantive aspects of the fields of practice and theory, but also the community of Child and Youth Care-involved people. We may have disagreed a lot in recent years, but at least we had a clear sense of who we were disagreeing with and how our disagreements might impact differently in the world of everyday practice, whether in residential programs, in schools, or in the community. In some ways, I think what helped us maintain some level of cohesion within our field was the community of people involved, and notably, the strong voices that reiterated the fundamentals of the field in terms of its purpose, its essence, and its futures. One characteristic of those voices was their strong relationship to both theory and practice, or to both, professional agencies and organizations and to academic institutions and post-secondary Child and Youth Care education programs. To be clear, these voices were always limited in their representation of diversity, and notably of diverse lived experiences that are connected to identities and social positionings. But those who challenged these voices on the grounds of their whiteness (myself included), nevertheless did so with clarity about context. It was intended as an engaging challenge, a conversation with those who have led the way in our field for decades.
It feels like that cohesion is not as strong as it once was. I can feel the melancholic expression of that in Robbie Robertson’s relatively recent song/poem Once We Were Brothers (great song; look it up). The orthodoxy and the countermovement still exist, as do arguments about the relative merits of interpersonal versus systemic foci, and continuing critiques of the lack of representation and lack of diverse lived experiences driving the field. But it isn’t clear anymore what field we are actually arguing about. And with that, it isn’t as clear – to me, at least – what we are trying to improve.
One dynamic that is coming into play quite rapidly is the changing of the guard, so to speak. Many of our most eloquent writers, researchers, and narrators are nearing retirement or have exited the field altogether. The generations behind our elders consists of a wonderful group of people with enormous capacities, great ideas, and very progressive, often critical, ways of pushing us to think in ever more complex and broad ways. While that is a good thing, there does not appear nearly as much of a community of people evolving who are developing this next iteration of our field together, both through debate and disagreement and through common commitments to young people, their families and their communities. We seem less connected and less engaged with one another. One consequence of this is that despite incredibly important work unfolding and being disseminated across many different journals, conferences, and in post-secondary education programs, much of this work is not coming together to form a whole, nor is it particularly connected to the experiences of young people (or early or second career people – they are not all young) in the workplace.
One amazing aspect of the strong community of peoples that had formed through the networks of the elder generation was its global character. From South Africa to Israel, from Palestine to Australia and India, across Europe and North America, including Indigenous territories in the West, North, South, and East of Turtle Island, there was a common commitment to develop ways of being with young people that reflected a deep commitment to justice, equity, and kindness, and there was a sharing of ideas, ways of being, and ways of doing that sought to draw on new ideas as much as on old ideas and longstanding wisdoms such as Ubuntu, all our relations, the seven generations, and so much more. It took hard work for such a global community of people to emerge and to come together regularly through conferences and other kinds of gatherings. Of course, the sometimes-exclusive character of such gatherings made it hard for new people to join or to find belonging, and this is perhaps one reason why our community of Child and Youth Care peoples is now struggling to continue in sustainable and cross-generational and cross-cultural ways.
I am saying all this not to overly celebrate a community slowly reaching its retirement, nor to be critical of those active in Child and Youth Care, youth work more generally, or community-focused endeavor at the broadest level. There is not an obligation on anyone’s part to continue contributing to a sense of connectedness across generations, geographies, contexts, cultures, and ways of being. But I do wonder about how effective we can be in creating change for the young people living on the margins of societies, excluded from power, including the power to determine their own fate, and continuously subjected to chemical treatments and psychological branding when we are unable to find a center for the discussions most of us seem to want to have. For my critical colleagues, I would simply say that this work is fantastic and necessary, but it is unfolding far away from what actually happens in the settings where most of the young people who are experiencing disadvantage and exclusion live their lives. And for my orthodox colleagues I would simply say that what was built by our elders is an enormously valuable foundation for the future, but only if it moves into a transformative phase of engaging with our critical colleagues directly and accepting (and celebrating) multiple truths and narratives. Having entirely separate narratives is not helpful to anyone in particular, and certainly not to young people.
It strikes me as strange that everyone who cares about young people, and specifically young people facing myriad adversities, agrees that we need community. At this stage of my career, of my thinking, and of my evolution as a Child and Youth Care practitioner and an educator, I attribute all good things to community and all barriers to making positive change to the individualism and sometimes conveniently simplified interpersonal context devoid from the very complex, and never one-dimensional social world. For this reason, I think building community for our field, including our thinkers, our elders, our youth, our researchers, and our practitioners, is essential.
One way of doing this is to come together in a space where everyone is welcome and that encourages narratives of all kinds. I think CYC-Net is such a space; there is value in continuity and familiar territory, and CYC-Net can help facilitate moving us from the community practices of previous generations to community practices that are fit for this generation and those to come. I don’t know of any other space that provides a greater opportunity to actually debate with one another, to agree and disagree with perspectives and approaches to Child and Youth Care practice, to ensure meaningful representation and authentic access to power to the full diversity of those in the community, and to develop new and transformative ways of thinking about Child and Youth Care that nevertheless remain connected and meaningful not only to those writing about the field but also to those working in it. These cannot be different worlds. Without a community of Child and Youth Care involved people, no matter how different their perspectives, including their ontological and epistemological foundations might be, all of us will become guilty of having served our careers well but created nothing in particular for youth to celebrate. That would be a shame.
Again, I am writing this not to point fingers or to suggest we are at the end of our field. But I do want to encourage people to start or re-start their engagement within the field. Start writing, start arguing, offer something different. I am convinced that if you do, we will once again become community, and we will want to gather as a community that will look and feel very different than the community of the past, as it should.
