Creating the Conditions…
This article was first published in the Minden Times in December, 2024.
The conceit of this column has been that I would spin off something I read or saw that put me in mind of an issue of importance to our local community. As the larger geopolitical world continues to spiral downward in how it exercises humanity, I am finding it difficult to react to their news without becoming downright dour and discouraging, which is what people never need to hear.
So I’m reaching into personal history for inspiration. And comfort.
In my earlier life, I was involved with giving voice to young people who had been raised in the child welfare system. Our mantra was that their experience as children parented by the state was what should inform the government -- and society more broadly -- about what needed to change to have better outcomes.
I founded a program that was mandated to prepare kids who were aging out of the child welfare system at age 16 or 18 to be ‘independent’. The funder’s idea was a 6-month boot camp to fill the massive chasms left by inadequate upbringing, first by parents deemed neglectful or abusive, and then by the state. We realized in the first weeks of operation that our program was basically a small bundle of bucks thrown into the wind to assuage the guilt shared by all who felt a shred of responsibility for doing such a bad job of parenting children who had been wrenched from their parents as punishment (presumably to the parents, but more, I always thought, to the children) for their inability to do the necessary. My kids were in high school at the time; I was consciously preparing them for independence. If my work assignment was bogus, thought I, then what would make it worth doing?
The program began to march to an empowerment beat: ready or not, the young people were going to be responsible for their lives, so they’d better learn how to identify and access what they needed to survive, even thrive. Tough love, if you like. But absolutely rooted in reality. The world is not fair, that we know. For those of us with the good fortune to be born into adequacy, maybe even privilege, that is of academic interest if at all. For kids leaving care, and others in unfortunate circumstances, it’s a death threat.
And so we turned to making the world a better place for kids leaving care. Not fixing the kids, as the assignment implied, but fixing the world.
Essential to that was teaching the kids to stand up for themselves, to speak truth to power, to ask for what they needed and be accountable for what they received, to create and nurture community, to act for the greater good. We were amazingly effective.
Any activity that bites the hand that feeds it – as we did: young people learning to be responsible adults tell authority what they think they need to hear -- will experience strong pressure to fall into line, to do the expected. That pressure fell primarily on me, as boss, to protect the program that allowed youth to find their power. It was immensely satisfying work; it was also exhausting. After eight years, I abandoned ship (guilt, guilt!), confident that I left it in good hands.
I indulged in a mid-life PhD to figure out what the hell made that program work, to see the forest rather than the trees. Senator Landon Pearson (1930-2023) who called herself the Voice of Children on the Hill, often spoke at events where my academic life took me. About her revolutionary work, she said that the idea of saving children was sentimental and misguided. The secret to their well-being, she said, was to change the circumstances under which they lived, and leave it to them to take advantage of what was available.
Change the Circumstances Under Which. I remember the resounding clang with which those words entered my conscience. That was what we had tried to do, day by day, situation by situation, kid by kid. We made progress. Not enough: kids today are coming into care and being abandoned in hotel rooms, exactly the situation that drove me out of government casework in Alberta in the late 1970s. The problem with progress is that the forces of regression never stop. Progress is maintained by progressing: if it’s not getting better, it’s getting worse. Change is constant.
Change the Circumstances Under Which. It is the mantra that I call upon whenever times get tough. It is an analytic tool that rescues me from sentimentality and despair. It is applicable to just about every human condition. Don’t believe me? I challenge you to name one that couldn’t be improved by changing just something in the situation in which it exists. I challenge you to practice finding the little overlap between what should be and what could be.
