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City of Vancouver axes child and youth advocate

April 11, 2006 By Open Space, Youth

A piece of the mural from “The Gathering“

I don’t usually blog news, but this has a direct correlation to some work I did last year with some incredibly inspiring youth and it’s shocking in its implications.

Last year I facilitated an Open Space event as the concluding act of a brilliant rights-based monitoring project co-hosted by the City of Vancouver. The idea of the project was to use the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child as a framework for looking at how well “duty bearers” were upholding human rights in Vancouver. Now this is no police state, and youth are considerably freer in Vancouver than they are in many other places in the world, but there are still some glaring examples of rights violations that go on. Police and transit security personnel often violate youth rights and, much more disturbingly, the child welfare system has come in for some harsh condemnation of late. Economic and social rights are often ignored and youth are generally outside of the civic engagement process. And that one, ironically, has just gotten worse.


The project I was involved in was beautifully conceived and executed by sara kendall and a number of amazing partners who trained youth facilitators and held focus groups around the city. At the end of the project, youth came together for a weekend to prepare a performance and hold an Open Space as a way of reporting out on their work and engaging various levels of government nad others in moving forward on solutions stemming from the project’s recommendations.

One of the partners in the process, and the host at the City of Vancouver, was the Child and Youth Advocate, Sheila Davidson, a wonderfully committed woman who has youth issues right on the skin of her heart. It was her position and office that was eliminated this week (possible linkrot). The City “saved” $150,000 in the axing, but the costs are going to be huge. In the linked article, NDP child and family services critic Adrian Dix says “One of the reasons you need this, especially in Vancouver, is for those youth living on the street. They benefit the most. I’ve attended events by [youth advocate] Sheila Davidson’s group where I would meet young people you’d never see at any other civic gathering.” He’s talking about our Open Space weekend, among others perhaps. Here’s a photo of him in intense dialogue with youth that day.

Today, some of the folks involved in the rights monitoring project released a press statement that said, in part:

It is disturbing and inexcusable that the Child and Youth Advocate has been cut during a time of well-known critical need for exactly what the Advocate’s position was fulfilling,” says Sara Kendall, a Vancouver youth and community facilitator who coordinated the rights-based monitoring project. “The youth community and children’s service providers are outraged. There is a single, viable response here: the Office of the Child and Youth Advocate needs to be reinstated.”

The work of the Child and Youth Advocate was instrumental in connecting children, youth, service providers and City government for the insurance of a healthier and safer city for young people. The erasure of this position marks the dismissal of the importance of young lives in Vancouver.

“Vancouver has previously shown leadership in investing in the lives of its most vulnerable, and most highly valued citizens, the children and youth who live here,” states Caitlin Padgett, the City’s first Youth Advocate Mentor. “Services that are now taken for granted and considered irreplaceable exist because of the work of advocates who spoke up for children and youth.”

Along with the position of the Child and Youth Advocate, the entire budget of the office was eliminated, including: The Youth Advocate Mentor, a part-time position that was the only one of its kind in Canada, mandated to directly link the voices of youth communities and City policy; a Child Care Advocacy strategy; community consultations addressing youth-police relations, a youth-police working group; Child and Youth Rights monitoring reporting.

“Young people, particularly those marginalized, rarely have the opportunity to meaningfully contribute to the decisions and policies that impact their lives,” maintains Sheena Sargeant, Executive Director of YouthCO AIDS Society, a non-profit organization that provides support services to youth living with HIV/AIDS. “With the decision to cut the office of the Child and Youth Advocate, City Council has directly impacted the quality of life of many children, youth, and their families; they have removed one of the very few ways that communities and service providers can be seen and heard.”

If you want further information, or you want to help find a way to meet this now unmet need in Vancouver call Caitlin Padgett at 604-762-4520 or Sheena Sargeant at 604-338-9697.

And for a beautiful photo gallery of the Open Space day, showing shots of the youth at work and some of the art they created, visit my Flickr gallery of the day.

[tags]Vancouver[/tags]

Welcoming Annette Clancy to the blogosphere

April 10, 2006 By Facilitation, Uncategorized 2 Comments

I first met Annette Clancy when she responded to my call to help design the appreciative summit on Aboriginal youth suicide I did last May.   Now she has hit her stride in the blogging world with a great blog called “Interactions.”

Today she put out a super post outlining a process called Dynamic Participation, which contains 10 principles for her approach.

Good to see her in the game!

The path of contemplative dialogue

April 10, 2006 By Conversation, Facilitation, Uncategorized One Comment

At the Public Resources page of the Center for Contemplative Dialogue you will find an interesting little publication called The Path of Contemplative Dialogue: Engaging the Collective Spirit (.pdf), by Stephen Wirth. In the book, contemplative dialogue is seen as radiating from some core principles:

  • Trust in the basic unity of human people and all life.
  • Nonviolence in spirit, word, and action.
  • Commitment to seeking truth with compassion and humility.
  • Commitment to speaking truth with compassion and humility.
  • Willingness to risk suspending the rush to action.

These principles are close to my core principles of facilitation but with some emphasis on truth that I’m toying with adding to my own list.

The implications of these principles and the process that emerges from them can extend in many places. In a recent discussion on the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation list, Wirth offered some insights into how to make large scale conferences worthwhile learning experiences using contemplative dialogue approaches:

Engaging a group seriously and looking at what its common purpose is, how its ability to learn well together affects the state of the organization or field, and honestly naming the problems that arise from the individual learning stance. This too is where distinguishing the possibilities of dialogue from discussion is significant. Dialogue used here in its technical sense of ‘building shared understanding’ and not just the interchangeable usage with the words discussion or conversation. Further distinguishing ‘learning’ as something more than drinking from the fire hose of ‘theory’ that usually gets sprayed out at such gatherings and consciously inviting/challenging the group to do something more than ‘the usual.’…

Blending meaningful input with thoughtfully designed reflective dialogue allows participants both to engage material and then broaden the groups thinking in relation to it. I assume an effective process requires a skillful blending of time to create safety for the group to speak well together, thoughtful process questions, and allowing meaningful time to reflect and speak to these questions.
Oftentimes I notice a dominant cultural value toward speed and productivity undercuts effective engagement of the group. To arbitrarily assemble groups of eight and give them eight minutes total to share their ‘most meaningful experience of dialogue’ with one another, is a kind of process violence I find all too common. A critical element of good process design requires walking back through the intended process and outcomes and looking realistically at whether the design can produce the hoped for quality of
group interaction.

I am in the midst of putting the final touches on a design for a large scale conference, and these insights could not have been more timely and useful.

Alan Watts on trust and control

April 6, 2006 By Being, Practice 8 Comments

I am thoroughly enjoying the podcasts of Alan Watts’ talks at the archive of alanwatts.com. Today, on the bus into Vancouver I listened to part four of “Seeing Through the Net” in which Watts talks about trust and control.

The essence of his argument is this: in Judeo-Christian societies, humans are said to be born with sin, and are therefore inherently untrustworthy; to be precise, humans are unable to rely on their own judgements to make good decisions and decisions for the good. And so the way to deal with a population of largely untrustworthy neer-do-wells is to create an eleborate system of controls in society to ensure that behaviour is managed and the chaos doesn’t get too overwhelming.

In contrast, Watts says, many societies, including traditional Chinese society and, I would argue, many First Nations societies see humans as essentially good and capable and trustworthy. If you can view humans like this, then you can see a room full of people as a roome full of potential, and an organization of people is one essentially capable of doing good in the world. All you have to do is trust these inherent capacities.

This control issue crops up everywhere. If humans are essentially untrustworthy then we need laws to keep the peace and agendas to keep them on topic. We need rules, regulations, measurements, standards and assessment and evaluation criteria that judge the largely untrustworthy human against the perfect ideal, in order to see how badly they failed to achieve perfection.

The kicker for me in listening to Watts comes when he says that the problem with this logic is that if you believe that humans are inherently untrustworthy, then you cannot possibly trust your own thoughts about that. It takes you into a strange loop that is inescapable. On the other hand if you begin with the assumption that humans are good and can be trusted, you can trust that assumption and engage others in your work and adventures.

It seems to me that this is a critical part of the infrastructure that underlies how we choose to be together in organizations and communities. If we can trust each other, then we can trust that any sticky place we come too will be resolved by the people we are with. If we can’t trust each other, then we can’t trust ourselves first of all, and the world becomes a sad place full of controls and statistics and punishment and devoid of the life and creativity and passion that we see in places where people are truly alive.

I try to work with people who believe in people and who trust them to find their way. It just sank in today a little deeper how profoundly this either/or really is. So here is a renewed call for a practice of deep and radical trust in the person sitting next to us. To the extent that we can trust them and validate their agency and potential contribution as a human being, we can do the same for ourselves. And vice versa.

[tags] alanwatts, trust, control[/tags]

Sayt K’uulm Goot

April 5, 2006 By Appreciative Inquiry, First Nations, Youth 3 Comments

It’s a Tsimshian expression that means “of one heart.” It was also the name of a very powerful appreciative summit I facilitated last year on youth suicide in northwestern British Columbia.

Today Jane Morley, the Child and Youth Officer for British Columbia, and the convener of that gathering released her special report on the summit and its results. The report is available as a .pdf from her site.

The gathering was one of the most powerful experiences of my life. On May 4th 2005 I saw nearly 200 Aboriginal youth step into a gathering rife with fear and trepidation and emerge engaged and powerful. They achieved this by simply turning to one another with a set of powerful questions about what might be in their communities and after some conversation, they delivered an inspired set of messages to policy makers and politicians.

In her report, Jane summaraizes the transformation of the day this way:

By the end of the inter-nation forum, it seemed that a shift had taken place – from the overwhelming sense of loss, alienation and fear people had felt in the face of youth suicide, to youth beginning to take the lead in finding a solution. THe energy and power of the youth were palpable, as was the willingness among the others present to hear and accepttheir views, the mutual respect and the support for the emergence of youth voices and youth leadership.

The inter-nation forum, the work that preceeded it and the subsequent results were the fruit of hard work by many people, but first among these were the youth themselves. It was such an honour to work with them. I hope the governments involved heed Jane’s report.