I spent part of Father’s Day yesterday working with one of the youth PODs at the World Urban Forum along with some friends like sara kendall.. We spent part of the morning in a circle, using a talking piece to discuss what should be in a final statement from the youth to the World Urban Forum leaders. The blog for the Youth leadership POD should have some of the final reflections.
In the room we had 50 youth from every continent, all of them investigating ways of engaging youth on the local, regional, national and global levels. What struck me was how the youth were adamant that parallel structures were useful to include youth, but what really needs to happen in many places in the world is that youth need to simply be a part of the decision making processes that affect them and the world they will inherit. Far more valuable than being stuck into advisory roles, youth a crying out for the ability to be active citizens, practicing care and compassion WITH their elders for a world that they will live with longer than any of us.
In my closing comment I thanked the youth for the Father’s Day present of showing up as good stewards for the world my kids would inhabit. And it led me to think about this question: where are you working with youth to co-create the world together?
Rob Paterson posted a link to a great short documentary about a Sudbury Valley type school in Maryland called Fairhaven. Sudbury Valley schools are democratically run and non-coercive. In our Supported Homelaerning Program here on Bowen Island, we use many of the same principles and we operate under many of the same assumptions that these kids are expressing in the video.
I love the last comment, that this kind of learning prepares a kid for living and learning within a worldof chaos, which is what the real world is actually like.
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]
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.
My friend Toke Moeller and I are running an Art of Hosting training this week with 12 Aboriginal youth here in British Columbia. We are having a marvelous time so far with one day behind us and two ahead. There have been some good insights as we head deeper into the essences and practicesof hosting conversations that matter. Today we spent time in a natural circle of trees in Cathedral Grove near Port Alberni, which is a pokect of nearyl 1000 year old douglas-fir and cedar on the Cameron River. These old ones make good teachers, especially when we bring them questions about confronting our fears.
I had one or two insights myself today about the essence of effective conversation. Both arose in an appreciative conversation with Toke. For me, a powerful one was that effective conversation creates in the spaces in which true offerings of the heart can be made. The results of the best conversations include having the participants in that conversation able to give gifts of their time, attention and commitment to the result. All good action arises as a result of this kind of free, heart-based offering.
And we also noticed that good conversations contain the seeds of stories which are repeated for years afterwards. It is, in fact, nearly impossible to know these seeds untila later time, when we pull them out of a bag and tell them as stories. But for sure, an effective conversation is one that conceives these seeds that later brith in the momentof telling. Who is to know what any of these seeds will become?
What can you add to this list?