A Youth Worker's Manifesto pt. I

There is a problem in this city. It is not with the roads. It is not with the buses. It is not with unemployment. It is with how we treat our youth and the people that take care of them. The youth of which I speak are the kids that are in your schools, in your rec centres, in your starbucks and in your youth groups. They are the youth that are in the system, but whether we see them or not, they are in our lives. They have been ripped from their homes by forces that they don't fully comprehend. They have been shaped by choices that are not their own. They have been made into people they are not entirely by their own will.

These are our youth.

They are the youth that society ate, chewed and spat out, left to their own devices. They are the youth that get into gangs. They are the youth that have access to drugs. They are the youth that sleep on our streets. They are the youth that have gone missing. They are our invisibles, well on the way to becoming invisible.

These are our youth.

They are the youth whose mothers passed on their crack addiction when they were born. They are the youth that were abused when they were babies. They are the youth that were left for days without food due to neglect. They are the youth whose faces are bruised by yet another of mom's boyfriends. They are the youth who were born with FAS. They are the youth that were ignored. They are the youth that were beaten without cause. They are the youth that were beaten for any cause.

These are our youth.

They are the youth that are strung out in an alley. They are the youth that break into houses to find something they can pawn so they can score another hit. They are the youth whose boyfriend left them with nothing more than a pregnancy. They are the youth that listened to the wrong man online and disappeared. They are the youth that cut. They are the youth that want to end their lives. They are the youth that can't control their anger, for a reason that they can't explain, because Daddy kept on hitting him when he was little and wouldn't stop crying.

These are our youth.

And we own them more than what we can ever give them.

We house them in grouphomes and foster homes and lock down recovery clinics. We commit them as patients of a hospital of societal illness, slaves to an impersonal system of beds and numbers. We house them with grouphomes that are understaffed and underpaid, with drywall full of holes, cracking lino, and burned out staff. We house them with foster parents and brothers and sisters, who opened their hearts to take yet another risk, another burden on the shoulders of the burdened. We give them case workers who are overworked. We house them in places that are ripe for tempers to fray, with easy access to others for drugs and gang inductions. We house them in the ghettos of our city. We house them without regard. We tell them that this is only temporary. We tell them this until they turn 18.

These are our youth.

We give them staff that are underpaid and told to care for them, and if they can, love them. We give them staff that are paid a pittance and train them in how to stop a kid from trying to kill themselves, how to restrain a kid that’s lost control of their temper. We give them staff that pull 48 hour shifts because there wasn’t anybody else to call. We give them staff that are paid less then someone working at the local Timmy’s. We give the staff six kids with different schedules, doctors, counselors, parole officers, support workers, social workers, teaching assistants, psychiatrists, addiction counselors, and ask them to juggle it all. We give them staff that are the anvil to the hammer that the world has beat into these kids. We give them staff that deal with the behaviors and the memories of the abuse suffered at a previous home. We give them staff that are asked to risk life and limb to some of the kids that are severely unbalanced. We give them staff that are expected to bind the horrific emotional wounds that abandonment causes. We give them staff that can’t work regular hours because it’s shift work, and doesn’t pay enough to hold down as a job. We give them a staff that cares, and then burn them out. We give them a staff that sees these kids for who they really are, youth who actually matter, and then fail to pay a competitive wage.

These are our youth. And these are our youth workers.

And we’ve forgotten about them.