A Special Message: On Building Resilience
/A Special Message: On Building Resilience, from our Executive Director Sabrina Evans Ellis.
In June, Sandra Escamilla, Vice President at Children’s Aid Society, and my former boss, contacted me about giving a keynote address for a Town Hall of she was convening. Sandra indicated that I would be talking about Building Resilience. Normally, I would have jumped at the chance. But, I didn’t respond to her text right away, because at that point, I didn’t really know what I would say. I have worked as a youth development professional for nearly 25 years. I know the resiliency factors like I know my own mind, high expectations, engaging activities, opportunities to contribute, relationships with caring trusting adults and continuity of supports. These are the protective factors. The elements that allow a young person to thrive in the most challenging of circumstances. In the emerging field of youth development, practitioners participating in YDI’s Networks for Youth Development Initiative, studied these factors and articulated how they should show up in our work, in our hiring, and professional development of youth workers. It was promoted, disseminated, replicated, and showed up in RFPs and core competencies statements and evaluations. Building Resilience is what youth work professionals do.
And yet, I didn’t know what to say. It was after COVID derailed my health for a month and took the lives of neighbors and friends. It was after Breonna Taylor was killed in her home, and Tony McDade, a trans man was killed by police in Florida. It was after Freddie, and Philando and Sandra and Tamir and Michael and Trayvon. It was after years of watching our black and brown children struggle in criminally under-resourced school environments and watching good teachers, phenomenal community-based agencies, and communities struggle with never having enough to meet the needs.
As a capacity building organization, our community program partners reached out to us since mid-March asking for convenings and asking what can we do for youth? Frankly, what can we do for ourselves? I looked again at the well-known and well-worn resilience factors, High Expectations, Engaging Activities, Caring Trusting Adult, Opportunities to Contribute, Continuity of Supports. And all I had were questions. --Do I even understand what resilience means in our context? Today? For our youth in times such as these?
So, I decided to put this concept of resiliency within the context of my daughters’ math homework. I struggled during the remote school year help them with their math. Wondering why the new math was necessary and ultimately reverting to my old math on the side. But deep in the annals of my old school days I kept falling back to a core principle.
When solving equations with variables on one side of the equation there is one main rule to follow: whatever you do to one side of the equals sign you must do the same to the other side of the equals sign. Within that context, I realized that the Resiliency Factors still ring true, but they have to balance out the challenges on the other side of the equation. For example, help youth rediscover what engages them. Offer meaningful opportunities for them to contribute to the world that has often done such a poor job of meeting their needs and offering connection, preparation, and authentic opportunities. Provide intentional continuity of supports within our agencies, and agency-to-agency to build the village our youth deserve.
If we as a sector are facing destruction and despair, we have to balance the equation with creativity and hope. It is the fuel that will allow our strategies to advance. We often thing of creativity as being artistic. People who paint and draw and make music. But Merriam Webster’s dictionary tells us that it means: “to bring into existence something new and to produce through imaginative skill.” Our ability to survive and thrive as a community of practitioners and as champions of youth depends on us to summon our collective creative energy to create something new and imaginative in our interactions and partnerships with youth, in our agencies, in our communities and in our nation.
Hope. A colleague once told me that she heard someone refer to a privilege. I disagree. Hope is not a privilege bestowed upon a few as the result of systemic inequity. It is in our DNA, It is what prompts a groups of people to trudge across nations to cross a hostile border to America, it is what sustained Americans in internment camps, and kept alive a race subjugated into slavery, It is what indigenous people had at Standing Rock, what young people have had over the last few months at the Barclay Center, at Foley Square, in the Bronx, and in Minnesota, It’s what made Malala get up after she was literally shot down.
The audacity of hope—as Barack Obama called it--and the power of our creativity is what fuels our resilience. YDI thanks and loves you for the work you’ve been doing, and for the new realities you will co-create with youth and families across the city.
