Foresight in Hindsight.
Posted September 12, 2023, by Mindi Wisman
It has been three months since we published The Foresight Initiative—our pandemic response aimed at highlighting experimentation, projecting young voices, and inspiring forward-thinking practice. If you haven’t seen it yet, please take a look. In our view, a greater appreciation for the lived experience and creativity of young people, as well as professional collaboration and wellbeing, have been the biggest wins to come out of the period of pandemic loss. We looked back at our Foresight takeaways and asked some leaders in the child and youth services sector for their responses; here is a sampling of what they told us.
The Value of Lived Experience:
‘Lived experience was a priority before, but it’s being pushed with a renewed importance.’
Those with lived experience are being recruited to participate in community networking meetings as a priority.
There is some tension between the value of lived experience vs. our scientific knowledge and understanding of best practices. The optimist in me thinks that tension will help the field become better and more client centered, without sacrificing our ability to provide excellent care and education.
It’s now more common practice for professionals to say they are a person with lived experience in the field.
The need for more peer positions and hiring of former clients into positions have become key indicators for success.
The Importance of Collaboration:
‘The story of the pandemic is like a story of how a society responds to short-term crisis. Many radical changes become possible if you know they're temporary. Some changes may become permanent—more remote work, for instance—but others will fall away. The question now is which changes will stick.’
Collaboration during the pandemic became critical. There was a strengthening of community through adversity.
Local neighborhood solutions were much cheaper than most people might have thought.
Hybrid work has allowed for an expectation of collaboration that is not dependent on being together. This has expanded our individual and collective skills at working with staff across projects and priorities.
The pandemic positives allowed us to think way outside of the norm in terms of how we collaborate and convene at national meetings, in workgroups, etc. With reduced travel we’re expanding our impact.
I’ve confirmed my belief that we should never discount the value of in-person connection and think that everything can be fully remote, without losing true connection and belonging.
Professional collaboration has been changing. It used to be collaborations were kindled and built from longstanding relationships. With all the turnover there has been a loss of institutional memory and we’ve had to spend a lot of time ‘getting to know each other’ again.
Collaboration has looked a lot more like an acknowledgement that we are all connected in this work, have similar goals, and must find ways to support each other.
Embracing Wellbeing:
‘The mass exodus of the work force, the reluctance to take on open positions, and the stagnation in grant funding really shed light on the burnout in the field. Approaches around the collective wellbeing of the workforce in the ‘helping professions’ is ripe for more significant changes to come.’
People who are cared for perform at a higher level.
We have to be flexible and let people work in ways that help them NOT have to choose between external obligations and work.
Leadership in many places is starting to model the values of self-care e.g. taking time off without regret, taking a mental health day, revising policies to reflect values for belonging and inclusion, welcoming kids and pets in the office when able, seeing failure as a learning opportunity. Bottomline: less talking about inclusion and belonging and more doing it.
There is a greater sense of ethical responsibility for the workforce and volunteers, with every decision including an empathetic response to the role or position and the person in it.
What are you seeing in your workplace? Are you emphasizing lived experience, increasing collaboration, and encouraging wellbeing? Let us know how it compares with what we found in The Foresight Initiative.