There was a time not so long ago in my part of the world when many of the youth serving agencies were run by people who would have identified themselves as being child and youth care professionals. This was particularly true in the smaller organizations but was not unusual in some of the larger ones. There was a time when the executive directors and senior managers of these organizations would have worked very hard at attending the provincial and national child and youth care conferences. It seems to me that this has changed. It seems to be now rare here for the executive directors and senior managers of the large agencies to identify themselves as child and youth care workers, even the ones who had done so to some degree in the past. Many of the smaller agencies have disappeared along with the people running them. The end result is an apparent decrease in the number of senior people identifying themselves members of the profession. I suppose this is not necessarily a bad thing because in some ways the profession has always been about front-line workers. However, it is a problem when as a result more and more of the decision makers are more and more removed from any sense of child and youth care. A lack of attention by decisions makers can be deadly to a profession.

This is exacerbated by the demands being placed upon agencies to become bigger, more efficient and more accountable. In many ways this may be a good thing but bigger usually means that the people at the top are expected to have traditionally recognized degrees like psychology and social work. More efficient often means more standardized and less diverse resulting in a narrowing of the credentials that are acceptable within an organization. More accountable often relates to accreditation and that can mean that only certain professions are recognized as being relevant. All of this doesn’t bode well for child and youth care ever becoming anything more than a marginalized profession. This is too bad as child and youth care has a lot to offer.

However, in a way it doesn’t surprise me. We have yet to make the leap to be able to play in the big leagues. People who are ambitious in our field have usually had to get advanced degrees in other disciplines which for many has meant that a breaking or a weakening of the ties with child and youth care. Child and youth care for many is something you do until you get the training to be in a real profession. I couldn’t even begin to count the number of people I have known over the years who started out in child and youth care but who now have little or no connection with the profession even if they are still working in the youth services field. Again this is too bad because many of them were the kind of people who should have taken a leadership role and assisted in the development of the profession. Now they are lost to us.

Maybe some of them would have been the people who would have helped us make the next step as a profession. I wonder if without them we will ever make this next step or if we will continue to be a somewhat marginalized group of people who are still struggling with the same issues we were struggling with thirty years ago when I first started work in child and youth care. I hope we can do it but some days I’m not very optimistic about it. This is one of those days.