If you’re lucky enough to be able to choose where you live, one factor in your choice would probably be the climate. So you choose this idyllic place with a wonderful climate where they schedule days and days of warmth, calm and sunshine — but today there’s a howling, bitter north-wester bringing pounding, stinging rain. Nice climate, lousy weather.

That’s not a bad meteorological model for your program.

An essential component of any program, whether it is a long or short term residential facility or just a place where people come, is the environment we create. This environment will have certain qualities such as the spaces and resources we need, and the people equipped to carry out the tasks of the program.

Another quality of our environment will be its climate. An environment is a “world” which we enter, and whether it is just the local community hall on Friday nights or a 24/7 high security youth detention centre, we are responsible for appropriate warmth, calm and sunshine. This climate will have a feel, and your program will decide the necessary levels of safety, comfort, challenge, latitude and attitude which suit your clientele. Just as we might choose where to live, so clients will find in our climate the qualities they can use and commit to. Or they won’t.

We spend a lot of time planning this climate to suit our program goals, and no doubt the climate in your place will be essentially different from the climate in mine. But the weather is whatever may happen from day to day — and in most programs for troubled kids and families there are going to be north-westers, chills and storms. In fact, part of the intelligent climate we build is that it allows storms, and it makes allowances for storms, and yet holds all within the security and hopefulness of a prevailing climate which is planned and managed.

Our wisdom lies in the planning of a baseline climate which serves the tolerance levels and function of our program; our generosity and daily work lies in accepting and entering the tough weather and the storms which are a function of the struggle and hurt of our clients, knowing (both for ourselves and the kids) that tomorrow (OK, maybe the next day) our good climate will resume.