Youth Work: An Institutional Ethnography of Youth Homelessness 9781442668171

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
1. The Research: Community-Based Institutional Ethnography
2. Getting Welfare
3. “Signing Out” of Care
4. Youth “At Risk”
5. The Institutional Coordination of Youth Work
6. Walking the Line: Research and Development Work with SYS
Conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

YOUTH WORK An Institutional Ethnography of Youth Homelessness

Combining institutional ethnography and community-based research, Youth Work is a sophisticated examination of the troubling experiences of young people living outside the care of parents or guardians, as well as of the difficulties of the frontline workers who take responsibility for assisting them. Drawing from more than a year of on-site research at an Ontario youth emergency shelter, Naomi Nichols exposes the complicated institutional practices that govern both the lives of young people living in shelters and the workers who try to help them. A troubling account of how a managerial focus on principles like “accountability” and “risk management” has failed to successfully coordinate and deliver services to vulnerable members of society, Youth Work shows how competitive funding processes, institutional mandates, and inter-organizational conflicts complicate the lives of the young people that they are supposed to help. Nichols’s book is essential reading for those involved in education, social services, mental health, and the justice system, as well as anyone with an interest in social justice. naomi nichols is a postdoctoral fellow with the Canadian Homelessness Research Network in the Faculty of Education at York University and the principal investigator on a five-year SSHRC Insight grant studying schools, safety, and the urban neighbourhood.

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Youth Work An Institutional Ethnography of Youth Homelessness

NAOMI NICHOLS

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2014 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4426-4743-5 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4426-1555-7 (paper)

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetablebased inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Nichols, Naomi, 1978–, author Youth work : an institutional ethnography of youth homelessness / Naomi Nichols. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4743-5 (bound). – ISBN 978-1-4426-1555-7 (pbk.) 1. Homeless youth – Ontario.  2. Homeless youth – Services for – Ontario.  3. Ethnology – Research – Ontario.  4. Ethnology – Ontario – Methodology.  I. Title. HV1441.C32O6 2014   362.7'7569209713   C2014-901616-6 This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

Contents

Introduction 3 The Project  4 Youth Work  5 Governance  6 Relations of Ruling  7 Description of Chapters  8 1  The Research: Community-Based Institutional Ethnography  12 Research Setting  13 Research Participants  16 Research Activities  19 Closing Thoughts  26 2 Getting Welfare  29 Getting Connected  30 Monitoring Welfare Eligibility  37 How It Works  42 Closing Thoughts  43 3 “Signing Out” of Care  45 Participants  45 Child Protection in Ontario  47 Leaving “Care”  48 Where Child Protection Intersects Youth Justice  58 Closing Thoughts  62 4 Youth “At Risk”  65 Becoming a Youth At Risk  67

vi Contents

Treatment  69 Involuntary Admittance to a Psychiatric Facility  74 Child Welfare and the Homelessness Sector  77 Closing Thoughts  80 5 The Institutional Coordination of Youth Work  85 Mapping the Institutional Terrain of Youth Work  86 “CYA” Work and the Public Sector’s “Revolving Door Syndrome”  88 Navigating Text-Based Institutional Hierarchies  93 Demonstrating Public Accountability  98 Standardized Performance Measurement in an Alternative School  103 Closing Thoughts  107 6 Walking the Line: Research and Development Work with SYS  109 Neo-Liberal Ideas and Managerial Technologies  111 Managerial Funding Regimes, Community-Based Research, and Frontline Work  113 Discovering Relations of Ruling  116 Working with Contradictory Knowledge  120 Working for Results  122 Closing Thoughts  124 Conclusion  126 Learning, Reflection, and Action  127 Teaching and Learning with Community  128 Stories and the Biopolitical Sphere  136 Final Thoughts  138 References  141 Index  151

YOUTH WORK An Institutional Ethnography of Youth Homelessness

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Introduction

Gesturing emphatically with a wet paintbrush, Desiree1 leaned across the table and said: My entire life, I’ve slipped through the cracks … like, they’ve always lost my paperwork or they’ve forgotten about it or said “you didn’t hand that to me.” “Well, yes, I did!” You know? … I’d always fall through the cracks. I’m not even over-exaggerating or anything like that. Seriously, every single time, I’ve always fallen through the cracks. I don’t even know how it happens. (interview, 2007)

Desiree’s sense that she always “fall[s] through the cracks,” her impression that these “cracks” involve paperwork, and her observation that she doesn’t “even know how it happens” shaped how my research unfolded. The euphemism “slipped through the cracks” makes it difficult to see how inter-institutional work processes are organized such that some young people are not getting their needs met in their interactions with public institutions. This book describes an institutional ethnography of public and social service institutions and a community-based research project at an emergency shelter for youth. It demonstrates how young people’s inability to get the things they need or desire from their interactions with mainstream institutions is the result of a misalignment between these urgent needs and the concerns (about risk, efficiency, and accountability) of the system. 1  The names of the people and places in this book have been changed to protect the confidentiality of research participants.

4  Youth Work

The Project My research began with efforts to learn from young people who stay at the Street Youth Shelter (SYS) of Middlesborough about a seemingly straightforward task: their work to find and sustain housing. I invited young people to coffee or lunch in local cafés and simply asked that they tell me how they came to stay at the youth shelter. The focus of the interviews was not young people or their families, but the complex of institutional relations a young person engages in his or her work to secure housing. People’s unique experiences provided a starting place from which to investigate patterns of relating that extend beyond the specific experience of any particular individual. Although my research emerges from young people’s descriptions of their work to sustain housing, the community development aspects of the project reflect my efforts to reconcile research findings with institutional expectations for frontline work and SYS’s unstable economic situation. Early research findings were used to build capacity at the youth shelter where the project was situated. Working with shelter staff, I developed and secured funding for an intervention to reduce shelter recidivism and increase shelter revenue. We created a program to support young people’s positive, sustained transitions out of the shelter and into their own rooms or apartments. At the same time, the economic structure of the program allowed the shelter to generate the income it required to remain open. This is not the project I set out to do. I initiated this project with a ­desire to explore relations between young people and public spaces – particularly institutional spaces. My plan was to conduct a communityactivist research project with young people, specifically those young people who live outside the care of parents or guardians and have been institutionally categorized as “minors.” I had visions of young people interviewing one another about their work to get welfare, access cheap or free food, take care of their health, go to school, and so forth. I imagined us transforming these stories into a productive investigation of ­social and public service institutions. In proposing to do institutional ­ethnographic research with young people, my intention was to create a means for mobilizing knowledge among young people, and to use our collective knowledge to lobby for changes in service provision for youth. Once I was engaged in full-time fieldwork, however, the actual contexts of participants’ lives and the objectives of my collaborating agency shaped the project towards different ends. A portion of the book, therefore, is dedicated to reconciling what actually happened once I

Introduction 5

began fieldwork with my initial research objectives. Although I began this project well versed in the principles of engaged scholarship, it is difficult to prepare oneself for the experience of conducting a project characterized by unpredictability, contradiction, and irreconcilable tensions. In  the end, the shifting nature of community-based research b ­ ecame ­important data, through which I investigate the politico-­institutional terrain upon which any institutional work with and by young people is coordinated. While this book describes the complex institutional arena within which young people’s experiences at a youth shelter are shaped, running alongside this narrative I’ve included a description of my work to initiate, conduct, and make sense of a community-based research project that deviated significantly from the one I envisioned. Youth Work Throughout the book, young people’s personal stories of their institutional work grounded an analysis of complex social relations, within which their own lives and others’ are embedded. I use the term institutional work to draw the reader’s attention to the textually mediated institutional processes and knowledge through which people’s actions are coordinated across time and space. The term adapts Dorothy Smith’s (2005) expansive notion of work as any activity that takes time and energy. Smith’s generous conceptualization of work is useful to the analyses put forward throughout this book. Analytically, a focus on the things that young people do – as constituent of their work – helps a researcher avoid judgments or trivializations of young people’s actions and ideas. This focus on young people’s work is also helpful from a professional point of view. Whether their actions are deemed institutionally effective or not, young people are actively participating in institutional relations that link their work to one another and to the adults who are paid to support their education, social welfare, economic stability, health, and so forth. How young people’s work is (dis)organized across institutional settings shapes and is shaped by the institutional organization of practitioners’ work in these same sites. My goal is to show how the work activities of people, differently oriented to and within youth-serving institutions, are co-ordered, and then to show how these complexes of coordinated social action end up becoming the objectified social relations I am calling youth work. Traditionally the term youth work conveys a particular set of work activities conducted by people who hold a professional title, such as child and youth worker (or CYW). CYWs support the work of institutions (e.g., schools or child

6  Youth Work

protective services) by helping young people bring their work in line with particular institutional expectations or processes. My unconventional use of the concept sees all of the things young people do in institutional settings (whether they are deemed institutionally effective or not), as well as the activities of any practitioner who works with youth, as youth work. As I use it in this book, the concept of youth work helps to illuminate how ruling or governance is an accomplishment of coordinated social relations. Governance Young people and the practitioners with whom they work are participating in social relations that inextricably link their work together and hook them into complexes of coordinated social action that are organized across institutional settings. As I progress through this book, I reveal how young people and practitioners’ work is co-ordered in ways that contribute to young people’s institutional and social marginalization. I adopt the term co-order from Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose’s (2008) governmentality studies. The term draws our attention to the social relations through which people’s actions are coordinated across spheres of activity (e.g., public institutions or private homes). Miller and Rose investigate contemporary forms of governance that are not anchored to, and do not operate through, the state. I am interested in how these ubiquitous forms of power – what I refer to in this book as relations of governance – are (re)produced in the coordinated activities of people. As such, the experiences of people who plan, deliver, and evaluate projects; determine what is good, healthy, or normal; calculate budgets and funding formulas; speak as experts; read; teach; manage; and motivate are included in my analysis of the institutions, practices, and activities of governance. Although Miller and Rose (2008) argue for an understanding of governance “… in terms of the activities of the minor figures that we study” (p. 5), their analysis does not give primacy to the experiences of people through whom governance works. The people whose thoughts and actions shape and are shaped by particular political ideas and governmental practices are only implied in the method of investigation Miller and Rose propose. In contrast, the analysis put forward in this book begins with people’s accounts of their work. It attempts to preserve the presence of the active subject in the investigation it offers. While I know that a person’s

Introduction 7

account of his or her work does not grant us access to their experience, in the fullest sense, it can serve to disrupt some of the smoothness that is suggested by an historical or theoretical account. The interdependencies Miller and Rose observe between political rationalities and governing technologies require people (who think and act) and tangible modes of communication or proliferation, what institutional ethnographers refer to as texts or text-based devices. As objectified practices for knowing and acting, the rationalities and technologies of governance are anchored to texts, which coordinate them as social relations: [Contemporary governments] exist in documents – in legislation; in a distinctive institutional language; in textually-mediated hierarchic intersections of different levels of government; in the laws that enable them to extract taxes; in the text-mediated administrative apparatuses that do the work of collecting taxes, directing and administering sources and objectives of funds, maintaining order at various levels, collecting garbage, maintaining public health, and so on and so on. (D.E. Smith, 2007, p. 12)

People’s accounts of their work to hook up to, avoid, or deliver public and social services, programs, and interventions grant an experiential visibility to political ideas, policy texts, and political technologies (programs, accounting mechanisms, statistics, audits, and the like) that exist in, and perpetuate, objectified forms of relating and knowing. Like Miller and Rose, I want to understand how the things people do (i.e., their conduct) is regulated. Unlike Miller and Rose – whose theory of power is grounded in analyses of the instruments and interventions of government (i.e., the use of measuring devices, scales, methods of calculation, ways of thinking, and the application of particular techniques or instruments to amend conduct) – my analysis is anchored in the unfolding activities of social life. It is less influenced by a theory of power than a theory of the social (D.E. Smith, 1999). Relations of Ruling Dorothy Smith (1999; 2005) uses the term ruling relations to point to an historical shift in forms of social coordination. She links technologi­ cal advancements facilitated by mass printing and capitalist modes of production to an increase in objectified forms of relating characterized by a replication of ideas and ways of doing things across time and

8  Youth Work

space. Relations among people are coordinated via knowledge, legislation, professions, accounting practices, laws, discourse, policy, institutional practice, social and institutional hierarchies, intervention, surveillance strategies, behavioural norms, and so forth. All of these manifestations of governance have a textual (graphic, visual, or auditory) character that allows for their dissemination, consumption, and investigation across time and space. The replication (or standardization) of technologies across institutional sites renders concepts, ideas, categories of organization, and so forth relevant across locales. As people interact in institutional, industrial, commercial, and increasingly residential settings, taking up ideas and practices that are mediated by ordinary workplace technologies, they participate in ways of being and being with one another that shape and are shaped by the complexes of objectified social relations Smith describes as relations of ruling. Theoretically, the concept of ruling relations resonates with the conceptual phenomena Hannah Arendt (1958) describes as rule by nobody – diffuse and ubiquitous forms of coordination for which no particular persons are responsible (p. 40). These are the forms of rule with which Michel Foucault (1977; 1978; 1994) was also interested. At a conceptual level there are parallels between Arendt’s rule by nobody, Smith’s ruling relations, and Foucault’s (1994) notion of governmentality, which understands rule as occurring in the coordinated subjectivities of people acting in relation to institutions, objectified knowledge, standard practices, and automatic processes. Much like my own use of the term youth work, concepts like ruling relations and governmentality are important theoretically. They allow us to talk in general terms about how rule or social order is produced as people’s work is mediated by calculative practices, discourse, professional knowledge, architecture, and so forth. For a sociological analysis of ruling to be practically and politically useful, however, it also needs to show how ruling relations are (re)produced, resisted, and reformed in the co-ordered activities of actual people. It must acknowledge that the capacity to organize is not located in discourse, institutions, or policies, but in relations among people, as these are mediated by objectified forms of knowing and being. This is what I have set out to do with this book. Description of Chapters Chapter 1 describes my research objectives, framework, and activities. I describe the research setting, participants, and methods. I explain

Introduction 9

institutional ethnography’s (D.E. Smith, 1990a; 1990b; 1996; 1999; 2006) particular approach to textual analysis and ethnographic activities and describe my use of community-based research techniques within this sociological approach. The goal for chapters 2 through 4 is to illuminate some of the institutional cracks young people are described (and describe themselves) as falling through. Each chapter relies heavily on young people’s narratives. Chapters 2 and 4 are organized around two individuals’ (Khaled’s and Stella’s) stories. While chapter 3 draws heavily from an interview with a young woman named Keelyn, I also include references to other young people’s (Janella’s, Sylvia’s, and Aiden’s) experiences where their stories illuminate other relations through which a person’s experience leaving Children’s Aid Society (CAS) “care” is organized. In each chapter, I show how an attempt to accomplish a seemingly simple institutional task inserts a young person into a complex and disorienting institutional field. Chapter 2 began as a story about getting connected with Ontario Works (OW) social assistance. The interview with Khaled was the first one that I did, and it set the general pattern for the interviews that followed. When I asked him to tell me about his work to access OW as an “independent minor,” someone who lives outside the care of parents/ guardians and who is under the age of eighteen years, he began by telling me that he was living in a park. From Khaled I learned that asking young people about a single aspect of their institutional work brings into view a complex inter-institutional geography. Khaled’s story of accessing OW traces his experiences with child welfare, the sheltering system, Citizenship and Immigration Canada, Service Canada, the school system, and the labour market. His experiences are also distinctly nuanced by, and reproduce, relations of race and class. In chapter 3, I explicate the institutional character of the colloquial phrase, “to sign out of care.” This phrase is commonly used by CASinvolved young people to signal their desire to terminate a relationship with the child welfare system. Use of this phrase obscures the complicated institutional work that is involved in the termination of a wardship agreement with the CAS. Its popularity marks the degree to which young people (and often their biological families) are unaware of the legal implications of their relationships with the child welfare system. In this chapter, I draw on the narratives of four youth (Keelyn, Aiden, Sylvia, and Janella) to illustrate how different child welfare designations structure young people’s experiences with the child welfare,

10  Youth Work

homelessness, and other human service systems. I show how the termination of various wardship orders/agreements variously impact people’s subsequent work to find shelter, get connected to other services, make money, care for their children, and get along with their biological families. My intention is for this chapter to demonstrate that no one simply “signs out” of care. In chapter 4, I explore how Stella’s experiences with the child mental health system led to eight years of relentless institutional probing, monitoring, and intervention as her mental health work intersected with the youth justice system, CAS, and the education system. Her ­story allows us to see what happens when a young person refuses to participate in institutional relations in ways that facilitate the standard application of policy or institutional intervention. Stella’s account also enables an exploration of “risk” and “achievement” as these terms function ideologically. I show how data-management technologies, institutional funding procedures, policy, and people’s consistent use of these terms in their speaking and listening practices grant them an objectified status, which facilitates the coordination of people’s institutional work across the multiple sites of Stella’s narrative. Chapter 5 focuses primarily on practitioners’ descriptions of their professional work. My intention is for this chapter to provide a counterpoint to the previous three chapters, which used particular young people’s descriptions of their institutional work to illuminate youth work as a complex of objectified relations that variously impact the institutional work of all young people who are active in institutional settings. Including a chapter that brings this complex of relations to light from practitioners’ standpoints reminds us that the institutional terrain, which shapes young people’s experiences at a youth shelter, is also a landscape upon which practitioners are active. A chapter on practitioners’ work allows me to paint a vivid and detailed picture of the coordination of people’s work across public and social service institutions. Chapter 6 builds a case for thinking about institutional ethnography as an exploration of governance. Reflecting on the ethnographic practices and development strategies I employed in my own research, I use political theory as an analytic resource to help me figure out how my experiences doing community-based research were coordinated with young people’s institutional work and practitioners’ work with youth. Focusing specifically on my use of research findings to create, fund, and coordinate an individualized life-skills program for youth (the Transi­ tioning Life-Skills Program or TLP), I describe how my development

Introduction 11

work became oriented towards the managerial concerns of the youth sector, at the expense of the particular needs of individual youth. Exploring how the project engaged practitioners, myself (as the researcher), and young people in particular ways of relating, I describe how communitybased research is a ruling relation. The last chapter explores the pedagogical and practical significance of my research. I describe my efforts to enact a cycle of learning, reflection, and action in this project and discuss the usefulness of this reflexive community-based research model in post-secondary programs that centralize opportunities for students to learn in and with communities. Throughout the chapter, I draw lines of synergy between my experiences as a community-based researcher and a university instructor. Moving between excerpts from one of my student’s journals and my own field notes, I explore our emotional responses to working with “marginalized” communities. I describe how teaching a communitybased prac­ticum course while conducting a community-based research project created conditions for intellectual synergy, and I argue that this synergy is a feature of learning in, and with, community. I also propose that learning is central to any collaborative endeavour that seeks to create change. As I draw the book to a close, I describe the type of organizational and professional learning opportunities that I  believe will support the creation of inter-institutional policy and practice reforms to prevent the institutional “cracks” that young people slip through.

Chapter One

The Research: Community-Based Institutional Ethnography

My research problematic is the complex of objectified social relations I describe as youth work – the policies, interventions, strategies, funding practices, managerial technologies, and political narratives that shape people’s work across a diversity of institutional contexts. My objective was to map these textually mediated relations – professional discourse, methods of intervention, means of accounting, ideas about poverty, statistical data, and so forth – as they construct a field of action that connects people working across institutional sites. The project is informed by other institutional ethnographic research that illuminates how a community-based agency’s work is shaped in relation to: non-profit funding regimes (Nichols, 2008); community-service processes (MarajGrahame, 1998); data collection practices (Ng, 1988); and race, class, and gender relations (Maraj-Grahame, 1998; Ng, 1988). While an institutional ethnography is often coordinated in relation to one’s activist goals (see, for example, Pence, 2001; G.W. Smith, 1990, 1995; Wilson & Pence, 2006) and/or community organizing work (McCoy, 2005; Mykhalovskiy & McCoy, 2002; Ng, 1988; Pence, 2001; Turner, 2002), it is seldom participatory in a traditional sense (for exception, see Campbell, Copeland, & Tate, 1998; 2000). I used institutional ethnography’s investigative approach – its mandate to figure out how things work – to cultivate a collaborative relationship with SYS and to carry out my primary research activities. I worked with an emergent research agenda, which reflected the experiences of research subjects (Carlson, Engebretson, & Chamberlain, 2006; Chung & Lounsbury, 2006; Schensul et al., 2006; Sclove, 1997; Small & Uttal, 2005). The research happened with people whose working lives

Community-Based Institutional Ethnography  13

are shaped by their efforts to engage and/or resist social and public services and those who hook people up to, manage, and/or deliver these services; but data collection and analysis processes were not participatory. The participatory aspects of the project were limited to the application of research findings for non-profit fund seeking, service advocacy, professional learning for staff, and an intervention for youth. All knowledge translation processes were co-developed with social service staff or youth. Research Setting My ethnographic work occurred at – or in relation to – the Street Youth Shelter (SYS) of Middlesborough, Ontario.1 SYS operates out of a renovated three-storey brick house on the north side of Beck Street, in the northern part of Middlesborough’s downtown core. A little too far from the nearest urban centre to be considered a suburb, Middlesborough, Ontario, is a small city surrounded by even smaller towns and rural areas. The shelter sits across from a discount grocery store, sandwiched between a municipal parking lot, and a large, run-down apartment complex called Beck Towers. Beck Street is one of a number of smaller downtown streets that are peppered with social service agencies, rooming houses, halfway houses, and historic homes that have been converted into student accommodations and low-rent housing. Directly behind the shelter is a carriage house that is home to “Loft” – the alternative school for young people who are staying at SYS or have stayed there in the past. Loft is a satellite classroom for the downtown public high school, Middlesborough Collegiate and Vocational School (MCVS). The lower level of the carriage house contains a woodworking shop. At times, the school board has paid a woodworking teacher to provide classes, but more often, the woodworking shop is run by a volunteer or someone willing to work for very little pay. Above the shop there is an academic classroom where students work independently and typically part time towards high school credits. Sebastian, a teacher, and Karma, an educational assistant (EA), are Loft’s full-time educators.

1 Middlesborough and the Street Youth Shelter of Middlesborough are pseudonyms.

14  Youth Work

The Building People who are not staying at SYS can enter the building through the front door between the hours of 9 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. This street-level entrance leads to the basement. The business office is on one’s immediate left upon entering the building, and a narrow staircase leading up to the shelter workers’ office is in front and also slightly to the left. The office of the executive director, Wendell, is on the immediate right side, but his door is located in such a way that you have to go by a receptionist’s desk to get to him. Since the shelter does not have the resources to hire a receptionist or an office administrator, this desk is usually occupied by a placement student from the community college or by a coop student from a local high school. There is a shared office on the left, past the stairs that lead up to the second floor. This is the office that I used when I was doing my fieldwork and when I was coordinating the Transitioning Life-Skills Program. At the immediate back end is a locked door. If you have a key (which only shelter workers, Wendell, and the business officer do), this door will take you to the staff bathroom and a common area that shelter residents are able to use. A series of stone steps, built into the side of the hill beside the shelter, lead up the residents’ entrance on the shelter’s second floor. Bet­ ween the stone steps and the residents’ entrance is a flat area with a picnic table that is papered with carvings and colourful drawings: initials and other tags that represent the flow of people who have used the shelter over the past decade. Young people and families staying at SYS must enter the shelter through the residents’ entrance on the west side of the building. People are required to ring a buzzer to request access to the shelter through this side door. After buzzing them in, a shelter worker will ask them to remain in “the bubble” – a glassed-in room that allows a shelter worker to quickly assess people before they enter the building. Once people are buzzed into the bubble and then let into the shelter, they find themselves in a foyer with residents’ mailboxes on the direct left, beside a scuffed up water cooler (which is filled with tap water), a bulletin board and pocket shelves stuffed with various fliers and notifications, a couple of chairs, and a desk with a telephone for making local calls. The opposite wall is lined with recycling and garbage bins, and an entrance to the shelter workers’ office. The shelter workers’ office has two computers for shelter workers and one computer accessible to residents for the purposes of housing searches, although it was

Community-Based Institutional Ethnography  15

often used to check Facebook, view posts on YouTube, or play video games. For the most part, people staying at SYS moved freely in and out of the shelter workers’ office. The second floor also has a kitchen and dining area, which are locked except during meals, and a large games cupboard that is also always locked. There are two bathrooms for the young people who live on this floor to use. Throughout the entire shelter, on institutional grey walls, there are examples of artwork done by people who have stayed at the shelter in the past. According to Wendell, although the walls get quite beat up, the art is never touched. All of the resident rooms in the house are painted light yellow, and the floors are covered with industrial brown carpeting. Each room has a window, and each young person has a bed, access to drawers, closet space, and a trunk that can be locked. While I was doing fieldwork, the rooms on the second floor were reserved for young people in the care of child protective services – the Children’s Aid Society (CAS). CAS had a contract to purchase six beds from the shelter for their adolescent clients (generally those between sixteen and eighteen years of age, but occasionally young people who were less than sixteen years). While I was doing fieldwork, the rooms were always full and often there were also CAS youth staying in rooms on the third or “general residents’ floor.” The six rooms on the second floor were designed for single occupancy. In contrast, most rooms on the third (or general residents’) floor are meant to house two youth. The front two adjoining rooms on the third floor (facing south onto Beck Street) were specifically designed to host families. While I was doing fieldwork, the shelter also converted another section of the third floor into a second residence for families to use. SYS is the only shelter in the city that provides hostelling services for men with children or families with two parents. The local shelter for women and children has a mandate to serve women who are leaving a partner who has been violent. Women with children who do not cite a violent partner as a reason for their shelter use may also end up staying at SYS. A separate entrance was created for the family rooms, so that physical boundaries could be preserved between the two groups of people using the shelter. In the basement, there is a common area for people staying at the shelter to use. People who are staying at SYS can only get downstairs using a staircase at the back of the building. Officially, this common space is only available for people to use at night. During the day, they are meant to be out of the shelter – at school, looking for work, or looking for a place to live. The common room contains a large television,

16  Youth Work

a pool table, a foosball table, a couple of couches and comfy chairs, and some games lying around. There is also a room to do laundry and a bathroom for shelter staff to use. Beside the laundry room, there is a large storage area, which holds non-perishable food items (from the local “Food Share” program) as well as other donated items (such as clothing) and things such as bikes or laptop computers that people using the shelter want to keep safe. Unfortunately, the storage area was broken into twice during my year and a half of fieldwork at SYS. Theft is a common occurrence at the shelter. According to the young people who stay there, it’s easy to kick in the doors to the residents’ rooms, although in most cases this isn’t necessary; most of the locks no longer work. Research Participants Despite the fact that I met all of the young people I interviewed through an emergency shelter for youth, many did not consider themselves homeless. While the use of emergency shelter services is commonly indicative of homelessness in the literature (Hyman, Aubry, & Klodawsky, 2010; Jasinski, Wesely, Wright, & Mustaine, 2010), many people who are homeless tend not to engage any shelter services whatsoever (Gowan, 2010; Wasserman & Clair, 2010). On the other hand, there are people for whom the use of an emergency shelter does not signal a period of homelessness. People use the shelters as a form of respite from relationships or while awaiting a more suitable housing placement through an institution like the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP). A lot of the young people I got to know over the course of this project were adolescent wards of the Crown, who had been placed at the shelter by the local CAS. The practice of placing CAS “youth in care” at emergency shelters is not unique to Middlesborough (Charbonneau, Jaiko, & Cazabon, 2005). Mark, an adolescent Crown ward who stayed at SYS for many months during my research there, explained the difference between homelessness and shelter use in this way: m: [Am I] Homeless? No, I just lived in the shelter and I’d say that my foster parents kicked me out and now I’ve barely got a dollar, but [laughing] – n: But you’re not homeless. m: No. Not really. Not really homeless. I have never lived on the streets …

Community-Based Institutional Ethnography  17 n: It’s just that sometimes in research, they talk about this is homeless and that is homeless but I don’t think the people who I know who live at the shelter think of themselves as homeless at all. m: The shelter is a place to stay until – to get you back on your feet – like not to go to the lowest and not be able to bounce up. The shelter helps you to bounce back up into where you came from … (interview, 2008)

A research project that claims to have emerged from the standpoints of participants cannot employ a conceptual frame that these same participants expressly reject. All of the young people whose stories inform my research have stayed at SYS, an emergency shelter for youth. Most were staying at  SYS  when I met them. As a group, sometimes I refer to the youth ­participants in this research as housing unstable, but more typically, I ­simply  refer to them as young people. The adult participants are all frontline or management-level practitioners employed in public or social service institutions that comprise or interact with the youth sector in Middlesborough. I interviewed two police officers, two educators, seven shelter workers, a crisis worker, a mental health nurse, and a CAS worker.

Participants’ Institutional Affiliations Because interviews with young people focused on the circumstances of their relationship with SYS, there are aspects of each person’s in­ stitutional work that may not have been addressed during our dis­ cussion. I intended for participants to feel that they had a significant degree of control over the topics that were broached over the course of our conversations together. While I had full access to all shelter case files, I opted not to read them very often. I was concerned not to take advantage of my increasingly ambiguous status at SYS as a researcher and volunteer staff.2 I tended to consult a file only when directed by a staff member to do so, when asked to add a note to a person’s file (about a visit to the health clinic, for instance), or when my work with the Transitioning Life-Skills Program required it of me. I did not record the information that was kept there. 2 I coordinated the Transitioning Life-Skills Program on a voluntary basis while the shelter was waiting to receive its Ontario Trillium Foundation funding.

18  Youth Work

As such, I offer the following descriptions of young people’s various institutional affiliations with some trepidation. It is not my intention that this section be interpreted as a general description of the demographic characteristics of homeless youth. My objective is to highlight the significant degree of institutional involvement among the young people I interviewed at SYS. Of the 31 young people who I interviewed individually or in the focus group, 23 participants had been involved with CAS as young people and/or as parents. Other scholars have cited a relationship between family breakdown and homelessness. Jasinski et al. (2010) indicate that almost half of their study participants were unable to live with their biological families during childhood because of poverty and abuse. While other research certainly points to a relationship between experiences with the child welfare system and adolescent or adult periods of homelessness (Dworsky & Courtney, 2009; Gaetz & O’Grady, 2002; Gaetz, 2002; Gaetz, O’Grady, & Buccieri, 2010; Goldstein et al., 2012; Karabanow, 2004; O’Grady & Gaetz, 2004; Osterling & Hines, 2006; Lindsey & Ahmed, 1999; Mallon, 1998; Mendes & Moslehuddin, 2006; van der Ploeg, 1989), the high number of CASinvolved young people in my study is largely a function of inappropriate housing for adolescents in CAS care and the consequent business partnership between CAS and the shelter. Seventeen of the young people I interviewed were enrolled in secondary school intermittently over the course of this project. The fourteen individuals who were not enrolled in school were all eighteen years of age or older. Most of the young people enrolled in school attended Loft, but some attended mainstream secondary schools and one attended an alternative school for young mothers. Some young people, particularly those in CAS care, attended a number of different high schools over the duration of this research. For anyone under eighteen years of age, institutional status (as minors, as OW recipients, and/or as CAS wards) requires that they be enrolled in school. A requirement to be enrolled in school does not mean that an individual actually attends. At the time of research, young people with attendance issues were expelled for truancy. For those who remain enrolled, other circumstances (e.g., abusive relationships, time at an alcohol and drug rehabilitation centre, involvement in mental health treatment programs, or periods of incarceration) contribute to slower academic progress. Seventy-five per cent of young people who are homeless and over eighteen years of age do not have a secondary school diploma (Public Health Agency of Canada, 2006).

Community-Based Institutional Ethnography  19

I am aware of mental health issues that were being investigated, treated, and/or were otherwise shaping an institutional intervention for ten of the thirty-one young people I interviewed. For some young people, their mental health work required that they adhere to a drug regime and attend appointments with psychiatrists and other mental health practitioners. For others, their mental health work intersected their involvement with the (youth) justice system, enabling a mental health court diversion or resulting in their participation in the Intensive Sup­port and Supervision Program (ISSP), an intervention designed to divert “at-risk youth” from the youth justice system and into the mental health system. Ten of the thirty-one young people who I interviewed were involved with the youth justice or justice systems, and many more than that were involved in illegal activities (typically selling, running, and/or using drugs). Many of the other young people I got to know, but did not interview, were also involved in the youth justice system at the time of my research. Research Activities I was in the field for nearly a year and a half. The data for this study were generated through twenty-seven formal interviews with young people and fourteen interviews with adult practitioners, a focus group discussion with six young people involved in the CAS as Crown wards (two of whom I also interviewed formally), participant observation, informal conversations (recorded in field notes), and textual analyses carried out over this period. My investigation of youth work as a field of social relations begins in the activities of people who work on the institutional front lines – the settings where people’s varied work to resist, access, deliver, monitor, and evaluate institutional processes brings them into contact with one another. These zones of coordinated activity shape people’s unique experiences within these complexes of objectified relations. In order to understand how people’s diverse experiences on the institutional front lines are produced, I pay special attention to the text-based apparatuses, technologies, or mechanisms of governance through which their work is coordinated.

Participant Observation The first months of fieldwork were largely dedicated to participant observation and interviews with shelter workers. It did not take me very

20  Youth Work

long to realize that my proposed research activities did not fit with the way things are done at an emergency shelter for youth. The young people who were staying at the shelter were clearly leery of me, and, more importantly, they were busy. Some people only used the shelter for one or two nights, which meant that my only encounters with them (if at all) were fleeting. Many others stayed for the entire forty-two days that OW funds. These young people had to secure another place to stay before their funding ran out. They also had to go to school, often attend court proceedings, and keep up with the demands of active social lives. The other young people who used the shelter had been placed there by CAS or other youth-serving agencies. Their days were already filled with institutional appointments, and they were sceptical of any further involvement with adults who they saw as representing the interests of dominant institutional structures, rather than their own needs or concerns. It was quickly apparent to me that young people’s active, long-term, and voluntary participation in this research project was highly unlikely. I also suspected that the shelter workers at SYS were unsure of how to interpret my presence. Of the two full-time day-shift shelter workers, one consistently referred to me as the new “placement student” (i.e., a student from a two-year community college youth work or police foundations program) and the other, Rose, immediately identified stark differences in our epistemological orientations. On my very first day at SYS, I tried to ask her about a form I found while cleaning out my new office. When I asked her how she would use the form in her work with young people, she told me that if I used too many big words, she would just tune me out. I tried to ask her about the form differently … I pointed to specific phrases I had circled (like “harm reduction strategy”) and asked where the phrase came from because it didn’t sound like the kind of language young people would use to describe their experiences … She told me that she doesn’t use this form, or any forms, if she can help it. In terms of the form I had found, she said that it is “something that looks good and sucks” … She told me that she has been a single parent, been homeless, and is now a grandmother. There is nothing [the young people at SYS] can tell her that will shock her, and nothing they can do, that she hasn’t seen. She told me that she isn’t big on book learning, but has learned a lot from experience. (field note, 2007)

My first encounters with Rose were always like this. She would respond to my questions, but rarely initiate any communication with me.

Community-Based Institutional Ethnography  21

Eventually, she and I became quite close. On a day-to-day basis, she became my primary informant or guide, helping me to understand the complex relationship between SYS and the CAS. But in my first few months at SYS, she made sure that I was aware that she had not yet accepted my presence there. In light of my lukewarm welcome at SYS, I dedicated the first part of my research to learning how the work there is organized. My intention was to discover, ethnographically, how to situate the research so that it better met the needs of people who work and live at the shelter. I did what was described to me as “shelter-worker light” training (field note, 2007), and undertook the ordinary work routines of a daytime staff person: doing morning wake-up, cleaning up after breakfast, getting people toiletries from the upstairs closet, phoning other service providers to schedule appointments, and so forth. During the first four months of intensive fieldwork (beginning in May 2007), I spent between two and four full days (eight or more hours a day) a week in the field. Over the next year or so (until the end of July 2008), I reduced the duration of individual visits to the field, but I remained involved as a participant observer, voluntarily coordinating the Transitioning Life-Skills Program, or interviewing people between three and five days a week. During my first summer in the field, I logged hundreds of hours as a participant observer: rock climbing with shelter residents; participating in staff meetings; cleaning recently vacated rooms; participating in public health workshops; hanging out at the picnic table or in the dining hall; attending medical, legal, and social service appointments with young people; and participating in the CAS summer day program as a lifeguard. On numerous occasions I accompanied young people whose work drew them into institutional settings beyond the youth shelter: a meeting with Ontario Works (OW) social assistance, a couple of pregnancy tests at the Women’s Health Centre, many meetings with CAS workers, an “appearance” at the local courts, and so forth. A lot of data were collected through participant observation. Par­ ticularly when I was helping to develop, fund, and coordinate the Transitioning Life-Skills Program, I had access to meetings, policy, and information that had previously been withheld from me. Opportunities to engage (as an applicant) the granting institutions I had previously studied as a researcher (Nichols, 2008) allowed me to experience firsthand how non-profit funding regimes shape work in community-based agencies. During the winter of 2008, I also did some research for Middlesborough Youth Services (MYS) and CAS, and I organized and

22  Youth Work

led in-service training for staff at the shelter. As I became an active participant in the settings where I was also working as a researcher, I was granted ethnographic access to documents and processes I would have been otherwise unable to study. On the flip side, I am sure that many ethnographic details escaped my notice when I was, myself, engaging the processes and institutions I hoped to investigate. In order to account for my extensive work as a participant observer, I  wrote field notes where I described my experiences and observations, asked questions, and noted holes in my understanding of particular institutional processes. Periodically during my first summer in the field – particularly when I was involved with the CAS summer day program – I was not diligent about these recordings. When the length of my field days decreased in the fall, I returned to writing field notes by hand directly after each visit and then transferring these notes, in bulk, to my computer at a later date.

Interviews I also conducted open-ended interviews with frontline practitioners, as well as open-ended interviews and a focus group discussion with young people I met while doing research at SYS. The interviews and focus group discussion were recorded digitally and then transcribed by me at a later date. Institutional ethnographers sometimes refer to the interview process as “talking with people” (DeVault & McCoy, 2006). People’s experiential accounts allow the researcher to describe how a particular complex of relations comes into being through people’s varied and interconnected work processes (DeVault & McCoy, 2006). While “talking with people” often takes the shape of a formal, scheduled ethnographic interview, in other instances, it happens informally during fieldwork or over the course of a researcher’s ordinary activities: riding the bus, teaching a class, or conversing with colleagues. The point of conducting multiple interviews is not to achieve objective generality, but to talk about evolving research findings with people located differently in relation to a particular institutional apparatus. The first young person I interviewed was Khaled, and that interview significantly informed the trajectory of this research. From this single account, I could see quite clearly that young people’s efforts to remain housed were shaped by the institutional work they were doing in other settings. After my interview with Khaled, I did not interview another young person until a few months after initiating fieldwork. I was introduced to Khaled through a friend of mine – a local social worker

Community-Based Institutional Ethnography  23

with whom Khaled had had a long and trusting relationship. I coordinated all subsequent interviews on my own, and it took me a while to get my footing in the community and establish myself as someone who was worthy of young people’s trust. In an effort to ensure young people felt safe and comfortable during the interview process, I began by interviewing them in pairs (e.g., friends or intimate partners). Sometimes this worked well, but on other occasions, it seemed that a conversation about how one came to stay at SYS was not one that people wanted to have in front of a friend or intimate partner. The focus of these interviews was meant to be people’s institutional work, but I found that particularly when interviewing people in pairs, conversations settled into a gossip session: descriptions of physical fights, break-ups, name-calling, and so on. Even during ­individual interviews, when young people described their work to accomplish a variety of institutional tasks, explanations of how their work made them feel overwhelmed descriptions of what they actually did. Frequently, I was unable to direct an interviewee towards the institutional terrain I was hoping to explore. Euphemisms such as, “I slipped through the cracks” or “my worker was a bitch” obscured the complexity of the institutional work with which they were engaged. In the end, young people’s inability or reluctance to talk about their work in institutional terms was an important observation. Some young people’s lives are embedded in institutional processes that they do not fully understand or even recognize. This makes it challenging for them to work effectively in institutional settings. As I became more comfortable at SYS, I learned how to ask young people if they were interested in talking with me about their institutional work. I waited for them to initiate conversations with me about my research, and then later I would ask them if they were interested in helping me with it. I always offered to take people out for coffee in exchange for their time and expertise, and so most interviews were conducted over coffee or lunch. The interviews were guided by a single question: how did you come to stay at SYS? How they told this story was up to them; my interest was in the institutional work that preceded and followed their interactions with the shelter. I also avoided using the word “interview” when I talked about my research. People’s experiences were that interviews were institutional tools, used for assessment purposes or to determine eligibility for services. The walk to and from the coffee shop with a young person became an important part of the interview experience. During an interview, it was not uncommon for me to return to a conversation that was started on

24  Youth Work

our walk from the shelter. On the way back to SYS, we often stopped and took care of an errand together or simply window-shopped, as we continued to chat. By the time I had been in the field for six months, young people were asking me when we could go for coffee, and the trips to the coffee shop became longer and longer. Once we had made ourselves cozy in one of two favourite downtown coffee shops, we would sit and chat well after I had turned off my audio recorder. My sense is that it was important for people to have a chance to spend time away from the shelter to enjoy a decadent hot chocolate or a big piece of cake while someone simply listened. Because I wanted to understand how service provision for youth was organized, I also conducted interviews with shelter workers and other frontline practitioners who work with young people. I would typically invite shelter workers to do an interview with me at the end of their shifts. Practitioners with more flexibility in their work schedules sometimes made time for me while they were at work or during a lunch break. As often as possible I tried to do these interviews outside of the institutions where they were employed. But in some cases, people preferred to speak with me while they were at work. I attempted to interview or speak with people who work in the institutions where youth are active: teachers, CAS and OW workers, police and probation officers, mental health practitioners, shelter workers, and youth workers. Some of these conversations were easier to set up than others. After months of playing phone tag with people who work with young people in a mental health capacity, I eventually interviewed a friend of my father’s who was a mental health nurse at the Norton Building of Middlesborough’s local psychiatric hospital. Wendell, the shelter’s executive director, facilitated my interviews with police officers, and the CAS worker I interviewed was someone I had gone to high school with. I found that in most instances, practitioners were willing to speak with me, but uninterested in being interviewed. While no one explicitly turned down a request to be interviewed, they simply did not make themselves available to me in this capacity. When interviewing practitioners, I did not use an interview protocol, I simply asked them to tell me about an ordinary workday. In these interviews, I attempted to understand how people were engaging particular texts or text-mediated technologies. Many of the technologies people engage as part of their work are computerized, rather than strictly textual formats. While the interface differs, the organizing capacity remains the same. Thus, I use the word text or text-based to denote

Community-Based Institutional Ethnography  25

ideas, information, or data that is bound to some tangible form of communication that enables replicability and movement of content across time and space. I did things such as bring the shelter’s intake form with me to interviews with shelter workers. I asked them how they would work through the form with someone requesting to stay at the youth shelter. The chief of police brought me to the main office to compare the latest iteration of the Police Standards Act (1990) with the significantly less extensive versions of the past. Often I would ask people to describe how they were activating or using a particular technology as they were going about their actual work. During an interview, I also noted how people took up particular institutional narratives in descriptions of their work. Esoteric language and institutional discourse provide a framework for coordinating people’s work across a multiplicity of institutional sites (DeVault & McCoy, 2006). These discursive transformations require practices for converting an unfolding social world into fixed terms through which it can be institutionally known and administrated (Miller & Rose, 2008). My efforts to note how people activate various organizing schemas and institutional vocabularies in their talk allowed me to track how discourse spans (and links) people, programs, agencies, sectors, and so forth, providing a unifying framework for how to do one’s work and how this work will be assessed. My goal was to draw attention to the processes whereby people’s actual experiences are subsumed in discourse, objectified as abstract data, or transformed into the terms through which they become institutionally recognizable or actionable.

Textual Analysis The combined use of ethnographic observation and interviewing with textual analysis is institutional ethnography’s distinct contribution. The goal is not simply to give precedence to people’s actual experience, but to trace these local experiences into realms of organization coordinated extra-locally. These latter forms of organization are primarily textual. Institutional ethnography aims to figure out how people’s work activities (and thus their actual experiences) are co-ordered via policies, official procedures, online reporting systems, databases, school attendance records, shelter intake forms, institutional performance indicators, and so on. Adhering to institutional ethnographic principles of textual analysis (D.E. Smith, 2006), I have been attentive to these documents as they are

26  Youth Work

actually used. As I have already indicated, interviews often focused on how people use particular documents in their institutional work. As much as possible, I also attempted to engage text-based work processes myself (e.g., writing a “contact note” about a young person’s court appearance and adding this to his or her case file at the shelter; adding information to the federal Homeless Individuals and Families Information System (HIFIS) database; and reading the “incident report” binder). More often, though, textual analysis took place in my office at home, as I traced my way through the policy documents, institutional websites, and textual processes that comprise an extensive institutional framework, within which people’s local work is situated. By examining these texts and text-mediated technologies as they direct people towards certain courses of action, spelling out official relations among people who represent various social categories, and coordinating a particular way of knowing, I was able to piece together a description of how people’s work to seek shelter is connected and/or connects them to other institutional processes, policies, and knowledge. In many instances, the cross-referencing that occurs within the texts themselves (the reference to Service Canada texts in the OW application process or the links between sheltering and CAS documentary processes) reveal materially how particular institutional bodies are linked in ways that produce the cracks young people describe falling through. Closing Thoughts Chapter 1 describes my research problematic, overarching research frame, and specific research activities. A central aim of this chapter is to clearly delineate the involvement of participants in the research process. Rather than contributing to data collection and analysis, participants were consulted throughout the project as I checked my analysis and findings against their knowledge of the youth sector. They also directed the application of research findings. While I took the lead in writing funding applications and creating presentations of findings for stakeholders, this work always occurred at the request of participants. Other aspects of the knowledge translation process (e.g., the creation of the Transitioning Life-Skills Program or the provision of professional development for staff) occurred more collaboratively. Clearly, this project does not adhere to the principles of communitybased participatory research (CBPR) – where all aspects of a project are carried out collaboratively. Without funding to pay for young people’s

Community-Based Institutional Ethnography  27

sustained involvement as peer researchers in the process, for instance, the principles of CBPR are difficult to uphold. In order for people – particularly young people with access to very few material resources – to actively and consistently contribute to a project like this, they must be adequately compensated for their time. I would have needed to include paid opportunities for research training, as well as a mechanism for addressing the flow of young people on and off the project as their lives evolved. While a year and a half does not feel like a long time in an adult’s life, this same period of time can involve significant transitions for youth, particularly those young people who lack the stability of a home, supportive adults, and a consistent relationship with an organization or institution like a school. Practitioners also need to be financially compensated for their contributions to a project. This financial compensation generally takes the form of paid release time to participate in research training, brainstorming sessions, research, analysis, and writing. Without a sufficient budget to compensate people for their time, I focused on including people in the aspects of the project that they deemed most relevant: the translation and dissemination of research findings. The youth who participated in a focus group discussion were invited to use a summary of their discussion (recorded on chart paper), as well as a presentation of emerging research findings, to generate feedback for the local CAS. In the end, they wrote a “letter to my worker,” which articulated what it’s like to be involved with CAS from their perspectives. I also wrote an accompanying report, which was submitted to the CAS and circulated to other local organizations. The adult shelter workers were involved in the community development aspects of the project as program developers, one-on-one youth mentors, and in the case of the shelter’s executive director, Wendell, in the production of the Ontario Trillium Foundation grant application. Some shelter workers (e.g., Rose) also served as key informants – people with whom I would check my emerging understanding of a particular institutional process or series of events. My initial disappointment that young people were uninterested in participating in the project as researcher-activists dissipated once I better understood the realities of a life lived without stable shelter, income, food sources, and relationships. It didn’t take me long to recognize that young people’s voluntary and sustained participation in a research project was unlikely without sufficient supports to increase the stability of other aspects of their lives. While I expect that Wendell would have

28  Youth Work

supported shelter workers’ involvement as researchers, I wanted to make sure that youth saw the research process as distinct from the information sharing that is required of them when they seek access to shelter, food, healthcare, and so forth. If the people who conduct shelter intake interviews were the same as those conducting research interviews, the distinction between the two processes may have been more challenging to maintain. Throughout the project, I altered the research design such that it better fit the actual circumstances of the research setting and participants’ lives, as well as the projects’ emerging findings. This process of continuous reflection and revision is not idiosyncratic to my research; it is a feature of action-oriented community-based research. In this first chapter and throughout the book, I draw the reader’s attention to this aspect of my work because a) it is not always granted visibility in scholarly writing, b) it fundamentally shapes a project’s outcomes, and c) in my case, the implementation of knowledge translation activities served as an important source of data through which I investigated the human service interface. My own efforts to get things done as a researcher in the human service sector helped me understand the difficulties youth and adult practitioners face in their efforts to coordinate effective and timely supports for youth.

Chapter Two

Getting Welfare

During some of my first interviews with youth and practitioners who work with youth, I noticed that people described experiences of ineffectual institutional engagement as times when they (or one of their young clients) “slipped through the cracks.” This metaphorical description is a gloss for what actually happened. In most cases, the people involved were not entirely sure how things went wrong. The specific nature of the cracks that are produced, how these cracks arise, and how a young person “slips” through them are left uninvestigated and thus unidentified. The next five chapters illustrate how differences in the organization of people’s work result in what institutional ethnographers call moments of disjuncture and what practitioners and youth call cracks. My intention is to illuminate these metaphorical cracks or theoretical disjunctures as they actually occur in young people’s lives. When I asked young people to outline what they did in a particular institutional process, they described their work as a series of dialogues, typically between themselves and their workers. No matter how much I prodded, they were rarely able to describe the actual institutional process that was engaged.1 While they frequently used institutional terms (“discharge,” “intake,” “independent living,” and so on), they either took the terms’ meaning for granted or were unclear about the meaning and therefore unable to describe the associated institutional process that is signified by the term. Young people’s experiential framing of their work – “I slipped through the cracks,” “I signed out of care,” or “I 1 Khaled is an exception in this regard. He described his institutional work with considerable clarity.

30  Youth Work

was rushed into being responsible” – is shaped by, and contributes to, an inability to see how their work is coordinated, institutionally. This chapter focuses on Khaled’s work to secure housing. My objective is to show how a single account can be used to bring a research problematic into view, and how a particular experience can be used to illuminate generalized/generalizing social relations. At the time of our interview, Khaled was eighteen years old. He had arrived in Canada as a refugee when he was eight years old and had been living in Ontario ever since. Shortly after immigrating to Canada, Khaled became involved with the Ontario Children’s Aid Society (CAS). At sixteen years of age, he was discharged from CAS “care” and over the next two years he was unable to secure stable housing. Initially, I asked Khaled to tell me how he got connected to Ontario Works (OW) – Ontario’s provincial social assistance program. As he began telling his story, however, it became apparent that for Khaled (and most of the other young people I have worked with) a story about getting welfare is first a story about finding a safe place to sleep. Further, the degree to which Khaled is able to get and maintain shelter is intricately connected to his ability to navigate social assistance, child welfare, education, and immigration systems that operate provincially and federally. His efforts to secure shelter are co-ordered with people’s work to evaluate and monitor welfare applications; they are shaped in relation to the production, maintenance, and auditing of CAS case-files; they affect his participation (or lack of) in school; and they are challenged by his citizenship status in Canada. When Khaled applies for OW, he enters an institutional domain where his experiences must be translated into institutionally actionable categories in order to get the things that he needs. While other people’s work to get OW will happen differently than Khaled’s did, the complex of institutional organization that his story brings to light is relatively fixed. The experiences will change, but the backdrop is the same for each person who inquires about staying at the emergency youth shelter in the small Ontario town where my research is situated. Getting Connected Khaled began his story about getting OW by telling me he was sleeping on a bench: “I was living just up on Westin Street, just like at that little bench, and then a friend of Sarah’s said to me that there was a station

Getting Welfare 31

– just like a place where you can go and sleep a day and get out” (interview, 2007). The “station” is a warming room. When he arrives, he is told by a staff member that there is “a welfare system that you can go to and then he showed me where to go and stuff. So I went down there and you can’t go there. Like they won’t even let you come to the building if you don’t have welfare” (interview, 2007, original emphasis). Institutional protocols for communicating with welfare administrators meant that Khaled was denied entry into the building. As such, he was not granted access to an actual person who could help him determine how to initiate the application process productively: “I didn’t know anything about the process and no one told me. So anyways, I pretty much ended up just leaving and then a friend invited me to sleep at their house” (interview, 2007, my emphasis). It is only when he arrives at the youth shelter (a couple of months later) that he learns that a person’s initial contact with OW must happen over the phone: “You have to make a phone call. It takes three hours on the phone. It’s a process … some automated thing” (interview, 2007). During his first attempt to access the phone system, however, Khaled discovers that he needs social and health insurance numbers in order to proceed with the application process. Khaled remains unable to speak with an actual person until he is able to key these identifying numbers into the phone. A person’s first encounter with OW is mediated by an automated phone system, which is standardized and thus unrelenting in its adherence to OW policy directives. The automated system makes it impossible for Khaled to engage with the application process. He is able to explain to me (but not to OW’s automated application system) why he does not have the documents that are required for him to initiate the process of applying for welfare: I didn’t have all of the documents to provide me with – to actually get that access. And because I was with Children’s Aid and then I got taken out of Children’s Aid, Children’s Aid did a lot of the work for me, and since I didn’t have that [relationship anymore], I wasn’t able [to access the information they had about me]. (interview, 2007)

An advocate – or someone with comprehensive knowledge of OW policy directives – may have recognized that Khaled’s age, emergency status, and level of frustration justified initiating the application process in person rather than over the telephone: “In some situations it

32  Youth Work

may be impracticable to begin the application process by telephone and staff may determine that the applicant would be better assisted by proceeding directly to an in-person appointment at the local office” (Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services, 2001a). Unfortu­ nately, Khaled was not supported by a knowledgeable advocate and was not sure how to explain his circumstances to an OW administrator, given that he was unable to use the automated system or inquire directly at the local OW offices. The requirement to initiate contact with OW over the phone enables the production of a textual (or audio) record of people’s encounters with OW, which can inform the creation or maintenance of an applicant’s file. An automated phone system makes sense if the goal is to maximize human resources; create a paper trail, which enables an audit of local OW operations; and efficiently monitor the distribution of government funds. For a young person who doesn’t “know anything about the process” of applying for OW or how to secure the documentation to proceed with the application, simply demonstrating OW eligibility can feel like an insurmountable task.

Demonstrating Eligibility – Part I When people phone the automated OW system, the textual coordination of their work is not obvious to them. By initiating contact with the system, Khaled assumes the categorical identity of “an applicant” and must follow a script laid out in the OW policy directives. From the relevancies of OW policy, Khaled’s experiences with homelessness disappear. He is now simply an applicant and the person who will process his application is an “administrator.” The administrator’s initial encounters with an applicant revolve around the production of an institutional determination of basic income eligibility. The construction of basic income eligibility must occur textually so as to enable an audit by the Ministry of Community and Social Services. In order for the administrator to demonstrate that she or he has conducted an institutional verification of information required to determine income eligibility, an applicant must provide documentation (such as bank statements and institutional identification), which enable the administrator to do her or his job. An applicant’s encounters with OW and an administrator’s interactions with OW applicants and welfare beneficiaries are shaped by provincial criteria for income assistance:

Getting Welfare 33 No person is eligible for income assistance unless, (a) the person is resident in Ontario; (b) the budgetary requirements of the person and any dependants exceed their income and their assets do not exceed the prescribed limits, as provided for in the regulations; (c) the person and the prescribed dependants provide the information and the verification of information required to determine eligibility including, (i) personal identification information, as prescribed, (ii) financial information, as prescribed, and (iii) any other prescribed information; and (d) the person and the person’s dependants meet any other prescribed conditions relating to eligibility. (Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services, 1997, p. 4).

The above criteria enable an audit of local “delivery agents” (or OW agencies). They reflect the relevancies of current OW (and other social and economic) policies and they facilitate provincial and federal accounting and accountability practices. From Khaled’s standpoint, however, the textual coordination of the application process is obscured. In order to successfully engage the ­application process, one needs to recognize that OW eligibility is not coordinated in relation to an experience (of hunger, poverty, isolation, homelessness, and so forth); rather, eligibility is constructed textu­ ally  through documented evidence of people’s official financial circumstances and their other institutional affiliations and/or statuses. Ontario Works administrators may be trained as social workers, but the OW directives orient their work to determining and verifying eligibility for welfare. Without any institutional documentation of his existence, there was no way for an OW administrator to begin to process Khaled’s application. When I ask whether Khaled contacted the Children’s Aid Society (CAS) to request the missing documents, he tells me that he called them but I can’t [get access to my file]. You can’t ask for it. Once you’re done with them, you’re done with them, is what they told me … they were able to get my health card without doing a lot of the stuff – the hassles that I went through. They can just get it right – but I don’t know how to do it. (interview, 2007, my emphasis)

34  Youth Work

Case files are ubiquitous in social service agencies. Their production and maintenance shape practitioners’ frontline work with young people. Decisions about an institutional course of action (which will be documented in a “plan of care”), with regard to a young person in CAS custody happen in relation to information contained in his or her case file. But the colloquial description of these files as belonging to the young people they represent, and whose care they inform, is misleading. The file that Khaled needs, and the institutional documentation in it, are not his. The case files are the CAS worker’s to produce and maintain. They contain documentation of the CAS worker’s professional work with young people, and it is against the merits of these files that the CAS worker’s job performance is assessed. Khaled correctly identified that the CAS case file would contain the kinds of institutional documentation he required to initiate the OW application process. But gaining access to his file is mediated by other institutional relations. The process of becoming a “Crown Ward,” and subsequently of “terminating wardship,” is coordinated legally through the court system. At the point of “discharge,” a young person is participating in (at minimum) two interconnected institutional processes. If the young person is, as Khaled was, under eighteen years of age, the “Society” (or the youth) must apply to the courts to terminate the wardship order. Once a wardship order has been terminated and a young person is discharged from care, “all activity on the part of the Agency with respect to the young person ceases and the file is closed” (Kawartha Haliburton Children’s Aid Society, 2006, p. 5). The caseworker’s decision to deny Khaled access to his file occurred in the context of policy documents that are inaccessible to him. Indeed, most of the young people I spoke to told me that decisions regarding their care are a function of the degree to which they comply with the Society and are otherwise held in their worker’s favourable regard. Such a determination precludes the possibility of productive action on the part of the young person, who explains his or her experiences with the child welfare system with statements such as, “my worker hates me” or “my worker is a bitch.” I spent six months in negotiations with our local CAS agency in order to gain access to their policies and procedures. Having finally gained access to the policy documents, I was able to see how Khaled’s CAS worker justified restricting his access to the file: it was “closed.” I could then also speak with a CAS worker to learn how she uses this policy

Getting Welfare 35

directive in her work with youth. I learned that CAS workers in Middlesborough (Khaled had been involved with a CAS in another city) are actually obliged to disclose the information in a young person’s case file to him or her upon request – even if the file is closed. While the information contained in a CAS case file is protected under Ontario’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA), young people can request access to their own files through a provincial Freedom of Information (FOI) request. Had Khaled had access to an informed advocate and a five-dollar processing fee, he might have filed an FOI, gaining access to the information in his CAS case file. The FOI request process takes approximately thirty days. Like Khaled, many shelter workers are unable to help someone productively chart a route through the public and social service sector because the institutional organization of this realm is not evi­d ent to them either. Significant turnover among staff at the youth shelter – influenced by a prevalence of unpredictable “relief” shifts, a lack of full-time work, and poor pay – contribute to a limited understanding of the social service interface. Further, a shelter worker occupies one of the lowest rungs in an inter-agency hierarchy. Despite the fact that the first floor of the shelter is occupied by CAS youth in care, a shelter worker does not have access to CAS policies. While the shelter is a hub of information for youth who are learning to navigate a complex of institutions and institutional processes, very few shelter workers understand how all the pieces of this institutional puzzle fit together. While helping people get onto OW is ordinary work for shelter staff, they are rarely in a position to advocate on behalf of someone like Khaled. Their daily and nightly work to prepare and pack lunches, set out and clean up breakfast, get young people out of bed and off to school and appointments, cook and serve dinner, clean out vacated rooms, and so on, means that their efforts to connect a person with other agencies are based on a generalized model for how things work. Very few of the young people I knew at the shelter had health and social insurance cards. Many had memorized their numbers so that they could provide them when asked (they are asked for these numbers during most institutional intake procedures). Others had not. For them, getting new cards entailed a trip to the Ministry of Health and Service Canada offices (which are within walking distance from OW and the shelter).

36  Youth Work

Demonstrating Eligibility – Part II When Khaled contacted Service Canada he learned that his refugee status made his work different: “I’m not a landed – like I don’t have my status in Canada, so … even though I’ve been here for like thirteen years, or something like that … [my residency] expires every year. So every year you have to go through something to get your social insurance back” (interview, 2007). Because my objective is to learn from Khaled about his work, I ask for clarification: “Your social insurance and your health card – you have to apply for both every single year?” Khaled patiently reiterates what he has told me: Yep. My social insurance expires – I have to do mine again within the next month, and I can’t do it in Middlesborough, so I have to go to [a big urban centre]. I’ve gotta go to the Canadian Immigration Agency, and I have to go and bring all my documents, my immigration documents, and then I sit in an interview place with a person, like even though I’ve had [a temporary resident’s card], they gotta do the whole thing because they need to know it’s you. So you sit there and talk to the person and show them all your IDs and you answer a couple of questions. (interview, 2007)

Khaled arrived in Canada as a refugee at eight years of age. When his biological mother left him and his sister, he was placed in the care of his extended family. Eventually CAS became his legal guardian, when it became apparent that his uncle was physically abusing him. Khaled was discharged from CAS care while he was still designated as a “minor.” He is considered a child in Ontario, under Citizenship and Immigra­ tion Canada policies, until he is eighteen years of age (Citizenship and Immigration Canada, 2008, p. 60). According to my reading of Canada’s citizenship and immigration policies and a series of discussions with local settlement workers, it appears that Khaled is in Canada on a Temporary Resident Permit (formally known as a Minister’s Permit), which has to be renewed every year. These permits are granted at the discretion of the Canadian government, when a person is ineligible to apply for permanent residency status. In Khaled’s case, he is unable to secure permanent resident status because he cannot provide documentation such as his birth certificate or passport. Khaled’s work to gain shelter is inextricably linked to his experiences with the social assistance system. In turn, his ability to navigate OW is mediated by his temporary resident status within the

Getting Welfare 37

Canadian immigration system. Khaled’s ability to house himself hinges on the degree to which he can find his way through a complex of densely enmeshed policies and procedures. A few weeks after arriving at SYS,2 Khaled receives temporary health and social insurance numbers. At this point, he is able to phone OW again in an attempt to establish eligibility to apply for funds. When I ask him to describe the phone call, Khaled tells me that: I had to state what my circumstances were, like that I didn’t have a place to live, that I didn’t have a job and stuff, and why I wanted to get on it … At this stage it is all on the phone – you’re not even qualified at this stage. When you’re on the phone, you don’t get qualified. It’s just a process to eliminate – to say, are you able to get it. And then they’ll set you up with an interview. (interview, 2007, original emphasis)

It takes three hours on the phone in order to establish that Khaled is eligible to apply for OW. After this phone interview, he is assigned an OW caseworker. This person conducts an intake interview in order to determine whether Khaled is qualified to receive social assistance. When he is approved, it is under conditions based on his immigration status and age. Monitoring Welfare Eligibility Instead of receiving financial support directly, Khaled’s cheque was sent to a Salvation Army representative with whom he met biweekly. Ontario Works policy directives require young people to meet regularly “with a responsible adult or agency that has agreed to maintain contact with the person to encourage the person to maintain living arrangements that are conducive to meeting the conditions for eligibility” (Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services, 2001b, p. 13). When I ask Khaled what was discussed at these biweekly meetings, he responds that: It was just to say, like am I doing the right things – am I going to school? To keep them from suspending me … the money that was given was for

2 In this particular case, the shelter absorbed the costs for Khaled to stay there because his unique circumstances put him in a position where he was unable to apply for OW to pay for his “bed and lodging” costs.

38  Youth Work food, you know, they would say “what are you spending your money on – the 100 dollars – what are you spending the money on? ” Well, obviously food. (interview, 2007)

Khaled’s sense is that these meetings were redundant. Of course, he was spending his money on food; he could not afford to spend it on anything else. He goes on to explain that “with me, too, since I was sixteen – I also had to visit my [OW] worker on a regular basis. It’s kind of like being on probation, you know, like go and report how you’re spending your money, how things are working” (Khaled, field note, 2007). Khaled was required to bring his immigration documents to each of these meetings in order to verify that his residency status had not changed. Conditions of surveillance are perpetuated through these meetings and are also relations through which race and class are enacted and intertwined. Roxanna Ng (1988) describes class as a “process which is enacted and re-enacted by people’s daily activities in securing their livelihood” (p. 14). Regulations based on age and immigration status structure Khaled’s work to maintain OW eligibility and ultimately to sustain housing. His work to secure shelter and the OW worker’s efforts to monitor and evaluate his eligibility are both processes individuals engage as a means of “securing their livelihood[s].” They are processes through which people are drawn into relations that co-­order their work. As Khaled and his OW worker engage the technologies for managing the provision of welfare, they acquire institutional identities that shape how the rest of their institutional work unfolds. Khaled and his OW worker’s interactions are shaped by relations of capital: an administrator’s job is to “monitor” an applicant’s eligibility for social assistance (Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services, 2001b). A directive to monitor Khaled’s welfare eligibility coordinates his OW worker’s response to the problem of his not attending school and later to the problem of his job loss and eviction. Khaled’s OW worker was required to “maintain an appropriate level of ongoing documentation and monitoring of attendance at school or training for each student” (Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services, 2001b, form #2221, p. 15). When Khaled was on OW, his attendance records at school indicated that he was not regularly attending: “I was a bit into my school year when I started skipping school, you know, not coming to school because I was not eating and stuff, because I was kind of tired or because I couldn’t put up with people, because I didn’t have that head on me” (Khaled, interview, 2007).

Getting Welfare 39

Regular monitoring of school attendance is an audit requirement for a social assistance–granting agency (Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services, 2009, p. 1). From OW’s standpoint, Khaled’s poor attendance records threatened his funding eligibility. From Khaled’s standpoint, hunger, exhaustion, and mental health issues made it hard to go to school each day. The OW worker’s professional mandate is not to ensure that Khaled is eating, getting enough rest, or maintaining mental health stability. Her responsibility (as constituted through her agency’s provincial audit) is to provide documentation of her work to monitor participants’ “ongoing eligibility and making determinations about the refusal, reduction, or cancellation of assistance” (Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services, 2008a, p. 6). Charged with referring OW participants “to employment assistance activities that reflect their individual skill, experience, circumstances and employment needs, as well as labour market realities” (Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services, 2008b, p. 4), Khaled's caseworker advised Khaled to drop out of school and enter into an OWdriven training initiative: I dropped out of school to do this program because my caseworker said that I should do this program because it was going to benefit me or whatever … So anyways, I decided to leave my grade 11 out of the question and I went and did this [apprenticeship program] … I finished my program and I got employed. (Khaled, interview, 2007)

Training and employment readiness programs are organized by the same kinds of ideas that underpin a life-skills program. They are part of an effort to create the self-managed subject. They are also situated in relation to discourses about “continuous quality improvement” or “constant job-readiness” (Miller & Rose, 2008). In this instance, the training program was also competitively organized: only the top-ranked student was guaranteed employment after graduation. The proliferation of (re)training programs constitutes a competitive market in and of itself, which can provide economic opportunities for colleges, instructors, and private businesses. This complex of politicoinstitutional technologies – the collection of school attendance data as a means of monitoring welfare eligibility; the OW worker’s response to Khaled’s poor school attendance; his participation in an apprenticeship program; the competitive organization of his apprenticeship and the entire field of job-readiness or training programs – are relations of ruling. While these relations shape people’s conduct towards particular

40  Youth Work

ends, the capriciousness of human agency means that outcomes are unpredictable. A neo-liberal narrative would see Khaled rewarded for successfully navigating a competitive apprenticeship program. He graduated at the top of his class and as a result, he was the only person granted an OWsponsored employment opportunity working with a local electrician. After four months of work, however, he was “let go”: I was working for him, but welfare was paying me. He wasn’t paying me. He gave me like, two bucks. You know? … [OW] said that they would pay him for three months, and they paid him for the three months, and the fourth month came, and he paid me nine bucks an hour. I worked that month and then he let me go. So after that I didn’t have anything else to turn to, ‘cause I didn’t have a job. I stopped paying rent because my rent was $600. (Khaled, interview, 2007, original emphasis)

An incentive program like the one Khaled participated in is meant to increase the work experiences of those struggling to gain legitimate employment. Unfortunately, for a sixteen-year-old without Canadian citizenship status or a high school diploma, four months of employment experience does not make him a competitive prospect on the labour market. In addition, the wage he earned, coupled with the limited duration of his employment, were not enough to provide him with any kind of financial stability. When Khaled was “let go” within the first four months of work, he couldn’t afford to pay his rent. He looked for work but was unable to find anything, so he phoned OW: I called them, and I said like, I just got off welfare – you guys terminated me when my three months with this place was up, right. And now he let me go. I don’t have anything else, and my rent needs to be paid. I’ve searched and searched, and it’s hard to get a job, I told them. And do you know you can’t get on [welfare again] for another year? What do you want me to do for that year? (Khaled, interview, 2007, original emphasis)

When he calls OW, Khaled learns that he is no longer eligible for funding. In the meantime, he is evicted from his apartment. Without a place to stay, he goes to the local warming room each night to sleep. All the while, he “kept hassling welfare to see if I could get back with them – for them to just help me out for a month or two or whatever – like how long it took me to get a job” (Khaled, interview, 2007). But Khaled’s

Getting Welfare 41

efforts to “hassle” OW were not productive. When I asked him if this work took place over the phone, he answered, “No, no, I walked into the building because if you phone them you get that automated thing … you never get a person … So I just went in to the place and said I wanted to see this person” (interview, 2007). Khaled was not interested in phoning OW’s automated application system to determine whether he was eligible to apply for welfare. He had already been told that he was not eligible to reapply for another year. When you listen to his account, you see that from where Khaled is standing, the official institutional process does not offer him the option he is seeking. He wants to explain to someone how his particular circumstances require an individualized response. He defies the accepted institutional process because his sense is that it has already failed him. He is unable to identify an effective response to his problem because the policies and processes through which OW is accomplished are not evident to him. Thus, it appears as though he is choosing to circumvent an official process. When Khaled walked into the OW office without an appointment, he reports that they threatened to call security to have him removed from the building. But he just stood there and said: “I’m not leaving. I want my worker. I’m just here to talk” (interview, 2007). In his account, they eventually agreed to have him speak with his OW worker, but by this point, Khaled was angry: “And when I went in I was really pissed. Like, she could tell that I was really pissed. She didn’t want to be alone, so we had the security guards standing there while I talked. And then I  talked, and when I talked I was calm” (interview, 2007). Khaled could not tell his story to the automated phone service. He needed to talk to an actual person. I ask him what he told his OW worker, and he responds that told her his “situation.” He told her that he felt that the apprenticeship was a “set-up”: They paid him to pay me. In my idea, he should have paid me right from the get-go and welfare should have been there just to support me if something was to happen. If I fell down, they should have been there to pick me up or something. That’s how I felt. Not the other way around where they pay this guy for me to work, and then all of a sudden when that time period is up he has no use for me, ’cause, you know, it was kind of free labour for him … That’s how I felt. So that’s how I put it to her. (interview, 2007)

While Khaled’s argument seems reasonable to me, in order for him to effectively self-advocate, he needs to be able to speak from within the

42  Youth Work

terms of OW policy. It does not do him any good to tell an OW worker – someone whose job it is to monitor his eligibility – that he feels that the structure of the apprenticeship program is flawed. While the points he makes are valid, the OW worker’s response is shaped by the logic of the OW directives for working with minors who have had their OW eligibility terminated. When I ask what her response was, he tells me that she said, “It’s policy. Policy is this; policy is that – and you’ve been suspended. You’ve left our program and you gotta wait a full year before you can [reapply]” (interview, 2007). Recently, I heard another young man use this exact same line – “policy is this; policy is that” – to describe his OW worker’s explanation of her inability to help his girlfriend get to the city where her “baby bonus” had arrived (field note, 2008). In both instances, these men threw up their arms in exasperation with a social assistance system that is organized outside their fields of view and consequently is not useful to them when they attempt to engage it. How It Works Part of one’s work as an institutional ethnographer is to trace one’s way into the administrative world of policy and institutional requirements in order to see how things work. It took me a year to figure out how things worked for Khaled. Even so, there are contradictions that I remain unable to reconcile. In the OW policy directives, the only thing stated about reapplication for people who are less than eighteen years old is that a “participant under age 18 who was eligible for assistance in his/her own right and is determined to be ineligible due to unjustified absences from school cannot reapply for assistance as an applicant under age 18” (Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services, 2001b, p. 13).3 I continue to conduct my own work from within these inconsistencies to figure out what actually happened. Six months after my interview with Khaled, I accompanied Desiree4 to an OW appointment. Immediately, she was told by her OW worker, 3 Over the course of completing this book, the OW policy directives had changed to allow young people to reapply for eligibility if they had been deemed ineligible on the basis of poor attendance. Further, a flexible approach to assessment is advocated: “Each case is assessed on its own merit. The rules around unjustified absences and other ineligibility reasons, and the consequences thereof must be clearly explained and understood by the applicant or participant” (Ontario Ministry of Community

Getting Welfare 43

Monique, that her file had been terminated because she had not brought in her monthly income statement. Monique explained that she had “reinstated” Desiree’s case, but that Desiree needed to fill out the missing income statements. This allowed me to ask Monique what happens when a person’s case is terminated. She explained that once a case is terminated, an individual is no longer eligible for OW (unless, as in Desiree’s circumstance, the case is reinstated). At the end of Desiree’s meeting, I asked how it could happen that a young person who completed an OW apprenticeship program, got a job, and then was laid off, became ineligible for social assistance. I asked whether the person’s case would be terminated. She explained that if a person had quit or been fired, he or she would be ineligible for funding for six months. Reading back through Khaled’s story, I see that I had inserted the term “laid off” where he had said “let go.” The two terms initiate two very different processes – they point someone like Monique towards different institutional courses of action. In Khaled’s case, termination meant something different than it did for Desiree. For the individual sitting on the other side of the computer, it is unclear how an OW worker can press a few buttons to reinstate one case, but is unable to do the same for someone else. The explanation for Monique’s actions lies beyond the scope of a young person’s local knowledge. Closing Thoughts While Khaled’s experiences are unique, they serve as an analytic point of entry into an administrative world that is relatively standardized. A young person’s work to gain access to shelter is organized in relation to a complex politico-administrative regime (G.W. Smith, 1990). As a heuristic device, the term politico-administrative regime directs us to identify the ways that young people’s experiences seeking shelter are coordinated institutionally. In this chapter, I have attempted to accomplish a generality of findings by moving from “a particular instance at

and Social Services, 2009, p. 8). Had this change in assessment practices been employed when Khaled was seeking temporary financial assistance, he might not have been evicted from his apartment. In fact, he might have been encouraged to return to school to complete his secondary school diploma. 4 Desiree is a sixteen-year-old woman who was staying at the shelter when I accompanied her to an OW appointment. I include this account because it informed my work to piece together the institutional backdrop to Khaled’s story.

44  Youth Work

a local level … to a description of a general form of organization, to social relations as a general course of action coordinated by texts” (G.W. Smith, 1990, p. 646). Other young people’s efforts to use the Ontario shelter system via OW funding will be different from Khaled’s, but the institutional backdrop will be the same for each person who “requests a bed” at an Ontario shelter for youth. All of the circumstances of a person’s life will be brought to bear on his or her experience with the process, but the policies that shape the process do not change. In Canada, as elsewhere (i.e., Australia, the US, and the UK), social and public services are increasingly organized around managerial or accounting objectives (Aucoin, 1995), rather than the standpoints of the people whose work it is to navigate these complex and overlapping politico-institutional matrices. Varney and van Vliet (2008) identify a relationship between the organization of the state (in terms of increasing privatization and decentralization) and people’s resulting dependency on non-profit organizations and informal safety networks for social and economic supports. Hulchanski (2006; 2002) points out that Canada’s free-market approach to housing means that we have the second smallest (next to the US) social housing sector of all the major Western nations. Beyond a lack of safe and affordable housing for young people, Khaled’s account illustrates the difficulties young people encounter attempting to navigate provincial and federal systems that have been ostensibly designed to offer support. Lacking the requisite policy expertise, it is very difficult for someone like Khaled (i.e., youth whose experiences are shaped by their multiple institutional relationships) to quickly and effectively access resources through formal channels. Without the generosity of friends and the youth shelter, Khaled could not have weathered the setbacks he encountered as safely. On multiple occasions I watched as young people turned up at SYS, requesting access to a bed after they had overstayed their welcome with friends. Often these same young people had been unable to maintain OW funding and were no longer admissible at the shelter due to past violations of curfew and so forth. With limited access to legal work opportunities, young men in Middlesborough typically end up taking on peripheral and low-paying roles in the drug trade (e.g., “running” drugs) and young women “hook up with” boyfriends or girlfriends who offer the security of food and shelter. In larger urban centres where I’ve worked with homeless youth as a researcher, many youth find work in the sex trade.

Chapter Three

“Signing Out” of Care

Young people between twelve and eighteen years of age can apply to the courts for a review of their child protection status (Ontario Ministry of Children and Youth Services, 1990, c. C.11 s. 65.1[4]). Between sixteen and eighteen years of age, young people can apply to the courts to terminate a Society or Crown wardship order. For some youth approaching sixteen years of age, this is certainly the goal. Colloquially, the process of terminating wardship is described as “signing out of care.” In attempting to learn how a young person “signs out of care,” I discovered that young people and their families are navigating complex institutional and bureaucratic processes that they do not adequately understand. The turn of phrase obscures the complicated institutional work that is involved in ending a wardship order with child protection services. This chapter examines child welfare policy, practice, and legislation from the standpoints of former “youth in care” who were homeless at the time of the research. Four stories of young people’s involvement with child protection services ground an investigation of Ontario’s child welfare system. Janella’s, Sylvia’s, Aiden’s, and Keelyn’s experiences allow us to see how provincial legislation, local practices, and policies shape young people’s efforts to secure housing, make money, finish school, and engage in relationships with others (e.g., their biological parents, intimate partners, children). My intention is for this chapter to demonstrate that no one simply “signs out” of care. Participants Janella was fifteen years old when I met her during my first summer of fieldwork at SYS. She had been placed at the shelter as part of a temporary care arrangement with the CAS. Janella participated in part of an

46  Youth Work

interview with Desiree that summer, and she and I went on to spend a lot of time together over my first four months in the field. When she was not making fun of my clothes or my hair, or the things that I said, she was telling me stories about the parties she went to and the people she spent her time with. One warm summer afternoon, Janella asked me to go with her to the Women’s Health Centre so that she could take a pregnancy test. This brief walk through the downtown probably took us thirty minutes, as Janella stopped to chat with groups of mostly adults hanging out in parking lots and on city benches. For a young woman who had grown up in a small town outside of Middlesborough, Janella had quickly made a name for herself among the city’s street-involved adults. A shelter worker introduced me to Sylvia on my first day of fieldwork at SYS. As Sylvia walked away from our encounter, the shelter worker turned to me and explained (as though I had asked) that Sylvia had just had an abortion. I had no reason to be curious about Sylvia’s reproductive health, and I was shocked at how easily he shared this intimate detail about her life with me (field note, 2007). Later, I became accustomed to this type of sharing. Observations and notes about young people’s institutional and social relationships, their physical and mental health, their “behaviours,” their daily and nightly comings and goings, and their personal and/or institutional histories are recorded in SYS case files. Once they are recorded in case files, the intimate details about a young person’s life become the “things you need to know” in your work with them. On two separate occasions over the course of the year, Sylvia was placed at SYS by child protective services. Almost a year after our first encounter in the foyer at SYS, Sylvia and I trudged through the snow together to do an interview and have hot chocolate at a local coffee shop. Aiden was twenty-four years old when I met him during my final spring season of fieldwork. When I told him about my research, he quickly offered to talk to me about his experiences at SYS and other shelters he had used over the past eight years. I interviewed him and his friend Leah (who was staying at SYS during a period of withdrawal from crack cocaine) outside on a busy café patio on a warm spring day. At the time of our interview, Keelyn was seventeen years old and pregnant with her second child. She was no longer in the care of the CAS. She, her twenty-four-year-old partner, Dean, and her baby, Ashton, had lived at the shelter on and off over the course of the last year, and I had known them all throughout this period in their lives. Keelyn and I arranged to do an interview twice. The first time when I went to meet her at the shelter, I was informed by Dean that she had

“Signing Out” of Care 47

gone by bus to a neighbouring city to pick up what he referred to as her “baby bonus.”1 The young people I worked with at the shelter often stood me up. I simply rescheduled my appointments with them for another time. I could see that efforts to align my activities with the way things are done at SYS, primarily my efforts to maintain clear professional boundaries, actually made it challenging for young people to communicate with me. Practitioners did not schedule appointments with them; they scheduled appointments for them. Experience had taught the young people at SYS that communication about meetings and appointments flowed in a single direction – from practitioners to youth. In Keelyn’s case, we rescheduled for the following week. On a hot spring day Keelyn, baby Ashton, and I walked down to a local café to sit on the patio and have lunch. Keelyn had requested that we go to this café – a hangout of local musicians, actors, and artists – because a social worker had taken her there in the past. After a brief discussion about her current pregnancy and her work to look after Ashton, I began my interview by asking her how she came to SYS for the first time. She explained that she had been living in a group home in Middlesborough “and then like last June I got out of CAS finally. I went to court and stuff and they let me out” (Keelyn, interview, 2008). Many of the young people I worked with over the course of this research applied to stay at SYS after having been discharged from CAS care. For many others, a relationship with the youth shelter began while they were still involved with CAS. The first floor of the youth shelter has traditionally been paid for by CAS and occupied by young people in CAS custody. Relations between CAS, SYS, these young people, and their families are coordinated (in part) via wardship orders that are established through the family court system and voluntary agreements negotiated between individual families, youth, and the Society. Child Protection in Ontario Child protection policy, legislation, and programming vary province by province. There are also local variations within each province. In Ontario, child protective services are provided by fifty-three Children’s 1 What Dean describes as Keelyn’s “baby bonus” is actually her Choice in Childcare allowance. Keelyn would not have been eligible to receive a National Child Benefit and Supplement because of her OW status.

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Aid Society (CAS) agencies. Individual agencies are provincially mandated through the Child and Family Services Act (CFSA). Children's Aid Society organizations are required to investigate allegations or evidence of harm, protect children under the age of sixteen, provide guardianship for young people committed to its care, supervise children assigned to the organization’s supervision, and/or ensure young people are adopted (Ontario Ministry of Children and Youth Services, 1990, c. C.11, s. 15 [3]). If someone is in the care of the CAS, it means that a Society or Crown wardship order or a temporary care agreement has been established through the Ontario Family Courts. Local policies and practices regarding care and custody are established by Children’s Aid Societies (Ontario Ministry of Children and Youth Services, 1990, c. C.11, s.15 [2]), which operate on behalf of the Ministry of Children and Youth Services. The practices and policies of individual Societies reflect statutes contained in the Child and Family Services Act (Ontario Ministry of Children and Youth Services, 1990) operating in conjunction with the Crown via texts such as the Children’s Law Reform Act (Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General, 1990b) or the Family Law Act (Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General, 1990a). They also reflect the local service provision contexts in relation to which a Society operates. Leaving “Care” For many young people, an initial interaction with the homelessness sector (e.g., shelters, drop-in programs, “in from the cold” programs) coincides with a discharge from institutional care (CAS, criminal justice, or mental health facilities). In order to understand how a young person’s experiences “in care” are organized so that they are discharged into the sheltering system, one must discover how this care is legislated through provincial and regional levels of government, policing, and the court system.

Society Wardship Orders Orders are established when the courts find that a young person is in need of protection. A Society wardship order is used to place a young person under the care and custody of the Society for a specified period of time. A Society wardship order cannot be in place for more than twenty-four months (Ontario Ministry of Children and Youth Services,

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1990, c. C.11, s. 57 [1]). After twenty-four months the order expires. At this point, young people are either returned to the “care and custody” of their parent or guardian or a status review is conducted and a Crown wardship order is established. When I asked Aiden to tell me about the first time he used the youth shelter, he explained how it coincided with the expiry of a Society wardship order: aiden: The very first time [I used the shelter], I was kicked out of my mother’s. CAS released me from their care and I had nowhere else to go, so I stayed at the SYS shelter … [I was] fifteen or sixteen when they [CAS] discharged me. n: So you weren’t yet a Crown ward? aiden: They couldn’t make me a Crown ward – rather, they kept me as a Society ward. In the end they couldn’t find a place to put me, so at the very end, they put me in Tom’s Motel. (interview, 2008)

At the end of his term as a Society ward, Aiden was “returned to the custody of a legal guardian” – his mother. However, conflict between him and his mother, which started before the Society wardship order, had not been resolved during his absence from home. Shortly after Aiden returned home, his mother “kicked him out” and he ended up at the youth shelter looking for a place to stay. Aiden was sixteen years old when he applied to stay at SYS; CAS was no longer required to provide him with institutional guardianship. Street Youth Shelter provides emergency shelter to people who are between sixteen and twenty-four years of age. Between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, a young person living outside the support of a guardian is an “independent minor” in terms of the Ontario Works Act (Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services, 1997). This status allows a young person to access the province’s publically funded shelter system. Like most of the people who stay on the shelter’s second floor, Aiden used his time at SYS to establish eligibility for Ontario Works (OW) social assistance2 and find a room in a rooming house. He finished secondary 2 As we saw in Khaled’s account, the process of establishing eligibility for Ontario Works as an independent minor is quite complex. First contact with the system is made via telephone. Later OW investigates a young person’s family and economic circumstances in order to determine whether or not he or she is eligible to apply for OW. It is at this point that a young person begins the application process.

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school and went on to participate in post-secondary education. In order to supplement his OW income, he also sold drugs. This work eventually led to his involvement with the youth and adult justice systems as  an “offender” and as a “victim.” During this period in his life, Aiden dropped out of school and began using drugs. At twenty-four years of age, Aiden struggles with addiction and recurrent periods of homelessness. Had Aiden become a Crown ward, CAS would have remained Aiden’s legal guardian until he was at least eighteen years old or until someone applied to terminate the wardship order through the courts (as part of a status review). His involvement with secondary and postsecondary education programs meant he would have been eligible for extended care and maintenance supports to cover the costs of his postsecondary education (as well as room and board). Rose, the CAS case manager at the shelter, explained that CAS is reluctant to take on someone as Crown ward when they are, as Aiden was, fourteen or fifteen years old (field note).

Temporary Care Agreements Referring to a young woman who was then staying at the shelter as part of a temporary care agreement with CAS, Rose explained that when Janella was last released from a youth justice facility, her mother refused to let her return home. Since Janella was fifteen years old, CAS was legally obliged to become her temporary guardian until she was sixteen years of age. The agreement required consent from Janella, her mother, and the Society. Rose believes that CAS did not file an application to have Janella’s status changed to a Crown ward because she was going to be an extraordinarily expensive and time-consuming client. Temporary care agreements are voluntarily established between young people, their families, and the CAS. These short-term agreements (usually less than six months, but up to a maximum of twentyfour months) are not established after a young person’s sixteenth birthday and cannot last beyond a young person’s eighteenth birthday (Ontario Ministry of Children and Youth Services, 1990, c. C.11, s. 29 [6]). Legally, the Society has a duty to promote the “best interests, protection, and wellbeing” (Ontario Ministry of Children and Youth Services, 1990, c.C.11, s. 1[1]) of any young person who is less than sixteen years of age, but in Rose’s experience young people nearing their sixteenth birthdays are unlikely to be designated Crown Wards.

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My aim for this chapter is not to prove (or disprove) Rose’s theory; I want to understand how this knowledge (that CAS is reluctant to seek protection orders for adolescents) has been shaped by her involvement with the CAS as the shelter’s case manager for youth in care. A temporary care agreement is designed to expire. It can only be extended (for a maximum of six months) with the consent of the Society, the youth, and his or her parent. The only way for Janella to remain under the care and custody of the Society beyond an extension of six months is if the Society was of the opinion that she was in need of protection and subsequently “brought the child before the courts,” established a protection order, and terminated the temporary care agreement (Ontario Ministry of Children and Youth Services, 1990, C. 11 s. 33[3]). However, in Part II of the CFSA, a child in need of protection (Ontario Ministry of Children and Youth Services, 1990, C. 11 s. 37[1]) is defined differently than a child in the first part of the Act. In Part I (which pertains to agreements), a young person is a child until he or she turns eighteen. In Part II (which pertains to orders), young people are designated as children until they turn sixteen. Once a young person is sixteen years of age, there are no legal grounds to establish a protection order. Janella refused to attend school and failed to show up for her CAS, medical, psychological, and legal appointments, attend probation meetings, or appear at her court dates. While she was under their care, the CAS was temporarily obliged to ensure that Janella upheld these institutional responsibilities and to cover the costs for appointments that she missed (field note). Providing temporary care for Janella was, as Rose suggests, expensive and time-consuming. Rose’s observation that few youth become Crown wards during adolescence is also perceptive; however, the relationship between the two observations is not based on cause and effect. The small number of young people who become Crown wards as adolescents is actually a result of the Society’s inability to secure a protection order once a young person is no longer deemed to be a child under this part of the Act. Even young people who have been placed under the care and custody of the Society through Crown wardship orders can find their status up for review once they turn 16. The status review process can be initiated by the Society if: The child has exhausted all Society resources. Is over sixteen (16) years and Is refusing to co-operate with the Society.

52  Youth Work The youth on independent living enters into a common-law relationship (equivalent to marriage). (C04.05.12 – Preparation for Independent Living of a Crown Ward, 2006, p. 5)

Janella’s approaching sixteenth birthday, combined with her refusal to “co-operate with the Society,” made her an unlikely candidate for a status review prior to the expiry of her temporary care agreement. Because the agreement expired shortly after her sixteenth birthday and a status review was not begun before this date, she was ineligible for a protection under the Child and Family Services Act.3 When Janella’s Temporary Care agreement expired, she established eligibility for OW, and applied to have them cover the costs of her bed and lodging at the youth shelter. Since she had been living at the shelter while under the temporary care of the CAS, she was simply moved from her single room on the first floor of the shelter to a double room on the general residents’ floor. Shortly thereafter, Janella was discharged from SYS for failing to return before curfew. While under the care of the CAS, shelter staff are unable to discharge young people for failing to uphold shelter rules. In fact, the shelter is not in a position to initiate a discharge of a CAS client in any circumstances. Upon the termination of a wardship order or care agreement, young people who have lived with complete disregard for shelter protocols are often discharged from SYS immediately upon their “graduation” to the second floor, where for the first time, they are held accountable to house rules. Also for the first time, these young people find themselves homeless. After she was discharged, Janella continued to violate her probation orders and incur new charges. When I last ran into her during the summer of 2008, she was heading off to a drug rehabilitation program as per a condition of her most recent probation order.

Crown Wardship Orders Under a Crown wardship order a young person is placed in the care and custody of the Society until the order is terminated by the courts through a status review (Ontario Ministry of Children and Youth Services, 1990, c. C.11, s. 65 [2]) or expires when a person marries or turns 18 (Ontario 3 “… where the child was under the age of sixteen years when the proceeding was commenced or when the child was apprehended, the court may hear and determine the matter and make an order under this Part as if the child were still under the age of sixteen years” (Ontario Ministry of Children and Youth Services, 1990, c. C.11, s. 47.).

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Ministry of Children and Youth Services, 1990, c. C.11, s. 71[1]). A Society may provide young people with extended care and custody after the expiry of a Crown wardship order (at eighteen years of age), but it is not obligated to offer extended supports. The termination of a permanent wardship order can also shape later experiences of homelessness and/or involvement with the shelter system. Keelyn’s first stay at the youth shelter coincided with the termination of her Crown wardship order. Just before she turned sixteen, Keelyn applied for a status review. She told me, “Once you’re sixteen with CAS, you can sort of go to court and sign yourself out”; but then added, “You can’t really do anything. Like I’ve been going [to court] since I was sixteen and I didn’t get out [of CAS custody] until last June [when I was seventeen]” (interview, 2008). This idea that you can simply sign out of care once you are sixteen is popular among youth who are involved with CAS, particularly those who are not yet sixteen years of age (CAS focus group). It is striking that both Keelyn and Sylvia, another young woman who initiated the process of terminating wardship, adopt this explanation of their work. Sylvia tells me that a “worker came down and one of the staff members from the group home, and my mom and my dad came because they both had to sign papers for me to get a court date to leave Children’s Aid because I was turning sixteen” (interview, 2008). But as Keelyn and Sylvia continue to describe the process of terminating their involvement with CAS, it becomes apparent that one does not simply “sign out” of care. sylvia

Sylvia assumed that signing papers and receiving a court date would result in the termination of her wardship agreement with the CAS. Neither she nor her biological family fully understood the process or its timelines. The papers she signed merely initiated the process of having her status with CAS reviewed. The application process for a status review of Crown wardship is conducted through the provincial family court system, not through a local CAS agency. When an application for status review is brought before the courts, and if it’s “in the child’s best interest,” the courts may terminate or vary a Crown wardship order (Ontario Ministry of Children and Youth Services, 1990, C.11, s. 65.2[1]). The Ontario status review for Crown wards and former Crown wards application form assumes that in most cases “the applicant will be a children’s aid society” (Ontario Ministry of Children and Youth Services, 2006: 1). It also assumes that “the respondent” is a parent and states that

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“a court case has been started against [him or her] in this court” (Ontario Ministry of Children and Youth Services, 2006: 1). These assumptions do not apply to the cases of Sylvia and Keelyn. As such, the application form is immediately more difficult for these two young women to discern. Sylvia tells me that after submitting the status review application, she moved back in with her father, thinking that the wardship order was terminated. She explains that her worker, “… sent papers saying that I was out of care and everything – although I wasn’t. My dad, when he got those papers saying I was out of care, he kicked me out. He just wanted to collect that extra month’s money. So I moved into the shelter” (interview, 2008). Sylvia’s story is full of confusing explanations like this one. I include them because I want to make it clear that neither she nor her family had a good handle on what they were doing, institutionally. Terminating a permanent wardship order is complicated work. With further prompting, I found out that “the papers” CAS sent actually indicated a date for Sylvia to appear in court. Contrary to her first explanation, the papers Sylvia received while staying with her father did not signify the termination of a Crown wardship order. Sylvia’s understanding of the process was that the children’s lawyer would take care of the review process and that if she did not hear anything from CAS, then this would indicate that her wardship had been terminated. She did not attend the hearings. She simply “assumed [she] was out.” After being kicked out of her dad’s house, she determined that she was homeless and applied to stay at the youth shelter. While she was staying at SYS, she received a letter from CAS “saying that I had to call my worker. If not, [it stated] that she’d put a missing person’s report out on me” (Sylvia, interview, 2008). When a youth in care is AWOL (absent without leave), CAS is required to file a missing person’s report with the local police. Once this report has been submitted, the police become responsible for finding the “missing” individual and bringing her into custody. Even though Sylvia’s worker had tracked her down at the shelter (i.e., she was not missing), the worker needed to provide written proof that she was following the appropriate, legislated (Ontario Ministry of Children and Youth Services, 1990, C.11, s.41[1]) protocol or steps for a young person who is AWOL. In the end, Sylvia decided not to pursue the status review. She remained in CAS care until the Crown wardship order expired when she turned eighteen years old. At this stage, she was not considered by her CAS worker to be a good candidate for an extended care and maintenance agreement with the CAS because she was unable to hold a job and refused to attend school (Mallory, CAS worker, interview, 2008).

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The Society is not obligated to provide extended care and maintenance to young people after the expiration of a Crown or Society wardship order. When her wardship order expired, Sylvia was moved onto the general resident’s floor at SYS, and then promptly discharged from the shelter for failure to follow the rules. keelyn

Keelyn recounts a similarly lengthy involvement with the family court system. She explains that although she submitted the application for status review when she was sixteen years old, the Crown wardship order was not terminated until she was seventeen. Like Sylvia, Keelyn “never actually went to court.” During the court proceedings, a children’s lawyer represented her case. After a year without seeing any progress, she decided to go to court herself: “I was all dressed up and stuff in case I had to go into the courtroom, but I didn’t have to. I just sat in the hallway and my lawyer was like, ‘yah, they’ve decided to let you out’” (Keelyn, interview, 2008). When Keelyn tried to apply for welfare after her wardship order was terminated, things began to get more complicated for her. Youth who leave care at sixteen years of age can attempt to establish eligibility with the province’s social assistance program, Ontario Works (OW). As Khaled’s account makes clear, the process of establishing OW eligibility comes before the process of applying for benefits. To establish eligibility one needs to submit institutional identification (e.g., a provincial health card, birth certificate, and social insurance number); institutional documentation of “special circumstances” requiring a young person to live outside the parental home;4 and current immigration documentation, in the case of youth who were not born in Canada. Those who lack

4 In the case of OW applicants who are less than eighteen years of age, the administrator must be “satisfied that special circumstances exist requiring the applicant to live outside the parental home” (Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services, 2009, p. 1). Special circumstances include: physical, emotional, or sexual abuse (requiring third-party documentation); “irreconcilable differences” and clearly demonstrated “withdrawal of parental support”; parent’s inability to provide “adequate care and support”; or no “familial home” or “financial support available” through “no fault of the applicant” (Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services, 2009, pp. 2–3). Special circumstances must be demonstrated institutionally by agencies like CAS, or confirmed by parents, through an OW initiated assessment of “family circumstances” or through third-party verification (Ontario Ministry of Community and Social ­Services, 2009, p. 4). In other words, the OW administrator must be able to access ­evidence of the special circumstances warranting a young person’s OW eligibility.

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appropriate institutional documentation will have difficulty establishing OW eligibility and will therefore be unable to apply for benefits. Because Keelyn herself had requested to have her Crown wardship status terminated, her eligibility for OW was questioned: [OW] had to review [my eligibility] and stuff because they were like, “You were in CAS, so you had funding and housing and everything, and you left willingly, so we don’t know if we can accept you.” So I was like, “Well at the end of the year – because I was going to have the baby – they [CAS] were going to let me go anyway, right. They just let me go earlier because I requested it.” Then they [OW] just overlooked it and were like, “Okay everything’s fine then.” (Keelyn, interview, 2008, original emphasis)

By initiating the review of her Crown wardship status, Keelyn unknowingly influenced her eligibility for OW. Because Keelyn had had “financial support available” through the CAS, and had initiated a process through which this support was withdrawn, the OW administrator was not easily “satisfied” that the circumstances of Keelyn’s application to OW were “no fault of the applicant.” Her application was further complicated by a practice whereby OW pays for housing directly, in the case of OW beneficiaries who are less than eighteen years of age. With her Crown wardship order terminated, Keelyn intended to come back to Middlesborough, the city where she had previously lived in a group home while in CAS custody: “I wanted to move back up here, and [OW] said, ‘Okay then once you move to Middlesborough and get a place and everything, then apply.’ But I couldn’t because in order to get a house, I needed to be on welfare to get money for a house” (Keelyn, interview, 2008). Until a young person has submitted an “intent to rent” form, signed by a landlord for a specific place of accommodation, OW will not proceed with his or her application. Independent minors do not receive OW funding directly. All funds are processed through a “responsible adult or agency” (Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services, 2001b: 13), and rent is paid directly to a landlord in order to ensure a paper trail. These practices are governed by the Ontario Works Act, which specifies conditions for third-party payments (Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services, 1997, c. C. 25, 17[1], 18[1]). Keelyn’s inability to get an “intent to rent form” from a potential landlord meant that OW would not issue her social assistance funding, despite deeming her eligible to

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apply for benefits. She did not have to “get a place and then apply,” as she indicates above. She simply needed to initiate the paperwork, in order to allow OW to flow some of her benefits directly to a landlord. In the end, she returned to Middlesborough without money or a place to live. After she was admitted to SYS, she applied to have OW cover the cost of her stay there. She was well into her first pregnancy when she met and began a romantic relationship with Dean, a twentythree-year-old man who was also staying at SYS. She moved out of the shelter with him, and he applied to have OW include her and her baby in his social assistance package. Significantly, at the time of our interview, Keelyn had yet to successfully complete the OW application process on her own. She told me that she “didn’t really even apply for welfare until [she] met Dean and [she] got put on his cheque” (Keelyn, interview, 2008). Statements like “I got put on his cheque” work much like the phrase “I signed out of care.” They obscure complex institutional processes, which shape young people’s work to be housed, make money, take care of their children, and so forth. Keelyn’s comment that she was put on Dean’s cheque also signals a transformation of their relationship, institutionally, so that Dean could claim her and Ashton as his dependents and the three of them could become a “benefit unit.” An OW audit requirement is that financial assistance not be “paid directly to applicants or participants under the age of 18” (Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services, 2009, p. 1). Had Keelyn applied for OW benefits on her own, she would have needed to meet the eligibility criteria for an applicant under the age of eighteen, but because she applied with Dean, who is older than eighteen years of age, “A trustee [was] not required in this situation” (Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services, 2009, p. 10). While Dean was not Keelyn’s trustee, his involvement in her life meant that they received her OW benefits directly. Dean would have seen his social assistance increase significantly by entering into a spousal arrangement with Keelyn (and a caregiving relationship with her son, Ashton). Keelyn, on the other hand, still did not understand how the social assistance system worked. Over the course of my research, it was not uncommon for young women to tell me that their boyfriends (who were older than eighteen years of age) collected OW support for the two of them (field note). Keelyn’s parental status, when combined with her age, further defined the conditions through which she was eligible for OW. Her OW eligibility required that she take part in the province’s Learning,

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Earning, and Parenting Program (LEAP): “Participation in LEAP is mandatory for parents aged 16–17 who have not completed high school and who are Ontario Works participants or are part of a benefit unit receiving financial assistance under Ontario Works” (Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services, 2009: 9). Learning, Earning, and Parenting programs are designed to help young parents (between sixteen and twenty-five years of age) access educational, occupational, and parenting supports. As part of this program, Keelyn was required to attend a school for young mothers located in a Middlesborough church basement. When I ask if Ashton was in childcare while she attended classes, she explained, “What happens is that you kind of just have him crawling around doing his own thing with the other babies. He’s in a swing or you’re holding him” (Keelyn, interview, 2008). While Keelyn works independently on lessons in Independent Learning Centre (ILC) booklets, she continues to be responsible for Ashton’s care. It is not surprising that Keelyn was not much closer to completing her diploma at the time of this interview than she was before Ashton was born. Where Child Protection Intersects Youth Justice Like many of the young people I worked with over the course of this project, Keelyn also maintained involvement with the youth justice system throughout her adolescence. If a young person is involved with the CAS and subject to a probation order, the probation orders can align with CAS protocols such that activities deemed inappropriate by CAS can also constitute a breach of probation. In many instances, charges laid in early adolescence continue to shape a young person’s life until he or she is at least eighteen years old. Keelyn ended up back in detention repeatedly because she was late for curfew, was AWOL from her group home, or had returned to the group home after consuming alcohol. After having requested the application for a status review, and before her wardship order was terminated, Keelyn officially resided in a group home for people she describes as “AWOL kids” (interview, 2008). She explains that CAS wards from another jurisdiction southeast of Middlesborough who had a history of running away from their placements were moved to a group home in Middlesborough so as to deter them from running “but I never really stayed at the group home. I was kind of always AWOL and ran away and stuff. That’s pretty much why

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I have a criminal record. It’s just from all those breaches of probation” (Keelyn, interview, 2008). Keelyn’s involvement with the youth justice system preceded her involvement with CAS. It began when she was charged with assault at thirteen years of age, which I shouldn’t have been charged for actually. The girl went to hit me and I actually didn’t get hit, because I moved. Then I hit her, and so I got charged because I gave the first hit … I tried to fight it in court, but it didn’t work, so finally I just said “guilty” because it was too much time. (Keelyn, interview, 2008)

Keelyn described pleading guilty to her first charge because the court process was taking too long, and at that time, she could not see how this single charge would continue to shape her life throughout her adolescence. Keelyn’s response is common. I attended a “summons to appear” at court with a young woman named Candace who was staying at the shelter. The institutional language that is used to facilitate the court proceedings makes it very hard to understand what is going on in the courthouse, and there is no one there to explain where to go, what to do, or how things will proceed. Further, the language used by the duty counsel (who is meant to guide you through the process) makes it hard to understand the nature of the questions being asked and to evaluate the advice being given. Unless a young person is advised otherwise, if he or she is under eighteen years, it seems simpler to just plead guilty to whatever charge has been made. The common misconception is that a youth justice record disappears once a person is eighteen. Keelyn’s next charge occurred a few years later when she “took a bank card from one of my staff at the group home. And then I frauded her account” (Keelyn, interview, 2008). At this point, her story starts getting quite a bit more complicated. Initially, for this charge, she tells me, “I just got a lot of [community] service. I got a week of custody, secure custody, which was down in Boyden” (Keelyn, interview, 2008). This second experience led to a number of charges over the next few years. After receiving her second charge, Keelyn continued to stay out all night, run away, and come home after curfew. While Keelyn was only in secure custody for a week, she was meant to be under house arrest at her group home for a month. This meant that Keelyn was not allowed outside the group home unless she was accompanied by a staff member.

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She describes abiding by this rule for three days and then leaving the group home on her own again. When she showed up to court a while later she learned that, “You’re supposed to go to court at like nine, ninethirty, and I didn’t get there until like noon. So they called my name up [and I wasn’t there]. So I had a Bench Warrant. So they put me downstairs” (Keelyn, interview, 2008) After showing up late to court, Keelyn ended up back in secure custody for twenty-four hours. When she returned to the group home, she began to acquire more and more charges: I had a bunch of “breaches” and everything because [probation] gave me a curfew and [an order to] “abide by the rules” at the group home. So one night I was in my friend Sophie’s room and I was like all stressed out and stuff. I was having problems. And [the group home staff] were like, “Keelyn, you need to go to your room. ” And I was like, “I’m not going to my room. I want to talk to Sophie for a bit.” And they said, “If you don’t go to your room, we’re going to call the cops and we’re going to breach you.” So I went to my room. A couple of days later, it happened again, and they breached me for that. So any time that I was like AWOL or anything, runaway, I got breached … once you’ve had a charge, then if they [probation] know you’re in CAS and they know that you’re in a group home, then they’ll say, “Follow all of the group home rules, curfew, everything.” So the group home can nail you about anything you do. So say they say, like, “Go to your bedroom,” and you’re out of your room five minutes past your curfew – they’ll freak! If they’re in that kind of mood, they can do that … [Further] because of all my breaches of probation and everything, every time that I was on AWOL, they [the police] started to know where I was going to be. They started to know that I’d be at my friend Jackie’s house. They knew where she lived. The group home gave them pictures of me and all the people I hang out with and everything. I know almost every officer in this town now. (Keelyn, interview, 2008)

Mathew, a police officer who I interviewed, had formerly been a staff member at Keelyn’s group home. He affirms Keelyn’s story, telling me that, as a police officer, “You get to know our frequent customers. You get to know them pretty quickly. There are kids out there that I know I could walk out of the station and breach them every hour on the hour because of the way that their conditions are laid out, but I’m not going to do that” (interview, 2008). He tells me that he does not remember ever having “breached” a young person for the first time; in every instance where he has been

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involved in this process, the young person had breached the probation agreement previously: In my experience, the young person has been arrested so many times, that they are absolutely indifferent to the situation. They couldn’t care less. They know that they’re gonna come in here and they’re either gonna get held or they’re gonna get released in a couple of hours on more conditions that they’re likely gonna forget and breach tomorrow. (interview, 2008)

Mathew’s account helps me understand Keelyn’s blasé description of her experiences with the youth justice system. I am not able to create a linear story of these experiences because they are not likely individualized events in her memory. It is also important to refer back to the broader institutional picture, which this chapter is constructing. When Sylvia was “missing,” CAS was legally obligated to file a missing person’s report with the police. Similarly, when Keelyn failed to return to her group home before curfew, the police would have been contacted and a missing person’s report would have had to have been created and processed. Once Keelyn had probation conditions to abide by the rules at her group home, there were legal consequences to her infractions that did not exist previous to involvement with the youth justice system. Mathew offers his perspective on the missing person’s report as a police officer and as a group home staff member. When I ask him about a typical encounter with the youth shelter, he tells me that he is frequently called in to deal with a “missing person.” His experiences as a group home worker and a police officer provide him with an understanding of the broader social implications of this work: In a group home I worked in, you’d report [a young person] missing at around eleven p.m. You’d have to have an officer come by at one a.m. to make sure that they’d come home. And this could go on every night of the week. And when I was on that side of it, I’d always wonder what’s the big deal? They [the police] just come by and look at the young person. But now that I’m on this [the police] side of it, I realize that there’s forty-five minutes of paperwork each time it happens and it’s the same officer that has to do it. And there’s no penalty to the young person. (Mathew, interview, 2008)

Mathew’s account sheds some light on the complex relations between frontline practitioners, young people like Keelyn, and the paperwork

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that documents and cements their institutional relations. Recalling his time as a youth worker at the group home, Mathew can also speak to the challenges staff face in terms of disciplining young people for breaking house rules: You’d give a young person a consequence, and then they’d take a safety pin and do a very superficial scratch on their arm because they know that we are bound by strict policy and procedure to bring them to the hospital at this point, and now their consequence is gone. Their bedtime was going to be nine o'clock, but now they’re up to midnight or – do you know what I mean? And then after you get home, you have to debrief with them, and so by the time they get to bed it’s two o'clock in the morning, and they’ve won. (interview, 2008)

Much like the shelter workers who are unable to discharge (or otherwise discipline) a CAS-involved young person for failing to abide by SYS’s curfew or policies around drinking and drug use, for instance, group home workers are similarly tied in terms of their ability to “give a young person a consequence.” They are held accountable to CAS policies and other legislation (such as the Mental Health Act) through their contracts to provide services to the CAS, but these same contracts restrict their institutional responsibility to the provision of food and shelter. As such, shelter and group home staff can feel disempowered. They are not the legal guardians for youth in CAS care, but they are the people who have to work with these young people on a daily and nightly basis. While a CAS worker is only obliged to meet with her or his clients on a revolving ninety-day cycle (if they are in a stable housing arrangement), the group home or shelter workers can spend up to eight hours a day (day after day) with these same young people. Yet shelter workers and group home staff do not have the institutional authority to act on a young person’s behalf, may not be privy to pertinent information about a young person’s life, and can feel that they have little recourse when their young clients rebel against house rules or do things that put people or the agency’s reputation at risk. Closing Thoughts Policy and service provision are situated in relation to particular political rationalities or ideas. The provision of public and social services – and consequently the experiences of young people as they are discharged

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from care – are informed by distinct, and at times contradictory, ideas about economic efficiency, consumer choice, responsibility, risk, family, community, and so forth. Clarke and Newman (1997) draw our attention to the “tensions between neo-liberal and neo-conservative social agendas articulated around the competing conceptions of freedom and discipline” and suggest that child welfare agencies might best be understood “as framed by multiple objectives: the reduction of welfare costs; the regulation of deviant family forms; and the restoration of parental responsibility and patriarchal norms via the agency of the state” (Clarke & Newman, 1997, p. 24). These tensions start to become apparent in young people’s stories of their experiences leaving CAS care. They are articulated more fully as young people explain their subsequent efforts to engage with other institutions via welfare applications, shelter intake processes, and so forth. As we hear in Mathew’s account, practitioners’ work is also shaped in this politico-institutional milieu. In order to keep multiple policy objectives and overlapping institutional processes in view, I organized this chapter to correspond with young people’s stories as they told them, rather than reorganizing them into coherent institutional accounts. Young people’s descriptions of their work were largely affective, revolving primarily around feelings and relationships. The stories they shared were not historically linear, and young people seldom talked about their experiences in institutional terms. And yet, each person’s account of his or her work to sustain housing offers another glimpse of the complex social relations that shape young people’s work in institutional settings. I drew on other people’s accounts to expand the institutional topography that Keelyn’s single account begins to construct. Combined, their stories show us how shelter use and/or homelessness can coincide with a young person being discharged from the child welfare system. Sylvia, Aiden, and Janella represent three different CAS wardship designations. Using their experiences to supplement Keelyn’s allowed me to construct a fuller picture of the institutional nexus surrounding young people’s experiences leaving care. A failure to understand the juridical aspects of young people’s relationship with the child welfare system impacts a young person’s experiences leaving care and their subsequent efforts to live independently. This chapter also reveals how Keelyn’s efforts to terminate an institutional relationship with the CAS influenced her initial encounters with OW. Ontario Works policies for working with independent minors require textual linkages between OW, the CAS, and the Ontario education

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system. Keelyn’s story allows us to see how OW policies contribute to relations whereby young women come to be economically and institutionally dependent on their older male partners. Finally, this chapter reveals how a young person’s involvement with the youth justice system may be magnified by their other institutional relationships, such as a designation as a Crown ward and/or a placement in a homeless shelter or group home. Keelyn’s repeated violations of her probation agreements occurred in relation to CAS and police policies that also shape the work of the frontline practitioners who are responsible for young people’s daily and nightly experiences at group homes and shelters. My intent is not to criticize shelter or group home staff for invoking the conditions of a young person’s probation order as a means of exerting their authority. Rather, I have shown how the frontline workers who spend the most time with these young people experience an institutional powerlessness (or lack of agency) that is not dissimilar from the experiences of young people themselves. Further, the work processes and policies to which practitioners are held accountable end up serving as institutional blinders, which shape how they perceive problems and influence the types of solutions they propose (recall Khaled’s OW worker’s suggestion that he drop out of school to retain his OW eligibility). While practitioners and institutional leaders understand their own professional accountabilities, they are less knowledgeable about the other institutional settings where youth are active. As such, many are unable to see how their professional interactions with youth shape and are shaped by young people’s work in other institutional settings.5 An inability to effectively coordinate their work across institutional sites shapes negative outcomes for youth who experience significant institutional involvement.

5 Mathew’s experiences working as a group home staff and then later as a police officer allow him to construct a fuller picture than most frontline practitioners of the circumstances surrounding particular courses of institutional action.

Chapter Four

Youth “At Risk”

Stella lived at SYS when I first began doing research there in the spring of 2007, and she was still living there when I stopped doing fieldwork during the summer of 2008. She had arrived at the youth shelter in 2005 when she was fifteen years old and lived there or at Pritchard House (SYS’s “second stage” or “transitional” housing environment) until she was eighteen years of age.1 No other young person has lived at SYS for this length of time. Even today, the shelter remains an essential touchstone for her, providing respite from an abusive partner and support in the form of food, a listening ear, and help during long, sleepless nights as the mother of a new baby. Like the other narratives that inform my research, Stella’s story is told as it is shaped by standardized and standardizing text-driven practices and knowledge that cut across the public and social service sectors. Stella’s story shows us what happens when a young person refuses to participate in institutional relations or fails to participate in the ways that the institutions require. Stella’s is also a story about risk. Street involvement, abuse, criminal activity, drug and alcohol use, mental health issues, lack of stable housing, and an absence of consistent social supports throughout her adolescence arguably placed Stella at considerable risk. But when I say that her story is about risk, Stella’s vulnerabilities only represent a single layer of my argument. Significant to our understanding of Stella’s story are the multiple and continuous institutional attempts to mediate the unpredictability or “riskiness” of Stella’s actions. To some extent, the

1 During this period in Stella’s life she also spent significant time in youth justice facilities and admitted to mental health institutions.

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ongoing institutional mediation of Stella’s days and nights has been about reducing the risk she represented to intervening agencies, human service practitioners, teachers, police officers, and so forth. Until quite recently, Stella aggressively resisted people’s efforts to work with her in any institutional context whatsoever. Her refusal to willingly participate in institutional relations meant that she was often drawn into an intervention against her will. Her continued disregard for – and active rebellion against – various institutional expectations, processes, and programs made her a particularly risky “client.” But how Stella recounts her own story and how her actions come to be known and interpreted institutionally are not simply reflections of particular subjectivities or divergent points of view. Stella’s conduct reflects systems of social organization within which others are operating (D.E. Smith, 1999). While knowledge and will appear to be features of an “individuated subject” (D.E. Smith, 1999, p. 78), a person’s ability to determine a course of action or line of thought is continuously being renegotiated relative to the unfolding social world of which she or he is a part. As such, Stella’s story is not simply a subjective account of her experiences in “care”; rather, her story helps us understand the complex of social relations that I describe in this book as youth work. One way to keep the institutional relations that Stella’s story points to in view, is to focus on the “processing interchanges” (Pence, 1997) or the moments where decisions are made about Stella’s institutional care. Decisions are based on the contents of Stella’s institutional files and reflect the institutional priorities and courses of action available to particular decision makers. In Ellen Pence’s (1997; 2001) institutional ethnographic work, she traces women’s experiences of physical violence at the hands of their partners into an institutional realm where the experience of being beaten is transformed, textually, into a “domestic abuse case.” Pence tracks “the case” as it is moved through the system. She identifies the various professionals who take up the texts that comprise the case, act on or through the texts in their various professional capacities, and move the case forward into other institutional settings where it continues to be processed. Beginning with women’s stories of being beaten, Pence follows them into the institutional settings where the stories are transformed: during a 9-1-1 call to a dispatcher, through the various stages of processing, until often a great while later, the case is finally ready to be acted on in a juridical setting. In a similar way, Stella’s personal experiences – of abuse, attempts to hurt herself, love, loss, sadness, and anger – were transformed textually

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into evidence (or clinical observations) which would enable the production of various mental health diagnoses. During early adolescence, Stella was diagnosed as having oppositional defiance disorder (ODD), conduct disorder, body dysmorphia, and bipolar affective disorder. The diagnoses, and the observations that preceded them, went on to shape the production of various institutional case files meant to represent, and inform, Stella’s experiences across institutional settings. People took up Stella’s diagnoses, as well as any number of other texts deemed pertinent to her case and used these to justify, document, and/or inform their institutional work with her. For Stella, this meant that numerous institutional case files, representative of the breadth of her institutional work, were actively being processed through multiple interchanges at any one time. In each instance, another person – a doctor, a CAS worker, a probation officer, or a teacher – activates these diagnoses as part of their work with Stella. The diagnoses themselves are inert. It is only as they are picked up and referenced by practitioners, in the contexts of their ordinary text-based work with youth, that the diagnoses become materially significant in Stella’s life. At each stage, the diagnoses are activated as part of another textually mediated institutional process: to initiate a court diversion, to place Stella in a mental health facility, or to justify a change in her medical regime. As coordinators of various psychological and legal interventions, Stella’s diagnoses have shaped almost every aspect of her life. Becoming a Youth At Risk Stella moved out of her family home for the first time when she was twelve years old because she was having “issues” with her mother. She temporarily moved in with her uncle and aunt, but returned home “for most of grade seven” (interview, Stella, 2007). During the first part of the school year, Stella remembers that her teacher would joke that “‘everyone is improving on their book reports except for Stella. She’s still only at an A’” (interview, 2007). She tells me that as the year progressed, she started to “[go] through depressions” and her grades dropped from As to Fs: When I first went through depressions … I kept on getting kicked out of class – and my teacher would ask me, “What’s wrong with you? You’re always angry all the time – why are you failing your tests and shit?” I was a really good student. And then when I was depressed, I got yelled at in

68  Youth Work class. I remember my teacher saying, “You’re the smartest kid in the class but you’re the only one who failed the test” … (interview, 2007)

At least initially, it is likely that Stella’s teacher was unaware of her struggles with depression, and therefore did not interpret unprecedented acting out and poor academic performance as a consequence of serious mental health concerns. Because he is charged with responsibility for Stella’s “academic achievement,” it makes sense that Stella’s teacher would be concerned by her drastic drop in grades. Educational policy in Ontario is focused on improving academic achievement, particularly among the province’s lowest achieving or at-risk students (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2004; 2007; 2008). In local school settings, teachers, principals, and parents (who sit on parent councils) generate, analyze, and compare achievement data as a means of assessing student, teacher, school, and district performance. Where educational policy and practice intersect, academic achievement becomes an objectified/objectifiable phenomenon that can be measured, compared, and otherwise accounted for, textually. This political and technical focus on achievement in education does not address the systemic issues that underlie school failure. As the concept of school failure takes on the qualities of a quantitative measure (via the comparison of graduation rates, literacy scores, or report card data across local sites), the various qualitative or material conditions which give rise to school failure fail to register in educational discourses. The data we generate to account for what happens in Ontario schools do not register difference; when we consider them in isolation, these quantitative achievement data allow for a kind of blindness to diversity. Elsewhere I have talked about the invisibility of homeless youth in mainstream schools and educational discourse (Nichols, 2009a; 2009b). This apparent invisibility is a function of our use of data that render complex realities (e.g., students’ experiences of school failure) into numbers that can be unproblematically compared as if these realities are irrelevant. This means that at the policy level and sometimes at the local level, there is a failure to recognize and/or attend to the actual circumstances that shape young people’s experiences of school failure: homelessness, poverty, mental or physical health instability, addiction, abuse, and so forth. Stella’s story grounds abstract notions like at-risk youth in the experiences of someone who actually did experience school failure, criminal involvement, drug use, violence, and so forth. Stella told me that she was arrested for the first time when she was still in grade seven. The

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only thing she remembers from this experience is being “shackled to a bench” (Stella, interview, 2007) inside a building, and that the arrest precedes a period of hospitalization. This memory is significant. It signals the beginning of a long and arduous relationship with the youth justice and mental health systems. Treatment Around the time of her arrest, Stella spent a couple of months in the Norton building, the mental health facility associated with the Middlesborough Regional Hospital and a couple of weeks in the psychiatric ward at Scranton Centennial Hospital. At Scranton, she underwent a psychiatric assessment and was diagnosed as having oppositional defiance and a conduct disorder. Eventually she was discharged back into her mother’s care. At the end of the seventh grade, Stella’s mother admitted her to a residential treatment facility called Well-Youth.2 Here she was reassessed and diagnosed with bipolar disorder and body dysmorphia. Stella’s participation in the residential treatment program required that she attend weekly (family and individual) counselling appointments. As part of her treatment, she was repeatedly re-institutionalized in other mental health facilities. While onsite at Well-Youth, Stella was not allowed to be alone – she needed to have a staff member with her at all times: “You were constantly being watched” (Stella, interview, 2007). One of Well-Youth’s stated benefits is that it offers round the clock monitoring and care of youth in order to maintain the safety of young people with severe treatment issues. Well-Youth describes itself as utilizing physical, psychological, and psychiatric assessment to ensure the safety for youth who are at serious risk of harm while residing in their family home. 2 Well-Youth is a pseudonym. While Stella describes the organization as a group home, the Well-Youth website describes the organization as a clinical treatment centre for youth. The website specifies that the residential treatment program exists to help youth (between twelve and seventeen years) who are struggling with behaviour problems; anger; social relationships; self management; social skills; school; problem solving; loss and grief; depression; anxiety; self-harming behaviours; suicidal ideation; and various forms of abuse. Well-Youth is accredited under Children’s Mental Health Ontario and partners with the Ministry of Children and Youth Services, the Ministry of Education, and other provincial bodies/funders. Well-Youth works with youth who are described as being unable to utilize community-based services. Many of the young people I interviewed had spent time at Well-Youth. None of them had anything positive to say about their time there.

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In the context of Well-Youth’s stance towards risk mediation, Stella was eligible to “earn individual and then [eventually] peer walks (ten minutes per day) for good behaviour” (Stella, interview, 2007), but based on Stella’s telling, I suspect that she was not frequently rewarded for “good behaviour.” Stella was only allowed to leave the facility twice each month (to visit family) and was not allowed to maintain contact with friends from outside treatment. Young people are not allowed to leave Well-Youth’s property, except to go to the end of the driveway, if they had parental permission to smoke, which Stella did not. Of course, she continued to smoke anyway.

AWOL As soon as she arrived at Well-Youth, she began to run away. As far as Stella is concerned, her ability to escape from the centre was its primary merit: “In some ways I think Well-Youth was a good thing for me. Other treatment centres weren’t good because I was locked down – you have the feeling that you can’t get out even if you wanted to” (interview, 2007). Stella tells me that she AWOLed the first week I was at Well-Youth – I’d sneak out my window and hitchhike because I just didn’t want to be there. I remember the first time I hitchhiked to Lockington and I called my friends. I even AWOLed from the group home van in Ossington and we hitchhiked to Eatonbrook to see [my friend’s] boyfriend. (interview, 2007)

Like Keelyn’s experiences at a group home in Middlesborough, one of Stella’s probation orders was to “abide by the rules” at Well-Youth. She was charged for breaching her probation whenever she was caught “AWOLing.” Whenever she left the grounds without permission, the staff would contact the police who would put out a warrant for her arrest because being absent without leave was against the rules and therefore a breach of her probation agreement. At this time Stella also began to receive assault and mischief charges. As well as spending time in custody under the youth justice system, Stella continued to be re-institutionalized (spending time “in a bunch of different treatment centres”) throughout her tenure with Well-Youth: When I was in Well-Youth, they felt that they couldn’t help me [there] at the time, so they sent me – I went to a youth psychiatric facility twice;

Youth “At Risk”  71 I went to Warrington Psych; I went to Scranton Centennial. I went to all of these different “lockdown” facilities because I got really badly into cutting and stuff. (Stella, interview, 2007)

Stella’s experiences of repeated institutionalization were significantly disruptive to her social, emotional, and intellectual growth. She clearly describes how this upheaval made it challenging to make and keep friends, to trust and relate to others, and to participate in organized learning opportunities like school. Although she explains that she “made a lot of bonds” while she was at Well-Youth, Stella elaborates that she also “developed a lot of issues with trust and stuff … I was constantly being moved and other people were moving on and stuff. I remember going to treatment and coming back and I was the only one from the original group” (interview, 2007). Repeated episodes of re-institutionalization made it challenging to develop and maintain trusting relationships with the other young people who lived at Well-Youth. It is also quite clear that Stella’s experiences in treatment (particularly in lockdown facilities) were disturbing enough that simply returning to the way things were each time she came back to Well-Youth would have been extraordinarily difficult.

“Lockdown” Throughout our interview Stella repeatedly described lockdown facilities as unhelpful and deeply disruptive. These experiences of institutional confinement radically altered her sense of self and deteriorated her physical and emotional wellbeing: The lockdown facilities didn’t help at all – do you know what it’s like? No mirrors – being put on all these different drugs. I went to Warrington Pysch and I had lost so much weight because I was on this medication and it made me lose a shitload of weight. I didn’t even recognize myself – I felt destroyed physically and emotionally. What has all of this stuff turned me into? I don’t even know who I am. (Stella, interview, 2007)

Stella’s experiences in lockdown treatment facilities happened primarily as a result of her having gotten “really into cutting and stuff” (Stella, interview, 2007). During our conversation, she explained that the cutting was a way of alleviating the emotional pain she was feeling, but that “afterwards there was even more pain than the beginning. You have so much emotional pain inside, but then it was like an addiction

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– if I couldn’t cut, I felt like the world was going to end” (Stella, interview, 2007). Doctors put Stella into restraints to prevent her from cutting, but the stress of being unable to cut made her feel “like the world was going to end.” She describes her most devastating experience in lockdown as a violation and explains how being restrained prompted an attempt to cut herself on a paper-towel dispenser: One of the worst times of my life was when I was in the Norton building. I was strapped to a bed. I was placed in four-point restraints with people sitting on my chest. I had to go to the bathroom in a bedpan. They pulled down my pants and gave me needles all the time. It was one of the worst times in my life because I felt like I was being violated. And I guess my mother begged them to let me out and the first thing I did was cut myself on the paper-towel thing. What did they expect? I had been in restraints. The psychiatrist didn’t even come and help me. It is just a place where they put you when you can’t be in society. (interview, 2007)

It is important, as we work our way through Stella’s story, that we remind ourselves that she was only thirteen years old at the time of its unfolding. All of the interventions I have described above in this section happened before Stella was fourteen years of age.

Incarceration and a Court Diversion By the time she was fourteen, Stella had also begun experiencing more lengthy periods of incarceration in provincial youth justice facilities. Because of the charges she continued to incur while living at WellYouth, Stella spent time in two different group homes for young offenders in Ontario. Primarily she was placed at Oakwood House, which is where she and Keelyn met. Each time she was released from custody (after having been sentenced) or from detention (while awaiting sentencing), she returned to Well-Youth. At Well-Youth, Stella continued to work towards the completion of the eighth grade in a section 23 classroom.3 School continued to be a struggle for her. The explanation she provides of her experience in

3 Section 23 refers to grant allocations for educational programs in care, treatment, custodial and correctional facilities. Programs are for “very high-risk students,” aged four to nineteen years (Toronto Catholic District School Board, 2010).

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school echoes Khaled’s (see chapter 2). Both of these young people describe how more pressing concerns – hunger, homelessness, medical regimes, housing instability – prevent them from consistently having “the head” for school: I was on five different medications at a time … I was completely knocked out, but also when you move around a lot, it’s just that you tune out. It was really hard for me to do schooling because when I lived in the group home it just wasn’t what I was focusing on. I had more important issues to deal with than school. Like when your head isn’t in the right space, you can’t really do schooling because your focus is somewhere else. (Stella, interview, 2007)

Despite her struggles to focus in school, Stella did manage to complete her grade eight year in the section 23 classroom at Well-Youth. She explains that eventually her mother arranged for her to participate in a mental health court diversion program4 and Stella and a lawyer worked to have eleven of her charges dismissed. Participating in the court diversion program prompted Stella to stay “out of trouble for a while” and finish her academic year, but soon she began to AWOL again because she was “basically sick of my group home and I just didn’t care. It was fun to cause mischief” (Stella, interview, 2007). Over the next year, Stella began to incur “charge after charge after charge” (Stella, interview, 2007). Her favourite counsellor at Well-Youth died when she was fifteen years old. After this, Stella refused to communicate with anyone, and she was eventually discharged from the treatment centre. [M]y counsellor that I confided in passed away. I wouldn’t open up to anyone. Then I got kicked out of the group home. I went back to my mother’s house and I just laid there – like I had a blanket over my head all of the time, I felt like I was so ugly that I couldn’t even look my mother in the face. I wasn’t showering. I just laid on the couch every day – I don’t know for how long it was. I was just lying there and three cops came to my house and put me in restraints and put me in an ambulance – because my mother had called the cops – and my dog was freaking out and I didn’t even know 4 In Ontario courts, mental health diversions can be established to facilitate “alternatives to criminal sanctions” for people with mental illness who have come into contact with the law for “minor offenses” (Canadian Mental Health Association Ontario, 2010).

74  Youth Work why they just ambushed me in the house and took me to the hospital … I guess my mother had called the cops on me. (Stella, interview, 2007)

In this passage, Stella recalls being arrested and hospitalized again. Like her first arrest – where she simply remembers being shackled to a bench – this arrest was not the result of Stella committing a crime or breaching the conditions of her probation agreement. The police are called in to intervene because someone (in this case, her mother) considered her to be a risk to herself or others. A fifteen-year-old woman who does nothing but lie on the couch with her head under a blanket, refusing to look at anyone, shower, or speak might reasonably prompt a parent to seek institutional assistance. But this account is Stella’s, and she is not telling it from the point of view of her concerned mother. In this very short passage, Stella paints a vivid sensory picture for us: she is lying inert on the couch with a blanket over her face; the dog starts barking wildly; police officers seem to appear out of nowhere; they put Stella into restraints and carry her into a waiting ambulance. Involuntary Admittance to a Psychiatric Facility In order to discover how her experience was coordinated institutionally, I interviewed two Middlesborough police officers (Mathew and Morgan) and a mental health nurse (Paul) at the Middlesborough psychiatric facility, the Norton Building. In our interview, Mathew explains that he is required to take someone to the Norton Building once the individual “meets the criteria for any mental health arrest: if he’s a danger to himself or anybody else … even any threats of self-harm or threats of suicide, we’ll go straight to Nortons. Well, we’ll go straight to emerg. And then, well, they’re stretched just as thin as anyone else” (interview, 2008). Mathew describes what he typically experiences when he brings an individual to the hospital against his or her will and explains why the experience is frustrating for police officers and for whomever is being taken to a psychiatric hospital involuntarily: If I arrest somebody under the Mental Health Act,5 then even just myself and whoever the officer is who I’m with, we are off the road for easily five 5 Action by a Policy Officer Where a police officer has reasonable and probable grounds to believe that a person is acting or has acted in a disorderly manner and has reasonable cause to believe that the person,

Youth “At Risk”  75 or six hours, waiting at the hospital. And then the doctor’s going to say, “Well, there wasn’t enough intent to really harm himself” or “I don’t feel that he is a danger to himself” and so he gets released and that’s – the doctor is better qualified to make that call than I am. But, it doesn’t – the person is not getting any help. The person obviously did these things because they need help and they are not getting it. And then the next time I want to take him to the hospital for the same reason, he’s going to tell me to go fuck myself. Because he’s not going to get help up there: “I go up, I’m going to sit there for five hours with you, and then the doctor is going to let me go and I’m not going to be any better off, so why would I go up [to the hospital] with you?” And then I have to take him and it becomes – I have to arrest him by force … And who wants to sit around in an emergency room surrounded by police officers? To say the least, it’s embarrassing. (Mathew, interview, 2008)

At the beginning of this statement, Mathew makes reference to the Mental Health Act (Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care, 1990). The Act empowers Mathew to take someone to the hospital if he “has reasonable and probable grounds to believe” that a person is “acting in a disorderly manner” or (in a nutshell) that one’s mental state makes her a risk to herself or others. But after waiting in the emergency room for a number of hours, the individual has often calmed down and any manifestation of “disorderly” conduct, which shaped Mathew’s initial involvement with the person, are no longer visible to examining doctors and it is deemed that “hospitalization is not urgent or necessary” (Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care, 1990, [7]11). As such, the individual is not admitted to the Norton Building, and is,

(a) has threatened or attempted or is threatening or attempting to cause bodily harm to himself or herself; (b) has behaved or is behaving violently towards another person or has caused or is causing another person to fear bodily harm from him or her; or (c) has shown or is showing a lack of competence to care for himself or herself, and in addition the police officer is of the opinion that the person is apparently suffering from mental disorder of a nature or quality that likely will result in, (d) serious bodily harm to the person; (e) serious bodily harm to another person; or (f) serious physical impairment of the person, and that it would be dangerous to proceed under section 16 [Justice of the peace’s order for psychiatric examination], the police officer may take the person in custody to an appropriate place for examination by a physician. (Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care, 1990, [7]17)

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instead, released into “a community that is not set up to deal with them and not prepared to deal with them” (Mathew, interview, 2008). When police intervention is requested in the future, the individual often resists arrest and Mathew is compelled to forcefully transport this person to the hospital for another psychiatric assessment. There is a circular character to the process Mathew describes. His description illuminates a process that is obviously not working for police officers (who end up at the hospital for the bulk of a shift, instead of patrolling their “area” or responding to “calls for service”) and also not working for people who have mental health concerns that contour their experiences in the community in general and with the police, in particular. While Stella’s account differs from the one that Mathew provides – in that she does end up being admitted to the hospital – Mathew’s description provides us with the institutional backdrop that is missing from Stella’s story. The police officers who appear and “ambush” Stella are simply doing their jobs. They are following police protocols coordinated in relation to a) the Ontario Mental Health Act (Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care, 1990), b) a mother’s requests for police intervention, and c) institutional concerns about demonstrating accountability and managing risk. When people’s actions or words indicate that they are not conducting themselves so as to minimize risk to others or to themselves, a police officer is legally obligated to intervene. The officer must activate a process whereby the riskiness of the individual or situation is subdued. There is an institutional relationship between risk and accountability. Demon­ strating accountability – documenting that an officer properly processed a case according to the stipulations of the Ontario Mental Health Act – is part of one’s work to alleviate or subdue the risks associated with people who are considered disorderly. As it is constructed in the Ontario Mental Health Act, a disorderly individual is someone whose actions cannot easily be predicted by intervening professionals (Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care, 1990). Because of the unpredictability or non-­ normative nature of the disorderly individual’s conduct, they pose a greater risk to society. Significantly, they also represent a considerable risk to the professional credibility of the people responsible for working with these individuals in an institutional context. When I suggest to Mathew that his description of a mental health arrest is probably what Stella was referring to when she describes being “shackled to a bench,” he explains that, indeed, handcuffing a person to a bench in the hospital during a mental health intervention is a normal

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part of his work to manage the riskiness of a situation where he is responsible for the actions of the person in his custody and the well-being of everyone else in the waiting room: We have to do it. I’m not going to – like if I don’t handcuff a person when we go to the hospital and they go ballistic and hurt somebody else. Well they’re going to say to me, “Why the hell weren’t they handcuffed? They were under arrest!” And if I say, “I didn’t want them to be embarrassed.” Well that’s not going to cut it. And then I’m in trouble. (Mathew, interview, 2008)

It is not Mathew’s responsibility to protect the dignity of individuals who, because their conduct is deemed disorderly, are detained by him under the jurisdiction of the Ontario Mental Health Act. His professional obligation is to protect this person from injuring him or herself and others and to take him or her to a medical practitioner who can assess whether or not he or she warrants hospitalization. Mathew is responsible for initiating a process whereby the riskiness of a “disorderly” individual can be medically determined. Child Welfare and the Homelessness Sector Shortly after Stella was arrested in her home, her mother attempted to admit her to a private facility that specializes in shock therapy (field note, Rose, 2007). At this point, the CAS got involved in Stella’s life. When she was discharged from the hospital, she was discharged into CAS care. Stella’s understanding is that her “mother put [her] in CAS” but my conversations with Rose lead me to believe that CAS intervened to prevent the shock therapy treatment. At fifteen years of age, the courts designated Stella as a Society ward and she was placed in a group home in Middlesborough. She AWOLed from the group home and ended up being sent to Oakwood House for three or four months because of an assault charge. When she was released from Oakwood House, Stella’s status as a Society ward was reviewed in the context of evidence contained in her CAS files about her involvement with the youth justice system, her mental health work, evidence of her mother’s inability to provide Stella with appropriate care, and, most significantly, a Child Protection Order (Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General, 2003) filed by the CAS on behalf of Stella. The courts re-designated Stella as a ward of the Crown, and the CAS placed her at SYS.

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While living at SYS, Stella breached her probation agreement (for being late for curfew and/or drinking) more times than she can count and repeatedly ended up back in a youth justice facility. When she was present at SYS (i.e., not in a youth justice facility), Stella attended the Loft Alternative School. She also had a stint at Middlesborough Collegiate and Vocational School (MCVS), the mainstream secondary school associated with Loft. At MCVS, she nearly completed her grade nine year, receiving As in all subjects, but stopped attending classes right before the end of term and did not take a single exam (field note, 2008). Her ongoing involvement with the youth justice system as well as her episodic and continuous mental health issues would have made it extraordinarily difficult to participate in mainstream schooling. Eventually Stella got a local probation officer who activated her mental health diagnoses in order to initiate her involvement in the Intensive Support and Supervision Program (ISSP). The ISSP formalizes a process for bringing together human service professionals from across the sector to provide individualized support for young people who have a history of criminal involvement and mental health issues. Stella’s work with the ISSP required her to meet monthly with a team of practitioners – the two coordinators of the ISSP, her psychiatrist, her therapist, her CAS worker, Rose (the CAS case manager at the shelter), and her probation officer. Her participation in an ISSP required that she attend these monthly meetings, adhere to a contract requiring her to meet her probation conditions, attend therapy, do community service, and so forth. I sat in a number of ISSP meetings with different young people in the community, including one with Stella. The meeting with Stella occurred when she was seventeen years old, so she had already been in the ISSP for almost two years. She had just received a new CAS worker (her third in two years) and a new probation worker. In the same week, she also learned that the building she had just rented a room in was about to be sold and so she would need to move back to SYS. Despite many questions from the group, Stella remained largely uncommunicative throughout the meeting while others discussed her progress. Eventually she just got up and left. We assumed she had just stepped out to use the bathroom, but later discovered she’d walked right out of the building and back to SYS (field note, 2008). At sixteen years of age, with the support of CAS, Stella discharged from SYS and moved into Pritchard House, SYS’s second stage (or supported) housing environment. Over the course of the next year, Stella had very little involvement with the youth justice system, but was back

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and forth between SYS and Pritchard House somewhat regularly as she struggled with mental health issues. Twice while living at Pritchard House, she stopped taking her medication and describes herself as going “into crisis.” For Stella, a mental health crisis is signalled by a prolonged period of intense self-harm. After the first crisis and an initial period of hospitalization, she returned to Pritchard House under the supervision of the house mentor who was to track whether or not she was taking her medication. But the shelter could only afford to pay a Pritchard House worker to be onsite thirty hours a week. As such, Stella’s failure to comply with her pill-taking regime went largely unnoticed. After the second crisis, she returned to SYS and continued to live there until she was eighteen years old. I met her shortly after she returned to SYS, and I was at the shelter the day that the new Pritchard House mentor came back from cleaning out Stella’s old room. She was deeply disturbed to discover the room still contained the unused pill packages, bloody razor blades, and piles of blood-soaked towels that represented Stella’s attempts to deal with her pain on her own terms. Once back at SYS, Stella began breaching the conditions of her probation agreement again, by failing to abide by SYS’s curfew.6 She was periodically sent back to the Oakwood House corrections facility. While at Pritchard House and later when back at SYS, Stella continued to attend Loft. Working with Sebastian and Karma, Stella initially attempted to complete secondary school credits through independent study and eventually through Prior Learning Assessment Recognition (PLAR7), but by the time she had been de-registered from Loft at eighteen years of age, she had failed to receive a single high school credit. Just before her eighteenth birthday, Stella moved out of the shelter into a rooming house, relying on CAS funds for “independent living.” 6 Towards the end of her time at SYS, some staff members would phone the CAS’s on-call person and report Stella “missing” as soon as she missed her 11 p.m. curfew. Even if she arrived back to the building ten minutes later, a process had been initiated that she was not in a position to stop. 7 “Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition (PLAR) is the formal evaluation and credit-granting process whereby students may obtain credits for prior learning. Prior learning includes the knowledge and skills that students have acquired, in both formal and informal ways, outside secondary school. Students may have their knowledge and skills evaluated against the expectations outlined in provincial curriculum policy documents in order to earn credits towards the secondary school diploma” (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2001, p.1).

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In order to receive this funding, Stella had to attend school and adhere to the conditions of her probation order, which she was required to keep with her at all times. It was also a condition of her probation to check in with the police every Monday morning. Shortly after leaving SYS, Stella stopped taking her prescribed medications again and began experimenting with street drugs. On her own accord she returned to SYS and admitted herself to the Norton Building. She continued to live at SYS on and off until just before the birth of her first child at nineteen years of age. Shortly after her eighteenth birthday, Stella was discharged from CAS into the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP). Had she not had a child, the CAS would have remained uninvolved in Stella’s life from this point forward. As it happened, Stella sought out significant social and medical support throughout her pregnancy (so as to remain off psychiatric medication). Because of concerns regarding Stella’s partner, the prenatal social worker, who Stella had worked closely with throughout (and after) her pregnancy, contacted the CAS which quickly became involved in Stella’s life once again. She continues to have to navigate various institutional processes in order to retain custody of her son. Closing Thoughts In a climate where active risk management is increasingly construed as an individual responsibility, Stella’s obliviousness to this imperative distinguished her as deviant. Objectified knowledge about risk – how to manage it, who and/or what is considered risky, and how this determination is made – acquires a coordinative capacity, particularly as knowledge about risk becomes embedded in institutional practices for working with people. When we talk about “youth at risk,” I believe that the concern is about young people’s visible lack of regard for the obligations of active lifestyle management via risk mediation. Stella’s story allows us to investigate risk as an ideological procedure. We see how conceptions of risk and being at risk work in a circular fashion to coordinate people’s conduct. Although we can describe many things as risky, the term at risk has a distinctive institutional character, which clearly allows us to see how the concept works ideo­ logically. The concept organizes upward from people’s actualities into an institutional domain. As the term at risk becomes embedded in how things work institutionally, it becomes an organizing framework around which programs are developed and policies are implemented. Despite

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the apparent emptiness of the concept, it acquires a kind of material significance each time it is activated as an explanation of a social phenomenon, an institutional course of action, or a policy move. Once it gains hold institutionally, it also organizes downward from this institutional domain, showing up in discourse, practice, policy, knowledge, calculating techniques, and so forth that have a coordinative effect in people’s daily lives. Institutional efforts to manage risk are connected to professional anxiety about, and text-driven processes for, demonstrating accountability. Technically and conceptually, accountability and risk work in concert. Accountability is a demonstration of continuous and transparent mediation of risk. For example, in education people talk about young people who are “at risk” of school failure. Test scores, attendance records, and credit accrual rates can indicate degrees of riskiness in this regard. These same data are used to represent institutional transparency and accountability. In psychology, attempts have been made to identify the “risk factors” which are associated with particular outcomes (e.g., adolescent sexual offending). Risk factors are based on measures of predictability (with regard to particular outcomes), which are also used in demonstrations of program accountability. Across various human-­ service institutions, these quantitative measures of risk work with discursively organized concepts such as youth-at-risk, streamlining how risk (and people defined as risky) come to be understood and related to, institutionally. In education, we see risk used as a justification for a number of initiatives which overtly target the performance of young people who have been categorized as such; the concept is used to justify increased resources expenditure and poor educational outcomes. I see the concept operating much like how Griffith (1984) observed the concept of the “single parent family” to work. That is, both concepts organize how teachers account for the actions of particular students, how policy makers interpret educational trends, and, ultimately, how educational resources are distributed. The term academic achievement works in a similar way; in fact, academic achievement works in concert with ideological constructions of risk. As these concepts become embedded in the institutional fabric of schooling, they organize how people relate to one another in educational contexts. Programs and interventions are created to improve the academic achievement of young people whose performance allows them to be identified as at risk of school failure. The programs

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themselves (e.g., student success programs, locally developed courses, centres for independent studies, or prior learning and assessment mechanisms) are organized around and solidify a particular version of the at-risk student as evidenced by various academic achievement indicators. Funds are allocated specifically towards these initiatives and the concepts of risk and achievement acquire an economic character as they are entered into budget decisions and funding proposals. Educators and educational stakeholders begin to talk about students who are at risk or the province’s achievement gap and appear to understand what one another mean (Griffith, 1984; 1992). The concepts are materially significant. They coordinate relations between people in (and beyond) educational settings. But the organizing strength of these abstractions require a simplification of the complex and varied circumstances that give rise to school failure. In Stella’s account we read about her initial and ongoing experiences with school failure. My intention is to show how a teacher’s evident disappointment with her drop in grades is shaped in the context of a provincial focus on demonstrating accountability through “achievement” data. As a high-achieving student from a middle-class family, Stella was not institutionally characterized as a youth at risk. It was only when she began to underperform academically that Stella’s teacher needed to account for Stella’s experiences in school. A character­ ization of Stella as at risk was precipitated by a dramatic shift in her academic performance. Instead of acknowledging the complexity and diversity of circumstances that shape people’s educational histories, we organize our educational interventions around abstract notions like “risk” and “achievement.” Stella’s story is full of examples like this one where practitioners must uphold a professional obligation to demonstrate accountability, which is difficult to maintain during their interactions with her. Each institutional course of action seems to require an additional institutional affiliation meant to diminish the riskiness of some aspect of her life. By the time she was seventeen years old, Stella was working with psychiatrists, psychologists, police officers, teachers, youth workers, probation officers, child welfare workers, shelter workers, and other people who work with youth in varying capacities. Each is responsible for subduing the risks associated with a single aspect of her existence. As significantly, their work is coordinated in response to Stella’s ongoing refusal to participate in these institutional relations in the ways the processes themselves require her to.

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It is important to take note that in Stella’s telling of her story, she does not make herself out to be a victim. Time and again, she provided me with examples of her refusal to comply with institutional expectations. Stella ran away, caused trouble, and hurt herself, often while in the care of those who were trying to help her. Her story reminds us that young people are not passive recipients of institutional intervention. In most cases, they actively pursue, navigate, and/or resist in­ stitutional relationships. While Khaled actively sought out various institutional affiliations – OW support, Canadian residency status, an electrical apprenticeship – Stella aggressively resisted people’s efforts to draw her into any kind of institutional relationship. I have argued that her experiences of relentless institutional intervention are a result of the considerable risk she posed to intervening institutions. It is significant that others are unable to predict what Stella is going to do at any given moment or how she is going to respond to an intervention. At each level of institutional involvement, the intervening institution required the presence of another institutional body as a demonstration of their work to reduce the risk she posed to herself and others. But I think that the bigger issue was that she posed a risk to the intervening agency or program. When you see Stella’s story laid out as I have in this chapter, there is a clear sense that no one knew what to do with her. Stella was diagnosed and re-diagnosed. She was subjected to numerous medical treatment regimes. She was shuffled from treatment centre to treatment centre, placed in group homes, a youth shelter, and in apartments. She was incarcerated, locked down, and put on probation. Children’s Aid Society workers, the police, ODSP workers, youth and shelter workers, as well as various mental health professionals all attempted to connect Stella with institutions and institutional processes. Across institutional settings people’s work with Stella was coordinated textually (via child welfare, educational, youth justice, and mental health policies, police records, SYS’s incident report binder and resident case files, arrest warrants, court proceedings, psychiatric evaluations, medication tracking sheets, and so forth). People’s efforts to draw Stella into institutional interventions, and their work to keep track of her progress once there, required constant monitoring and documentation. In Stella’s account, we see that initially her institutional work was coordinated in relation to a number of mental health diagnoses. Later, these diagnoses would have been referenced in relation to, or informed

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the writing of, other texts: case files outlining Stella’s stay and treatment at Well-Youth (as well as her multiple infractions: for running away, smoking, and “causing mischief”); hospital records documenting periods of forced hospitalization for mental illness; the Family Law Act (Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General, 1990a) as it was used by CAS and the Crown to justify Stella’s removal from parental custody; contact notes recording Stella as “no-call; no show” or late for curfew at her group home and later SYS; police records specifying various youth justice charges or warrants for her arrest; and a series of reports documenting CAS’s intervention into her parenting work. At each of these institutional moments – moments that can be considered, conceptually, as processing interchanges – people took up the texts that represent Stella’s institutional care and used these to inform their work with her. While Stella’s story is meant to appal the reader, it should not be misinterpreted as an attempt to hold any person or institution at fault. My intention is reveal how, at an institutional level, the experiences of young people who become the targets of complex institutional action, end up obscured by institutional observation, calculation, policy-­ mediated procedures, and reform initiatives.

Chapter Five

The Institutional Coordination of Youth Work

As I indicated in the introduction, the term youth work traditionally ­conveys a particular set of activities conducted by people who hold a  professional title and who work to support the various dominant ­institutions that provide services or support for young people. My unconventional use of the term in this book is a deliberate attempt to  draw the reader’s attention to the co-ordering of young people’s and practitioners’ work across institutional settings. The previous three chapters used young people’s stories of their work to get housed, access social assistance, terminate a relationship with CAS, and resist institutional treatment to expose institutional relations that produce particular outcomes for young people who lack stable housing. But youth work occurs in the coordinated activities of young people and the adults who work in the institutional settings where youth are active. Practitioners’ descriptions of their work represent another vantage point from which the social relations of youth work can be investigated. The coordinated experiences of individual youth and adults, working in institutional settings, reveal relations of governance that are coordinated extra locally. Essential to an investigation of ruling is an analysis of how people’s work in institutional settings is co-ordered. The everyday world of experience is “put together” in the ordinary things people do that take time and energy – their work (D.E. Smith, 1999). Young people are not paid for their work in institutional settings; but economic relations in public institutions depend on young people doing their work in ways that allow their local efforts to be drawn into extensive relations of

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capital and exchange. Young people and practitioners’ institutional work is coordinated such that particular institutional goals can be met. The coordinated complexes of social action I describe as youth work illustrate an institutional preoccupation with accountability and risk management. This chapter explicates how accountability relations constrain practitioners’ efforts to coordinate timely and effective inter-institutional support for young people. Accountability discourses, punitive audit practices, professional framing (e.g., youth at-risk or corporate parenting), “cover your ass” (or CYA) work, narrow service purviews, and competitive funding practices are institutional relations within which youth work is conducted. The fact that young people’s institutional work fails to produce the outcomes they need is not an instance of systems failure; young people and the practitioners charged with their care are participating in institutional relations organized to serve the aims of governance, rather than the immediate needs of young people who are without housing. Mapping the Institutional Terrain of Youth Work In Ontario, the Children’s Aid Society is not required to offer its services to young people who are sixteen years of age or older and living outside the care of parent(s) or guardian(s). If they have not already been made wards of the Crown, youth are responsible for securing housing, food, healthcare, education and/or training, and social assistance on their own. Often, the first step in this process is to find a safe place to sleep. When a person “requests a bed” at one of the shelters in town, they initiate a series of institutional processes that draw them into relations with other public institutions: Ontario Works (OW), mental health services, immigration, education, Service Canada, the CAS1, and so forth. Much of this work requires the additional coordination and support of frontline staff at SYS. This is where an organizational disjuncture arises: officially a shelter worker’s job is to provide young people with accommodation and food. As such, the first point of 1 Young people applying for emergency shelter who are under the age of sixteen and unable to return home will be taken into temporary custody by the CAS. Young people who are caring for children of their own may also enter into a relationship with the CAS, if they become “known” to child protection services when they apply to stay at a shelter.

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contact for most young people who are setting off on their own are shelter workers who are unable to facilitate essential connections for their young “clients.” There is a sense among the shelter workers at SYS that relations between agencies in Middlesborough are organized hierarchically, and that SYS occupies a space near the bottom of this institutional “totem pole.” Although it is experienced as hierarchical, legislation across the province is organized horizontally.2 In other words, the Education Act does not have lesser or greater authority than the Child and Family Services Act or the Mental Health Act; the acts were written to work together in support of a comprehensive legal framework. In this context, a teacher does not have lesser or greater authority than a child protection officer, for example; each simply has a different professional jurisdiction, mediated by the aforementioned legislative frameworks. In order to understand how public institutions operate such that people have a clear sense that some practitioners are “top dogs” and others are not, one cannot begin her investigation by looking at policy. Instead, one needs to begin with the ordinary work practices that characterize different workplaces. Tracing the flow of information across public sector organizations, one begins to see how people experience the public sector as a hierarchically organized institutional space. In the name of accountability and transparency, public sector institutions regularly collect data. The work of collecting and moving these data makes it feel like inter-­ institutional relations are organized hierarchically. The aggregation and movement of data require people to record certain details about their work, input these data into online systems, analyze them, produce and circulate reports, and so forth. Sometimes, data collected in one institutional setting are channelled outward, only to return as text-based technologies, which organize frontline work (e.g., the use of standardized assessment data in Ontario schools to inform the development of School Improvement Plans). Other data never return, remaining inaccessible to the people they represent and the people who produced them. For example, outside of child protection hearings, there are few legal grounds for someone to advocate for access to child protection data. Federal, provincial, and municipal privacy laws exist to protect such information. Access is granted under conditions outlined in the Freedom

2 There are different levels of legislative authority when you examine federal law. The Constitution of Canada, for example, is Canada’s highest law, overlaying all others.

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of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA). Even when a person wishes to request access to information about themselves, an appeal must be made through the Provincial Privacy Commissioner. The process takes thirty days. Shelter workers’ sense that they are at the bottom of the social service totem pole is mediated by this unidirectional flow of information. SYS is required to upload information into the federal HIFIS (Homeless Individuals and Families Information System) database and report regularly to OW, CAS, and, where appropriate, probation. In contrast, they receive very little information about the young people who stay at SYS and when Requests for Information (ROIs) are sent to other agencies, they are seldom answered. To be clear, I am not suggesting that shelter workers should have unilateral access to the information in a young person’s child protection file. I am attempting to articulate: a) why shelter workers feel that they occupy the bottom rung of an institutional hierarchy; and b) that accountability relations make it challenging for service providers to coordinate a timely response for young people. A thirty-day processing turnaround is quite timely, bureaucratically speaking; but for young people who spend significant time on the street, it is too long to wait. The exigencies of life of the street require immediate action on the part of youth and often the adult practitioners with whom they work. “CYA” Work and the Public Sector’s “Revolving Door Syndrome” A shelter worker’s job is to provide people with temporary food and shelter, while helping them get connected with OW. On the ground, this work begins with an intake interview. At any time of day or night, a young person can arrive at the side door of the shelter and ring the buzzer to be let into “the bubble” before being allowed into the shelter proper. This initial assessment is used to determine that an individual is not intoxicated, meets age-based eligibility criteria, and has not been previously “barred” from the shelter. After passing this initial assessment, an individual is led into the shelter workers’ office to participate in an intake interview. The “intake” is structured around the completion of a form, which either becomes the first piece of paperwork in a young person’s file or is added to an existing file. After providing a name, social insurance number, and photographic identification, a young person is asked a series of questions about her or his criminal, psychological, medical, educational,

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and familial history. At this point, the intake is complete, and in most cases an individual is “admitted” to the shelter. Once admitted, the individual becomes a “resident” and must do the work, which this designation requires: updating identification, getting connected with OW, finding an apartment and securing an “intent to rent” form from a willing landlord, attending probation meetings, and interacting with a school (if a young person is under eighteen years of age). All the while, shelter workers are doing the work that their institutional designation requires. For the most part, this entails documenting the work – or lack of it – that the resident is doing. In my interviews with shelter workers, I was told that this working relationship did little to transform the circumstances of the youth who stay at SYS. Shelter workers were adamant that relations between services providers circumscribed their own efforts to support sustained transitions into the community for youth. This concern is not limited to shelter workers – although it is perhaps more pronounced in their talk. Across public sector institutions, people talked about what they described as “cover your ass” or CYA work, which they see having little impact for their young “clients.” Further, they lament the sector’s “revolving door syndrome,” where the same small group of young people become regular consumers of the city’s social services (field note, 2007). Practitioners describe being unable to facilitate timely institutional connections for the young people they work with, and young people’s lifesustaining work is not effectively institutionally supported. Calvin, a shelter worker, explains that his work is made more challenging by a lack of accountability, which is typical of public sector organizations. As he explains it, an accountability deficit is typical “of the public sector. The private sector is more performance based. Your performance is a bigger factor. A lot of the agencies that we work with are government jobs where the quality of your work is irrelevant” (interview, 2007). Despite the ubiquity of managerial technologies in public institutions, Calvin describes a system labouring under the weight of institutional protocols, which diminish accountability and preclude the possibility of effective inter-agency collaboration. To illustrate this point, he tells me about his inability to access the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) crisis intervention services for young people at SYS, who he believes require immediate mental health supports: A CMHA crisis intervention team comes here, makes a presentation and says, “Phone us. We have protocols to follow.” And it sounds really good

90  Youth Work when they’re here in that three-hour presentation. Then they drive back. Two weeks later at ten-thirty at night when we do need them, if we phone them, if we make that call, then they say, “Well, we’d have to assess them,” or “Well, if they’re not in the mood to talk to us themselves than there’s nothing we can do.” (interview, 2007, emphasis in original)

Calvin’s account references a CMHA protocol for mental health crisis intervention that “sounds really good.” When he calls the twenty-fourhour crisis support line in the middle of the night, however, he learns that the same series of protocols he described sounding really good, prevent the team from being able to help him – in that moment – support a young person who he believes to be experiencing a mental health crisis. Twenty-four-hour crisis intervention is part of a provincial fund-­ reallocation strategy meant to reduce mental health hospitalizations. The CMHA defines a crisis as “any situation so identified by the person experiencing it.” This, combined with institutional expectations/standards around mental health assessment, shape who is able to initiate a crisis intervention. When Calvin phones to request support from the crisis intervention team, he enters a domain where he is not in a position, institutionally, to initiate action on behalf of young people at SYS. If the young person Calvin references in this passage does not already have dual diagnosis (mental health and developmental disability) documentation in his or her case file or does not consider him or herself to be experiencing a mental health crisis, the incident would not fit the criteria of a “crisis” warranting immediate CMHA attention. Clearly, it is important that people determine their own involvement in mental health services; the issue here is that Calvin is responsible for mediating the riskiness of any “situation” that arises at SYS. For example, if an individual indicates that he/she might harm him/herself or others, and if the individual is unwilling to speak with the crisis intervention team who are on the phone, Calvin is professionally obligated to contact the police and have the young person transported by force to the local hospital. Initiating police contact (“forming” the individual) inserts Calvin and the young person into a complex set of textually mediated processes linking SYS, the Mental Health Act (Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care, 1990), the local Regional Police Department, the Police Standards Act (Ontario Ministry of Community Safety and

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Correctional Services, 1990), and the Middlesborough Regional Health Centre. However, if Calvin attempts to handle the situation in-house, he might later be accused of placing himself, his co-worker, and the young people using the shelter at risk. Research indicates that public sector institutions are increasingly organized around assessing performance indicators and adhering to quality assurance models (Aucoin, 1995; Ball, 1999; Taylor, 2003). Yet above we see Calvin making sense of his unsatisfactory experience working with a national mental health agency as a problem of accountability. His experience is that CMHA crisis intervention protocols – the textually mediated practices through which a crisis is constructed, institutionally, and through which an intervention becomes a set of standardized practices, articulated to policy, and linked to other institutional processes – detract from the local CMHA agencies’ responsibility to support his work with young people at SYS. I prompt him to elaborate on his explanation, referencing a meeting we had both attended with a representative from the local police department. In response to my question about whether his critique extends to police services, Calvin responds that this is also somewhat the case, but that he thinks, … they have a more rigid command structure. They are held accountable for their job performance and their actions … [In contrast,] I think [SYS] has seemed to some of [the police] like a paperwork machine … we are calling them a lot for missing persons and stuff … A police officer came and spoke to us at our last staff meeting and he said that the primary role of a police officer is to watch his own ass: accountability, liability … It’s probably truer than what a lot of people around here will say. A lot of what we do is to cover our own butts. (interview, 2007)

Calvin notes that the local police department, unlike the CMHA, has a “rigid [or visible] command structure” through which people can be held accountable for their “job performance.” It sounds like he wants to be able to call someone to account when he is unable to effectively coordinate his inter-institutional work for youth. Later in this same passage, however, Calvin also references a popular depiction of the shelter as a “paperwork machine.” SYS, we are to discover, is more like the CMHA than not. He explains that the shelter regularly contacts the police for “missing persons and stuff.” The

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“missing person” Calvin references in this passage is distinct from “the mental health crisis” he alluded to earlier; each term references a distinct institutional process. If a young person staying at the shelter under CAS care is late for curfew, shelter workers are required to contact the CAS staff person who is “on call.” In turn, the CAS staff must contact the police who will begin the process of filing a missing person’s report. At each of these processing interchanges (Pence, 1997; 2001) accountability within and between agencies is constructed textually. Recall that a processing interchange is an institutional point of contact where “systems” or processes interact. These interactions are facilitated by people acting on, and moving, data. The immediate course of action for a shelter worker at SYS is to initiate a paperwork trail. After the shelter worker places the call to CAS, he or she must document this work in the shelter’s incident report binder. At this point, the shelter worker has done his or her job. The CAS on-call staff then does her or his job and reports the person as “missing” to the police. It is at this point that the real text-based work begins. The institutional process for dealing with a missing person is labour intensive for police officers, requiring extensive paperwork even if the young person returns to the shelter later that night or early the next morning. For young people whose probation agreements include “an order” to abide by the rules at one’s place of residence, a warrant for their arrest may also be issued. In these circumstances, being late for curfew is considered a failure to comply with probation and is a punishable offence (Ontario Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services, 2011). The following day, the police will turn up at the shelter and arrest the young person, whose institutional status will have changed from that of a “missing person” to that of a “young offender.” All of this work will be documented by the police officers involved, using standardized reporting mechanisms that allow statistical data to be pulled from the forms at a later date. These statistical data eventually show up in the police department’s annual reports and business plans as a demonstration of accountability to other institutions and to a taxpaying public. Calvin makes two moves in his account: first, he constructs accountability as something that is distinct from (and maybe even prevented by) paperwork and protocols – two technologies typically employed to manage people’s work; he then reduces accountability to an individual or organization’s efforts to “cover [its] own butt.” His account is further

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organized by a concern with accessibility – of people and of people’s work processes – and management of risk. The reference to CYA work runs through my interviews with CAS workers, police officers, shelter workers, and crisis workers. CYA work, which is always textual, is understood as distinct from people’s actual work on the ground with youth. This is an oversimplification. People’s work in institutional settings – their work with young people and their work to account for it – is always textually mediated. Knowledge about youth, agency protocols, policy, performance evaluation practices, and chains of communication all exist textually, enabling the construction and enforcement of professional accountability and clearly shaping how frontline practitioners’ work with youth is organized. Navigating Text-Based Institutional Hierarchies Karma is the educational assistant (EA) at Loft, the alternative learning classroom associated with the youth shelter. She is employed by SYS, but paid by the local public school board. Because Karma is considered an employee of the shelter, she conducts her work outside of the formal accounting and accountability mechanisms that characterize public education. A typical workday for Karma is dedicated to filling pressing gaps in young people’s day-to-day care by helping them access food, diapers for their children, or counselling at Middlesborough Youth Services. In order to connect young people with local services, she records what she describes as “serious occurrences” in a young person’s case file at the shelter, and activates these notes in her conversations with service providers. The notes that Karma records in young people’s case files are based largely on her own observations. Unless she is recording an “incident,” which can be verified by an external source (e.g., a phone call to the police), the notes that Karma includes in the SYS files are not institutionally useful in other settings. Work at SYS is not subject to the kinds of managerial technologies (performance audits, program evaluation strategies, or standardized assessments) that one observes shaping work in other institutional settings. Outside of the youth shelter, therefore, SYS case files are not seen as professionally credible. On the one hand, this lack of administrative infrastructure means that shelter workers can organize their work so that it is  responsive to the evolving circumstances of young people’s lives. On the other hand, because it is conducted below the threshold of

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i­nstitutional visibility, the work is not considered professionally accountable in other institutional settings. The adoption of accountability and managerial paradigms in ministry-mandated human service organizations in Ontario shape how other agencies operate and consequently how ordinary people interface with one another across these institutional contexts. While not every agency or organization that works in the area of human services is mandated by provincial and/or federal ministries, those organizations that are (e.g., criminal justice, healthcare, child welfare, social assistance, and education systems) set the tone for how things are done in the sector more generally. Within this increasingly managerial context, Karma, like Calvin, lacks the authority to initiate institutional action for the young people she works with at Loft. While aspects of her work at Loft and SYS are textually based, most of Karma’s work is mediated by texts and text-driven processes, which she does not actively engage and through which she is not able to be held institutionally accountable. Sebastian, the teacher at Loft, submits achievement data (e.g., attendance records, grade breakdowns, and credit accrual rates) to Middlesborough Collegiate and Vocational School (MCVS), the mainstream secondary school of which Loft is a satellite classroom. In contrast, Karma’s accountability work with MCVS is limited to monthly meetings she and Sebastian attend with the vice principal. Her text-based work happens primarily in relation to the preparation, maintenance, and use of case files at SYS. Karma’s relationship with SYS requires that she complete “incident reports” whenever police are involved in a situation with young people who go to school at Loft. She also adds a note about “the incident” to a young person’s file. Similarly, when Karma observes a young person exhibiting what she describes as a “behaviour,” she walks over to the shelter, pulls the person’s file, and adds a note about it: “any ‘behaviour’ – anything that they [shelter workers] need to know – I document it into the files for them.” In Karma’s description, “anything they need to know” refers to information in the case files that shelter workers will activate in their work with young people who stay at SYS. Intake and discharge procedures, resident contracts and service plans, a decision to “bar” someone from the shelter, the production and maintenance of a disciplinary warning system, and staff meetings are all organized around the information documented in shelter case files (field note, 2007). Case files at SYS are used to determine whether a young person will be “admitted” to the shelter; they are used to account for an early discharge; and they inform the creation of a young person’s

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service plan. In the textually mediated processes where a case file is activated, the case file, and the procedure itself, structure the institutional relation. In social service agencies, the creation and maintenance of case files is an essential aspect of one’s text-based work. At SYS, young people’s case files contain mostly observational notes and, to a lesser degree, other institutional documentation (e.g., a provincial health card number and/or social insurance number). In contrast, the CAS equivalent to case files (blue binders) contain fewer observational notes or “recordings,” but extensive institutional documentation linking CAS to other Ministry-mandated institutions: psychiatric evaluations, records of dental and medical appointments, immigration documents, records of “plan of care” meetings, report cards, and so forth (field note, 2008). Unlike the case files at SYS, the CAS binders are evaluated each year during the annual Crown ward review. For an agency to pass the review, all of their binders must contain the standard set of institutional texts through which the process constructs accountability. This complement of institutional documentation creates an accountability interlock: a CAS agency’s proof of accountability requires evidence that their processes hook into accountability regimes in other institutional settings. Because they contain mostly anecdotal recordings, SYS case files cannot be seen to evidence accountability in the same way. While essential to people’s day-to-day work at SYS, the observational notes Karma adds to young people’s files are not considered institutionally relevant in other settings. When other agencies request information from the shelter, they are not typically interested in the qualitative observations, which are contained in the files. As I indicated at the beginning of this chapter, shelter workers do collect data, which are streamed into other settings. But these numerical output data (e.g., the number of shelter beds that are filled each night) support institutional processes in other sites, and not the work of young people and staff at SYS. It is this disjuncture that Karma seems to be struggling to understand in the following passage: I find as far as the shelter goes, and it’s just an observation, we’re kind of the low man on the totem pole … you know like if we have a case conference, no one ever comes. They don’t talk to us … So, it’s like in this line of work there’s obviously protocol, which I understand and I follow, but there’s also – it’s very fragmented. There are a lot of services and cross communication is very poor … there is a hierarchy and we are sort of on

96  Youth Work the bottom rung of it … when kids come through the shelter we kind of serve their basic needs. I guess maintenance and social control is what we’re about. And in the shelter, for sure, it’s not about hooking them into services. It’s OW… and I think from there, OW’s gotta take responsibility … I don’t think they do that … It ends right there. (Karma, interview, 2007)

Karma describes a field of social relations where shelter staff has little agency or professional decision-making power. When they initiate interagency meetings, other practitioners do not come. She describes a ­hierarchy of service provision, established through “protocols,” which she goes on to describe as fragmented. The protocols represent reporting pathways that seem to start and stop at the shelter. Even though SYS increasingly provides services (e.g., housing, the Transitional Life-Skills Program, one-on-one youth mentorship) that other agencies in the community purchase for their young “clients,” the young people remain under the institutional jurisdiction of the purchasing agency. While shelter work feeds into, and is shaped by, other institutional processes, there are few instances where a shelter worker is in a position to make a decision about a young person’s institutional work. More often, a shelter worker’s interactions with young people happen in relation to, and in the fulfilment of, decisions that were made in other institutional settings. The legal aspects of a young person’s work with the justice, social assistance, or the child welfare systems means that shelter workers like Karma necessarily subordinate their work and insights to those of a probation officer, CAS worker, OW worker, or police officer. Offi­ cially, Karma’s obligation as a shelter worker is to ensure that a young person receives temporary food and shelter, while mediating between the individual and OW. Similarly, in her role as an EA, Karma’s jurisdiction is limited to supporting a young person’s educational experiences and the typical work processes of a school. This institutional association does little to expand her scope of practice in other institutional settings: When I came in to the school program, I saw a window of opportunity because we’re hooked into the high school, and the guidance department, right … But a lot of what we are dealing with is sort of behaviourally beyond what they are used to dealing with. We’re dealing with at-risk youth, right, and youth who are high-maintenance. So, what I did was that I said to myself I can sort of become … sort of like an access centre here, an access point. (Karma, interview, 2007)

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Karma frames her institutional work with young people in relation to her characterization of them as “at-risk youth” – young people who are “beyond what [schools] are used to dealing with.” Drawing on information in a young person’s case file and objectified knowledge associated with the concept of at-risk youth, Karma constructs Loft students as at-risk of something: drug addiction, homelessness, violence associated with prostitution, a mental health crisis, and so forth. This conceptual workup – the transformation of young people’s experiences into case file entries and the subsequent categorization of these entries as evidence of risk – is essential to Karma’s efforts to hook young people into most social service processes. However, this same work to distinguish her students as “high maintenance” makes it almost impossible for her to adequately advocate for, and institutionally support, her students through a mainstream high school guidance department. Graham is a crisis intervention worker who works in the local secondary schools, but is employed by Middlesborough Youth Services (MYS). Graham’s work in the area of adolescent mental health makes up for a lack of available school social workers within the school board. He is called in by school administrators when they have a student who they believe requires immediate mental health support. Like the shelter, MYS operates without a provincial mandate. While Graham must conduct his work so that it corresponds with accountability processes in schools, his status as an independent service provider does grant him a degree of institutional flexibility. Together Graham and Karma work to meet young people’s immediate needs directly, often circumventing slow and heavily bureau­ cratized institutional processes. Because they work in organizations without provincial mandates, Karma and Graham cannot exercise the type of institutional authority we see with people who work at CAS, the school board, or probation exercise; on the other hand, their institutional affiliation with smaller non-profit organizations means that it is easier for them to nimbly respond to the changing needs of young people. Karma tells me that, “someone will come up and say, ‘I haven’t eaten in a week. I don’t have my social insurance number and no ID, so I can’t go to the food bank.’ So it’s like ring, ring, I call the shelter or MYS to see if they have any food in the [food] cupboard.” For complex problems and longer term needs, Karma must get her students connected to an agency that is able to refer them to services she cannot help them access herself:

98  Youth Work k: If I see that this young person’s really got – that there’s a real drug problem going on … there needs to be a referral made. But that’s out of my hands. I can’t, unfortunately, do that … n: Because you’d have to go through their CAS worker …? k: Exactly, or their OW worker. And so a lot of these kids just fall through the cracks. (interview, 2007)

Because the young people she works with are not her clients, Karma is limited in her ability to help them access other institutional supports, unless she can “work the case” through Graham at MYS. In situations where Karma is not able to coordinate an immediate institutional response from MYS (e.g., because the young person is a ward of the Crown), she tells me that young people “fall through the cracks.” Although organized differently, Karma’s account is reminiscent of Calvin’s frustration with a twenty-four-hour crisis intervention service that remains inaccessible to him during a night shift at SYS, and the disconnect young people note between lengthy institutional timelines and the urgency of their day-to-day needs. A series of phone calls between practitioners is likely to lead to an intake interview or an institutional assessment, which will eventually inform some kind of institutional intervention for a young person. But this sequence of institutional work can take weeks or months. During this same period of time, young people may have moved from (or been kicked out of) the shelter or an apartment. They may have lost a job, overdosed on drugs, dropped out of school, been arrested, or been kicked off OW. As I indicate in the next section, demonstrations of institutional accountability require a text-based administrative apparatus (D.E. Smith, 2007), which slows down other forms of institutional activity. An institution’s efforts to establish itself as credible is work, which needs to be done by people. The problem is that for young people without stable housing, institutional connections must be made quickly in order to make sense, given the quickly evolving circumstances of life on the streets. Demonstrating Public Accountability: Corporate Parenting and Corporate Policing Every year, CAS agencies across Ontario undergo a process called a Crown ward review. Mallory, a Middlesborough CAS worker, describes the annual Ontario Ministry of Children and Youth Services audit as

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“the most stressful time” of the year. Officially, the Crown ward reviewers perform an audit of her work. But the only aspects of her work under review are those that have been documented in the standard blue binders that Mallory keeps for each of the young people she works with. As such, Mallory’s day-to-day work with youth is organized around producing the documents through which her work will later be deemed accountable: m: … the Ministry comes in and looks through the file to see that everything is in compliance: that the medical was done on time, that the dental was done on time, that the serious occurrences are filed, that the plans of care were done on time, that the visits are happening. n: So they are interested in your paperwork? m: Yes, it’s all about paperwork. It is. That’s what the Crown ward review is. We have these giant blue binders that we have nightmares about. (interview, 2008)

A serious occurrence, a plan of care, and a dental are textual evidence that Mallory is doing her job. The plan of care is actually a goal sheet she fills out during Ministry-mandated meetings with the young people she works with. Mallory conducts seven-day, thirty-day, sixty-day, and the standard ninety-day plan of care meetings each time one of the young people she works with moves into a new housing situation. Once a young person is housed, Mallory continues on a ninety-day cycle for these meetings. The ninety-day cycle provides the general frame within which Mallory conducts her work with youth. Other people – foster parents, group home staff, shelter workers, child and youth workers, and even teachers – are the people who spend time with her “clients” on a day-to-day basis. While Mallory may meet more regularly with a young person who is struggling to adjust to a new school or living situation, only the plan of care meeting notes are likely to be reviewed during the Ministry audit. As she explains, “Paper is a lot different than when you’re actually spending time with a young person. And that’s something that we actually really struggle with around review time.” Like the anecdotal notes that shelter workers add to the case files at SYS, Mallory believes her “recordings” provide a clearer sense of her work with a particular young person. But these recordings do not contribute to the accountability interlock I described earlier, and as such, they are not the focus of the Crown ward review: “What is more

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important for the reviewers is that the young person is getting proper care and that the plans of care are addressing the child’s needs. That’s something we hear every once in a while: ‘the plan of care needs to address the child’s needs’” (Mallory, interview, 2008) The Crown ward reviewers would be able to assess whether the “plans of care are addressing the child’s needs” (Mallory, interview, 2008) by confirming that the plan of care appropriately references other medical, psychological, dental, and educational assessments which are included in Mallory’s blue binders. The institutional format of the review glosses over the fact that the binders are prepared and reviewed by actual people. Once the material conditions of the binders’ preparation and evaluation are stripped way, the binder represents an agency’s obligations as a child’s “corporate parent.” The review process is not interested in qualitatively significant details about a young person’s experiences with the CAS; the process has been constructed to ensure that an agency has the documentation it requires to demonstrate appropriate guardianship in a court of law. If Mallory’s blue binders do not contain the paperwork that is required to demonstrate accountability in terms of the Crown ward review, she will receive a directive: [A directive] is like a permanent mark. Let’s say, the annual dental didn’t get done within the time period, you’d get a directive so that you’d know that it wasn’t done on time. There are also recommendations, which are like [suggestions]: “For the next recording period, you should look at this, this, this, this, and this.” And then the directives are like: “If this isn’t taken care of, then, next year you’ll basically have another one [directive]”… and that’s something that they would look especially close at the next year during the review: “Did you actually do this? … Did you get the paperwork for the dental that was due? Did you ask the foster parents’ to fill that out? Did you get the psych. exam that he or she needed?” … Basically we are the legal guardians. We are the corporate parents for these children. (Mallory, interview, 2008)

“Directives” and “recommendations” are institutional red flags that coordinate a Crown reviewer’s reading of Mallory’s blue binders in the following years. While the people doing the review may differ from year to year, the blue binders, with their directives and recommendations, allow for a standard reading of an agency’s and worker’s performance. It is not uncommon for a young person to have a different

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worker by the time the next review rolls around. But the standardization of the binders allow a new worker to pick it up and proceed to document a young person’s experience in CAS custody, so that, textually speaking, the transition is seamless. The Crown ward reviewers construct an assessment of Mallory’s work – and young people’s experiences “in care” – through the textbased evidence she provides. Each binder reflects the specific complex of institutional relations that shape a particular young person’s experiences of institutional care. While the review process distinguishes Mallory’s work as professionally accountable in a way that a shelter worker’s cannot be shown to be, a conceptualization of CAS workers as “corporate parents” signals their primary responsibility to relations of the governance within which the institution of child protection services functions. Corporate parenting requires a particular kind of accountability – one that is demonstrable in administrative terms. This is not how regular parents demonstrate accountability to their children or others (e.g., teachers, social workers, doctors). Even in an instance where a child enters institutional care, it is not because a parent has failed to document regular goal setting or dental care compliance. Mallory’s efforts to document her work in ways that correspond with her annual institutional audit are not unique. Morgan, a chief of police, describes how his local branch is required to work up their professional activities into an annual business plan. Both the audit and the business plan are administrative technologies through which their work becomes institutionally recognized as accountable. Morgan describes the work that goes into creating the business plan: The thing that we struggle with is that we come up with a business plan … We hire a consultant. It goes to tender … and what they do is external stakeholder research with focus groups, then they do internal stakeholder research with surveys and focus groups. Then we have a steering committee. Then we analyze – and of course we’ve got anywhere from 150–300 bits of priorities that people have brought up and you look for themes and clusters and then we distil it down to what’s achievable over three years, under the headings of the five core functions: infrastructure, prevention, technology, etc. (interview, 2008, emphasis added)

At CAS, an office administrator does an internal audit of everyone’s blue binders before the Ministry review begins. The police department

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hires a consultant to head up the process of producing their annual report. In both instances, the accountability work required of the organization by the overseeing ministry necessitates the creation of new work activities revolving around the collection and management of accountability data and, in the case of the police department, new professional positions. Demonstrating effective management and strong job performance is important institutional work. With increased competition for funding and clients it becomes important to establish and protect an organization’s image (Clarke & Newman, 1997). It is important, in this climate, to be reputed as community or customer oriented. Despite the extensive focus group and survey research conducted by the consultant working with the police department, however, the data are eventually distilled “down to what’s achievable over three years, under the headings of the five core functions: infrastructure, prevention, technology, etc.” While the process seems locally driven, the document that is produced in the end conforms to standards and expectations generated, and allowing measurement, provincially. The consultative process adheres to an increasingly popular Community-Based Policing model, which has been adopted by police forces across the Western world and increasingly across the globe. The product of this consultative process must be understandable within the framework of public management because this is how it will be evaluated. The community-based policing model works with neo-liberal governing discourses, as community “stakeholders” are invited to participate in a consultative processes, focused on generating targets and evaluating performance data. Once documented, these consultative meetings become accountability to the public. Morgan describes this combined use of business models and community-based policing as the “corporate model for policing.” Like corporate parenting, this terminology signals the adoption of contemporary business management practices and ideals in public service sector institutions. In the drive to be seen as self-managing organizations, CAS agencies and municipal police forces (as well as other human service sector organizations) produce strategic plans, write vision and mission statements, create business plans, conduct “environmental scans,” and/ or employ various calculative technologies for assessing performance. The adoption of business practices across the public and social sectors diminishes the potential for variation across an increasingly dispersed state. Across institutional contexts, people’s day-to-day work shifts to

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accommodate the collection and measurement of performance data, which are incorporated into institutional plans, reports, and audits. Standardized Performance Measurement in an Alternative School As part of a provincial effort to generate, aggregate, and make insti­ tutional sense of achievement data, Sebastian, the teacher at Loft, ­prepares and submits monthly reports to MCVS. The reports contain information about student progress towards standardized educational expectations, around which the production of mainstream schooling, as a complex of textually mediated practices, is organized. At Loft, students rarely meet standardized educational expectations in the standard amount of time allotted for their accomplishment. The reports Sebastian is required to submit, therefore, potentially threaten his sense of professional credibility. He explains his work to subdue his professional expectations about educational “standards” and “success rates” in order to meet the more pressing needs of his students: I think it’s our own title challenges too, our own professionalism: like this is how I think it should be; these are the success rates; these are the standards. So you are aware of that. And you are aware that teachers or social workers have these standards as well. They expect certain things. That plays on your mind a lot, for sure. So you fight against them. You are always checking yourself and saying, “No, we need to be flexible. We need to meet – it’s a student-directed program, rather than a top down [program].” (interview, 2008, original emphasis)

While Sebastian is required, institutionally, to collect and submit data on credit accrual, grades, standardized literacy test participation (or the course-based equivalent), attendance rates, and so on, he “fight[s] against them” in his efforts to create a flexible, “student-directed” learning environment. His narrative captures his efforts to uphold a sense of professionalism in the context of academic achievement indicators, which suggest he, and his students, are unsuccessful. Because Loft is considered an off-site classroom of MCVS, its activities must be recognizable within the institutional frame of secondary schooling across Ontario. Sebastian’s educational work is legislated by the Ontario Education Act (Ontario Ministry of Education, 1990) and mediated by other educational policy documents. It does not matter that he and Karma may never actually read these documents; their

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work is brought into line with Ontario education policy via technologies geared towards measuring and improving their students’ academic achievement. Sebastian’s (and to a lesser degree, Karma’s) educational effectiveness is measured using the same academic achievement indicators that are used to measure achievement in traditional secondary school settings: attendance, graduation, and credit accrual rates. While Karma and Sebastian work to ensure that Loft is a “barrier-free space” (Sebastian, interview, 2008) where kids can get warm, eat a meal, talk, phone their OW worker, and so on, Karma explains that the “bottom line” for them “is the number of credits we get each year” (interview, 2007). While the primary focus of their day-to-day work is connecting with and supporting their students; this work is unrepresented in the achievement data Sebastian submits to MCVS and the outcomes of it are not considered indicators of “student success.” In order to make sure that Loft is, indeed, a “barrier-free place,” Sebastian sets aside his “title challenges” and allows himself and his students to do their work, relatively unaffected by the standardized timelines and expectations, which are characteristic of mainstream institutions. He explains that he dedicates a significant amount of time each day to connecting with young people on a personal level because he (unlike a mainstream high school teacher) has the time to do this: If you are not connecting with them on a personal level, why would they care about what you have to say about the subject you are trying to teach? So because we have the time to do individual stuff like that, why not do it? I think of us more as like a program, than just a classroom or as a schoolbased building. It’s a program where [education] is just part of the program. (interview, 2008, my emphasis)

Most of the students at Loft have been expelled or un-enrolled from a number of the mainstream high schools in Middlesborough. Their fractured relationships with public education – and other mainstream institutions – follow them to Loft. Sebastian and Karma work hard to simply get their students in the door. In order to ensure that young people at Loft “care” about school and the subjects he teaches, Sebastian tells me that he tries to “connect with them on a personal level.” The first hour of each day is spent chatting with students about “their night or whatever, what happened on the weekend, their foster parent situation, or the shelter situation, something

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like that; or a party story they have and how drunk they got or high they got or something like that – it’s often pretty disgusting stuff! [Laughing]” (Sebastian, interview, 2008). Most of the students at Loft only attend school part time. In dedicating an hour of this time to food preparation and catching up, there is very little time left for young people to engage in coursework. Both Sebastian and Karma tell me that unlike teachers in mainstream classrooms, they have the time to connect with their students in this way. Karma explains: “If [young people] need to talk about what happened, you know, when they were four years old, okay. ‘Let’s talk about it. Let’s talk it through. I have the time. Let’s do it. I’ll support you through this moment.’ We have to be more [available] instead of ‘Oh, I’m busy, this isn’t my job’” (interview, 2007, my emphasis). While Karma and Sebastian’s efforts to “be more available” to the young people at Loft ensure young people come to school, this does not leave much instructional or institutionally recognized educational time left in students’ compressed schedules. In schools, time is an important and limited educational resource (Manicom, 1995). When teachers must dedicate a significant amount of their professional time to doing health and welfare work with/for their students, there is less time available for other kinds of educational work: the constant recurrence of health and welfare problems [in some schools] means that time is continually taken, week after week, year after year … The cumulative effects of such processes distinguish teaching in inner city schools, and are an instance of how schooling practices can be seen as classing practices, that is, as constituent of class relations and inequitable schooling. (Manicom, 1995, p. 139)

Students who are hungry, exhausted, depressed, anxious, and/or scared are not able to learn. When their physical and emotional needs are not met or even acknowledged, they are not able to do well, or participate fully, in school. However, as Karma and Sebastian indicate, this health work takes time – time that is not accounted for in the measures we use to govern public education in Ontario, and time that hinders young people’s progress towards an institutionally and socially significant marker: high school graduation. Loft’s institutional viability is measured using various indicators: attendance, credit accrual, and, to a lesser degree, graduation rates. In

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order to justify Loft’s existence, Sebastian’s reports must contain data that suggest Loft effectively fills an institutional gap in the community. He tells me that his attendance data3 are always high, but that he constantly modifies courses in order to accommodate an institutional “push for credits”: There is a push to – if two people showed up all year, that would be a problem, but there’s no push on numbers. The numbers are there. There’s a need for an alternative classroom in our city that isn’t CIS [the Centre for Independent Studies]: a school that is one-on-one; [a school that] is more personal, and is supportive that way; [a school] that includes food and things like that; [a school] that is connected with someone like the shelter – a social service agency. The need for that is obvious. But there is a push for credits … ‘If you’re not doing credits, what kinds of courses are you doing there? And how could we possibly justify you existing, if no one is doing school?’ … And that’s okay. It’s good to have it in the background so that we are always adjusting courses as far as delivery goes. (interview, 2008, original emphasis)

Sebastian has no trouble justifying Loft’s existence based on attendance rates – people want to go to school at Loft. But the reason they are keen to participate in school at Loft (and not at a mainstream high school) is because “it’s a program where [education] is just part of the program.” The emotional and institutional work Sebastian and Karma do with their students prompts their students to come back to school day after day. In order to accommodate provincial expectations with regard to academic achievement and student success within the limited hours of a school day, Sebastian has to “[adjust] courses, as far as delivery goes.” In order to demonstrate that Loft is accountable in institutional terms – that is, through the generation of academic achievement data – Sebastian adjusts (i.e., decreases) instructional time and course expectations. Working on the fringes of the traditional school system, Sebastian and Karma must be ready to defend the existence of the Loft school as a credit-granting institution. Their daily efforts to acknowledge and help alleviate instabilities in their students’ lives mean that they engage 3 Sebastian submits attendance data electronically through MCVS and also keeps his own handwritten notes. The standardized reporting mechanism he is required to use to submit his data at the school are unable to convey attendance rates for part-time students at Loft (Sebastian, interview, 2008).

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with students in personal ways, rather than focusing on improving their test scores or even, for many students, on a goal like graduation. But this work is conducted against a policy backdrop where a provincial focus on “closing the gaps” between the lowest and highest achieving students or “raising the bar” for achievement for “every student” (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2008) is part of a provincial and national move to improve graduation rates. This disjuncture shapes how students and teachers work together in alternative education classrooms across the province, and also how Ontario’s public education system interfaces with other institutional systems. Closing Thoughts Beginning an investigation with people’s accounts of their work, one sees accountability as it is constituted in people’s coordinated actions. These co-ordered “doings” reflect particular institutional aims. In public sector institutions, accountability is a demonstration of fidelity to government objectives: effective and transparent management of resources and adherence to governing discourse. People’s efforts to demonstrate accountability to external reviewers, taxpayers, and funders shape how they understand their professional responsibilities and contribute to an inability to cultivate effective inter-institutional responses for youth. As this book indicates, the increased coordination of institutional accountability processes is not the same as the timely coordination of services for young people who lack housing. Inter-organizational relations make it challenging to effectively coordinate youth work across institutional sites. While inter-agency protocols exist, they facilitate limited types of information sharing and service coordination. Across organizations, people collect and report data, which they do not actively use to improve the organization’s services for youth. When data are shared or reported, it is not with the goal of improving communication or engendering a coordinated response. Data are collected and disseminated to serve monitoring, accounting, and assessment goals. They become evidence that individuals or agencies are doing their jobs. Data sharing and reporting between “credible” organizations creates an accountability interlock, where the credibility of one organization is bolstered by their documented relationships with other credible institutions. An organization that can demonstrate that it is part of a broader accountability interlock – that it, that its accountability processes articulate

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effectively with accountability processes in other institutional sites – is understood to have increased inter-institutional credibility. Rather than fostering inter-agency collaboration, phenomena like the Crown ward review, deficit-funding formulas, and a police services business plan orient agencies, and the people who work there, towards CYA work and thinking. By nature, CYA work is individualizing – the point is to protect the professional reputation of an individual or organization. Rather than directing analytic attention to youth “at-risk” and the problems they pose for institutions, in this chapter, I have produced an analysis of institutions and the problems they pose for young people and the practitioners with whom they work. The findings explored in this chapter have implications for professionals who work with youth in a variety of settings. Whether or not it is intentionally coordinated to this end, youth work involves some form of inter-agency communication or cooperation (Gharabaghi, 2008; Prince & Austin, 2005). It is crucial that people who work in, and design policies for, public sector institutions consider how youth work is produced in the coordinated activities of people working across institutional disciplines. The things people do in one setting shape how others elsewhere are working. Bringing these complex linkages into greater visibility supports accountability to the people – rather than the processes – with whom one’s individual work is coordinated.

Chapter Six

Walking the Line: Research and Development Work with SYS

Over the course of this project, a desire to orient research to community development posed challenges for me both ethically and practically. At times my work to create, fund, and coordinate the Transitioning LifeSkills Program threatened my hard-won relationships with the young people who use the youth shelter and my ability to conduct research from their standpoints. My efforts to establish grounds for collaboration with – and transfer knowledge to – human service sector agencies meant that I engaged the very technologies that I observed being employed to manage and account for work across the human service interface (e.g., program marketing, outcomes management, data collection, fee-for-service structures). By paying attention to my discomfort, however, I was able to use my experiences doing community-based research to further investigate the social relations that young people’s and practitioners’ accounts had pointed me to. In this chapter, I show how community-based research draws people – researchers, community practitioners, and community members – into relations that have a coordinating or ruling effect. The life-skills program that my research inspired is a means for drawing young people into relations through which their actions can be observed, tracked, and transformed. In order to demonstrate that the program is successful, SYS needs to record observable changes in the actions and life circumstances of the young people who participate in it. This focus on  producing measurable change in individual young people’s lives shifts the professional focus away from the ways in which institutional relations contribute to a young person’s experiences of marginalization and places the burden of responsibility for “positive social

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outcomes” squarely on the shoulders of individual young people and the one-on-one workers with whom they work. Obviously, this was not my intention. In order to makes sense of this unexpected outcome, I turned my institutional ethnographer’s lens on the research process itself. My analysis is guided by the observation that researchers are always situated within and outside of the relations, which their research seeks to understand (Griffith, 1998). Over the course of this project, I have come to understand people’s work in institutional settings as an accomplishment of governance and as a means governing. On a conceptual level, linking the terms ruling relations and governance reminds us that an investigation of ruling relations is always an attempt to discover how people’s conduct and consciousnesses are co-ordered. Throughout this book, I have used people’s unique accounts to explore how certain ideas and practices flourish, and how they in turn have a coordinating effect in terms of human perception and experience. In what they describe as governmentality studies, Miller and Rose (2008) draw our attention to specific technologies and narratives that characterize modern forms of democratic governance in the Western world. They describe an historical trajectory for the social practices and ideas that I observed over the course of fieldwork and explain how particular technologies (e.g., interventions, problem posing, calculative techniques) and narratives (about risk, accountability, exclusion, and so forth) have arisen and taken hold in contemporary Western societies. While I have not relied on theory to coordinate this project, I have used it as a resource, which has helped me make sense of research findings. Like other institutional ethnographic studies, I began this investigation by listening to people’s experiential accounts of their work, and I have tried to retain this experiential knowledge in the final analysis that I offer. The research did not begin with theory, and I have not used research data to contribute to theory-building endeavours. That said, in the next two sections, I do offer a general or theoretical description of the institutional terrain upon which youth work arises, becomes visible, measurable, and subject to reform. I have organized my analysis around a series of political-institutional moves, which characterize the backdrop against which people’s work in institutional settings is organized. Each subsection of text focuses on a single set of institutional relations; in totality, these two sections illustrate the ways that certain ideas or narratives rationalize, and are rationalized by, multiple and disparate practices or technologies.

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I take this theoretical detour here because I found these ideas­ ­ seful  when I was, myself, in the thick of research and community u development work. I struggled to understand how I, as a researcher – someone who I believed should be attentive to and able to adeptly navigate institutional relations – found myself contributing to the very practices that my research revealed had disastrous consequences for some young people. After this theoretical digression, I recount my efforts to collaborate productively with SYS and explore how community-based research, as a social relation, shaped this work. Neo-Liberal Ideas and Managerial Technologies While this chapter endeavours to show how certain neo-liberal ideas justify the use of specific managerial technologies, and how these technological practices then re-affirm or provide a grounding for the very narratives, which informed their creation, I also recognize that it’s not quite as clear-cut as all this. Governance is not an accomplishment of a closed system, and people are not passive or predictable. At the same time, I want to draw people’s attention to the ways in which social coordination is facilitated through a recursivity of ideas and practices, functioning like feedback loops, which sediment particular ways of knowing and doing across local sites.

Welfarism to Neo-Liberalism Scholars of contemporary government have noted that changes in public policy and program delivery reflect a shift in political rationalities from welfarism to neo-liberalism (Harvey, 2005; Miller & Rose, 2008; Sheilds & Evans, 1998). Welfarism worked under the assumption that the activities of government should be directed towards the betterment of economic and social life for the good of the masses. Where welfarism attempted to link the “fiscal, calculative and bureaucratic capacities of the apparatus of the state to the government of social life” (Miller & Rose, 2008, p. 73), neo-liberalism rests on the belief that the state “[represents] an unnatural intrusion into the workings of the market” (Clarke & Newman, 1997, p. 14). The goal of fostering a social or collective identity is eschewed in favour of official recognition for various independent associations of people. Neo-liberal economics has been depicted as an inevitable reaction to a sluggish and unresponsive welfare state, and notions of citizenship

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and “the public” have begun increasingly to reflect the consumer and individualistic tendencies of the market (Clarke & Newman, 1997). Associated with this shift in political thinking, we see congruent changes in how governance actually works. Responsibility for the provision of services is dispersed across a plethora of semi-autonomous agencies that compete for resources and clients. Business acumen becomes a measure of organizational competence. Technologies for the accumulation, calculation, storage, transfer, analysis, and comparison of data proliferate within and across nations, allowing for external “objective” measurement, evaluation, and comparison of people’s work (Harvey, 2005; Miller & Rose, 2008). The implementation of calculative strategies – technologies for counting, recording, and comparing data – across institutional sectors means that the activities of everyday and institutional life acquire a tangible (or quantifiable) character. As relations are reorganized, further technologies arise through which we make sense of the vast amounts of data we are generating. The various recording practices, and the content of what is recorded, are themselves a means of governing (Miller & Rose, 2008). There is a tendency for people to pay attention to, and make a particular kind of sense of, specific details, while disregarding or failing to take notice of others. Beyond simply being embedded in technologies for recording, storing, and acting on data, neo-liberal values have been adopted and promulgated by powerful, coordinating institutions: institutes of education, intellectual “think tanks,” national economic and political institutions, and international organizations (the International Monetary Fund [IMF], the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization [WTO]) (Harvey, 2005). As neo-liberal ideals and managerial practices are incorporated into the fabric of everyday life, they acquire a hegemonic quality (Clarke & Newman, 1997; Harvey, 2005). The pervasiveness of neo-liberal discourses (regarding the inevitability of change, the naturalness of the market, or the relationship between choice and freedom) normalize these narratives as self-evident truths.

The Freedom to Choose As neo-liberal values become embedded in programs, policies, and institutional practices, particular ideas about freedom and responsibility flourish. Government institutions are depicted as unable to solve a nation’s social and economic ills. The “free” market is counterposed as an

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impartial mediator of economic or social crises, and the individual is bestowed with a kind of entrepreneurial or consumerist power: the freedom to choose. A preoccupation with personal security (as something that can be procured through the purchase of life and health insurance and so on) replaces ideas about the common good. Individuals are understood to be free to make choices that will minimize risk to themselves and their families and maximize the quality of their lives (Miller & Rose, 2008). People are enticed to make choices that advance them socially and materially: “Consumption regimes now operate as highly managed and carefully calibrated domains for the calculated regulation of the minutiae of private conduct through personal acts of choice” (Miller & Rose, 2008, p. 102). Because “there are presumed to be no asymmetries of power or of information that interfere with the capacity of individuals to make rational economic decisions in their own interests” (Harvey, 2005, p. 68), the good life is accessible to everyone who conducts themselves in an entrepreneurial spirit. Neo-liberalism operates in service to changes in capitalism (the shift from local to global modes of production); it is tied to changing relations of profit and production, as well as the decline of the welfare state. Managerial Funding Regimes, Community-Based Research, and Frontline Work When I talk about managerialism, I am referring to technologies for recording, reporting, and documenting one’s work that both reinforce and function in conjunction with the rationalities of neo-liberalism I explored in the previous section. Contracts, fee-for-service structures, and per diem models institutionalize change. As state responsibilities are dispersed among a variety of smaller agencies, associations, public institutions, and arm’s-length organizations, there is increased competition for resources and contracts among service providers. Destabilized funding and labour relations significantly influence how organizations proceed to fund their work. Effective institutional fundraising efforts revolve around demonstrations of accountability: logic models, strategic plans, and program evaluation enable funders to assess and compare organizational effectiveness during competitions for funds. There is pressure for agencies to take up data collection, calculation and storage practices in order to make sure their work is visible, comprehendible, and comparable for

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funders and other stakeholders. Managerialism offers techniques for rendering diverse professional realities into forms that lend themselves to calculation, evaluation, and comparison. The increasingly universal language of results- or performance-­ orientation, target- or goal-setting, and output measurement “promises ‘transparency’ within a complex field of decision-making” (Clarke & Newman, 1997, p. 30). As a set of ideological practices, managerialism unifies the “dispersed organisational form of the state and, in its customer orientation, claims to be able to represent and service an individuated public” (Clarke & Newman, 1997, p. 30). The dispersal of state responsibilities and the associated practices for managing professional conduct and demonstrating accountability lay the foundation for the marketization of public life.

Accountability A preoccupation with financial risk is the essential precondition to concerns about economic accountability. But a concern to moderate risk is evident in all kinds of social relations, which are not directly linked to capital accumulation and the management of public resources. An imperative to manage risk at an individual level permeates all aspects of social life: the amount of exercise we get, the kinds of cars we drive, the food we eat, how and where we conduct ourselves, all indicate degrees of active risk-management at the level of individuals. The fact that this individualized work hooks people into relations of capital seems to be the obvious goal. Of interest to me, though, is how this obligation to actively manage risk plays out in institutional settings, where changes in people and not the accumulation of capital are the overt goals. Institutional efforts to calculate and manage “the riskiness of an individual or an event” are mediated by policy, funding regimes, professional knowledge, and so forth (Miller & Rose, 2008, p. 107). Public and social service institutions are legally, morally, professionally, and financially accountable for “the calculations that they make, the advice that they give and the success of the strategies that they put into place to monitor and manage that risk” (Miller & Rose, 2008, p. 108).

Work with “the Marginalized” Ideas about individual responsibility influence how practitioners understand their work with young people who they have learned to think of as marginalized or at risk. The same complex of ideas that have

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shaped the managerial turn in practitioners’ work contours the emphasis on youth empowerment or self-mastery across the youth sector. A conception of the free individual actively pursuing her self-advancement in/through the market (broadly conceived) has influenced the delivery of services in public and social service sector institutions. Institutional practices privilege and produce the entrepreneurial individual. Those who, for a multitude of reasons, fail to be successful in these terms become those who we understand to be “marginalized” or “excluded.” The transformation of methods for seeing and working with people who are considered marginalized – the increasing focus on developing a person’s capacity for self-management – have consequences for how youth work is organized and, significant to the analysis put forward in this book, how practitioners’ work with young people is managed. As the professional focus shifts from “diagnosis and insight” to the development of an individual’s “cognitive, emotional, practical and ethical skills” (Miller & Rose, 2008, p. 106), institutional work practices are reorganized so that they produce “visible, identifiable and specifiable behavioural or mental outputs, leading to target behaviours that seem to be amenable to measurement and calculation” (Miller & Rose, 2008, p. 107). This move reinforces the emphasis on performance measures – goals, targets, and outcomes – as a means for “managing professionalclient relations” and “managing professionals themselves” (Miller & Rose, 2008, p. 107).

The “New Public Management” Managerialism provides a framework for increased internal management as well as mechanisms (e.g., a performance audit or accountability contract) for aligning activities in a variety of organizations with the objectives of central government. Methods for rendering one’s work calculable require modes for describing one’s professional activities “not in the esoteric languages of their own expertise, but by translating them into costs and benefits that can be given an accounting value” (Miller & Rose, 2008, p. 109). Employed in a diversity of institutional settings, the implementation of accounting technologies as means for managing professional conduct is often referred to as “the new public management.” In Canada, scholars describe the influence of the new public management on bureaucratic restructuring, particularly in public institutions (Aucoin, 1995; McCoy, 1998; Rankin & Campbell, 2006; Nichols & Griffith, 2009; Sheilds & Evans, 1998; Turnbull & Aucoin, 2006). Others scholars write of “managerialism” (Clarke & Newman,

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1997), “performativity” (Adams, 2008; Ball, 2003), or “accountability” (De Lissovoy & McLaren, 2003). In each instance scholars have identified techniques for transferring a general visibility (and commensurability) to professional practices and domains, which are otherwise unintelligible to the average person. Work practices are brought under public scrutiny through technologies like audits, costing practices, logic models, growth plans, and accountability frameworks. These technologies render visible and manageable a diversity of sites – welfare offices, schools, jails, hospitals, shelters, child welfare agencies – that carry out the tasks of government. Mana­ gerialism operationalizes the rationalities of neo-liberalism in people’s work to access and provide services. In the next section, I bring these ideas about governance to bear on my own experiences doing community-based institutional ethnographic research at SYS. I describe my efforts to discern a productive course of institutional action for my community-development activities, while attempting to maintain a research focus on the social coordination of youth work. Discovering Relations of Ruling To productively coordinate my research activities with the needs of my collaborating agency, I needed to discover how people’s work to provide and seek shelter is institutionally organized, and how work at SYS takes shape within a field of action spanning the public and social service sectors more generally. I needed to see how practitioners’ work activities are shaped in relation to the logic of neo-liberal discourses embedded in the intertextual coordination of human service sector funding and accountability regimes. I needed to understand how people’s professional sensibilities (their ideas about youth, homelessness, and other forms of marginalization; their understanding of their work and their professional identities) are organized in relation to thinking about community, empowerment, and risk. Finally, I had to reorganize my proposal writing, research approach, and development activities so that they could be recognized as accountable in the human service sector.

Funding and Acountability Early in the research process, I conducted a number of interviews with staff at SYS. In these interviews people expressed their concerns that

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the shelter no longer provided programming (such as job readiness training, employment supports, addictions counselling, empowerment workshops, and so forth) for young people who use the shelter. Beyond offering a bed and a meal and connecting young people with Ontario Works (OW) social assistance, there was very little else in place, structurally, to ensure that young people did not end up homeless again. I  set out to discover how economic relations contributed to a loss in programming at the shelter. Ultimately I learned that funding relations constitute a single strand in a web of ideas and practices that shape work that happens at SYS. The shelter’s most recent contract with the city was shaped by a consultation process that was led by someone who specializes in the provision of long-term residential care for people who are elderly. The consultant applied the same funding formula that is used in long-term care facilities to the hostelling sector in Middlesborough. As such, SYS is funded on a per diem (or per bed) basis. The shelter receives provincial funding through the municipal government and the province’s social assistance program, OW. The per diem formula means that the shelter is only paid when someone uses its services (and even then, the funding only covers two-thirds of the cost of an “occupied bed”). The adoption of a per diem funding structure inserts the shelter into a competitive field where it must compete for clients and for other resources to ensure it is able to cover the other costs of service provision. In a per diem model, strong performance is indicated by the number of clients served. For the shelter’s per diem arrangement to be economically sustainable, the shelter must maintain high and stable rates of occupancy, which conflicts with frontline staff’s desire to help young people find stable housing and an outcomes-based approach to service delivery, which sees securing housing as the desired outcome of any homelessness sector program participation.

Dispersal of Responsibility It is significant that the shelter receives provincial funding that is first processed at two distinct levels of government (municipally and through a ministry-mandated service). The funding is accounted for as it moves through these two independent channels. By the time it reaches the shelter, there is already a chain of accountability in place. The dispersal of government funding and the responsibly for service  provision into local non-profit agencies sets the stage for the

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marketization of services and the implementation of arm’s length oversight strategies. The practice of filtering government funding into community-based organizations draws participating agencies into subtle and multilayered accountability relations. Contracts, fee-for-service practices, and program evaluation tools coordinate what happens at each level of dispersal and allow funds to be tracked and accounted for via program outcomes or results. These technologies suggest a means of minimizing the risk associated with investing in multiple independent service providers because it makes the service providers themselves responsible for the economic and social outcomes of their work. All of the shelters in Middlesborough are similarly funded, using a per diem model, which requires consistently high rates of occupancy to be economically sustainable. Small shelters with varying rates of occupancy like SYS are required to seek out other funding sources (e.g., grants, contracts, or fee-for-service arrangements). Taking up this work solidifies SYS’s status as a competitive player in a service market, where work is increasingly compared in economistic terms.

Marketization of Services Although SYS is not a provincially mandated organization, in order to work with agencies that are, it ensures that its policies and practices adhere to the way things are done in these other, less autonomous institutions. While it may appear at first blush that SYS is operating with relative autonomy in the human service sector, its dependence on other more heavily bureaucratized agencies to purchase its services means that work at SYS increasingly reflects the way things are done in other institutional settings. That said, SYS’s institutional flexibility remains its “competitive advantage” in the human service market (Wendell, field note, 2007). The funding proposal for the Transitioning Life-Skills Program was inspired by the executive director (Wendell’s) observation that SYS’s lack of bureaucracy was its primary organizational advantage. In the application to a provincial funder, I argued that SYS was able to nimbly respond to the needs of clients at a lower cost than other service providers could accomplish because it operated without the heavy bureaucratic infrastructure associated with Ministry-mandated service providers. SYS’s ability to underbid its competitors continues to shape its relations with the local CAS. The entrepreneurial flavour of the

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relationship between SYS and CAS is maintained through frequent contract negotiations and more recently, through fee-for-service measures. One such fee-for-service program is SYS’s Transitioning LifeSkills Program, and until recently, CAS was its primary consumer.1

Life-Skills Development The Transitioning Life-Skills Program provides a structure through which the shelter can be held accountable to its paying customers. By tracking young people’s progress towards their individual “transitioning goals,” staff are responsible for demonstrating that their “clients” are making progress. Providing life-skills training to homeless (or CAS involved) youth represents income generation for the shelter and becomes a means for observing and comparing the efficacy of particular shelter workers and the social/emotional development of individual young people. It is important to recall that the suggestion for increased pro­ gramming  geared towards life-skills development came from shelter workers. Their fascination with life-skills development is discursively organized. It is shaped by a shift in political rationalities from welfare to neo-liberalism, whereby the onus for risk management on the part of the practitioner and his or her client becomes increasingly individualized. The emphasis on assessing and improving the circumstances of the individual young person reinforces the idea that poverty is a function of a person’s deviant or pathological tendencies. The homelessness as a function of inadequate life skills explanation reflects a strange (but effective) merging of social exclusion and neo-liberal discourses: in order to help people shift their excluded status, we need to teach them how to enterprise their lives according to the principles of continuous self-­ improvement through active risk reduction. By initiating young people in the practices of careful budgeting, healthy eating, pro-active health work, and safe sexual practices, we effectively teach them how to manage themselves. An emphasis on assessing and categorizing individuals in terms of cooking skills, employment readiness, parenting, budgeting, and so forth also allows them to be processed through services. Young people who have used SYS’s emergency shelter services can be moved from

1 OW also paid to have people participate in the Transitioning Life-Skills Program at SYS.

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here into Pritchard House, SYS’s transitional housing environment, once it can be demonstrated that their life skills are improving. The same processes for measuring improved life-skills outcomes among youth can also be used to measure SYS’s service outcomes and to compare job performance among staff within the organization. Working with Contradictory Knowledge A focus on life-skills development comes from outside the standpoint of the young people who stay at SYS. During conversations and interviews, young people would tell me that they would only be using the shelter for a day or two to get back on their feet. I would then watch as they stayed for the entire forty-two days that OW would fund. A year later, many of the same people had returned to the shelter. They certainly never explained their use of the shelter as a result of having poor life skills. They would describe getting kicked off OW or out of CAS, getting kicked out of apartments, break-ups, and fights with family and friends. These young people have life skills in a literal sense – they have honed the skills they need to survive from one day to the next. Problems arise for young people when administrative timelines and processes do not correspond with the actualities of their days and nights. The life skills young people possess are not acknowledged, and formal life skills learning opportunities seem to have no bearing on their everyday experiences. When working collaboratively with a community-based agency, one must take this kind of contradictory knowledge into account. Had I proceeded solely from the standpoint of young people, I would have failed to establish grounds for collaboration with practitioners at SYS and would not have successfully secured an Ontario Trillium Founda­ tion grant, which allowed the shelter to remain open.

Creating the Transitioning Life-Skills Program In order to create the Transitioning Life-Skills Program (now known in the community as the TLP), I drew from data collected during the first six months of my ethnographic research. I produced a programmatic structure whereby young people would receive one-on-one mentoring to learn life skills over the course of their ordinary days and nights. The program is meant to acknowledge the material conditions of a young person’s actual life and the reality that he or she already possesses all

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kinds of life skills, which are unique to these lived experiences. It recognizes and works to reconcile incongruities between young people’s and practitioners’ work in institutional settings. The goal of the program is to work individually with young people to help them figure out how to live outside the care of a parent or guardian. The process begins with a conversation between a young person and the program coordinator. The conversation is inspired by interview techniques used by institutional ethnographers (DeVault & McCoy, 2006). It aims to draw young people into conversations about their work to maintain housing, take care of their physical and mental health, nutritional and economic needs, do schooling, and so on. The interviewer does not presuppose what this work should look like, in favour of learning from participants how their lives are organized and what (if any) supports they need to live independently in the community. The conversation is also oriented to the production of “baseline measures” and “targets” with regard to a young person’s life-skills development. As such, it is distinctly shaped by relations of accountability: funders are interested in seeing young people economically and socially “transitioned” out of institutional care. I wanted these conversations to contrast the multi-paged, standardized life-skills inventories that I repeatedly encountered over the course of my research, while also providing the program coordinator and mentors with the textual evidence they needed to talk about their work with youth in terms of the language of an Ontario Trillium Foundation grant application: “expected results,” “activities,” and “performance indicators.” Once the funds were secured, I knew that Wendell and the program coordinator would have to conduct their work in relation to the terms of the Trillium proposal. In particular, their work would need to reference Trillium’s results and activities work plan and request budget form. Mentors and volunteers would need to track their work with youth in ways that allowed the program coordinator to a) report on the program’s progress towards its target results and b) indicate outcomes to potential fee-for-service funders. Most significantly for the program’s sustainability (and to our ability to secure start-up funding), the program coordinator and Wendell would need to generate fee-for-service revenue by marketing the program to other agencies in the community. The success of our grant application was dependent on our demonstrated commitment to participate in a competitive service market; and our competitive success required a flexible approach to service provision that would allow us to target the needs of specific consumers of

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our program. Having to step into the coordinator’s position for a while until the results of the granting competition were announced, I experienced how the frontline technologies I point to in this book (documentary and assessment practices, contract negotiations, institutional hierarchies, life-skills interventions, and so forth) draw people into relations that govern. The minutiae of young people’s lives and practitioners’ work were brought under institutional scrutiny and evaluated in economistic terms; my expertise was employed to sell the program to funders and institutional clients. As I will demonstrate in the next section, my ability to work with young people on their terms was also significantly diminished. Working for Results While the shelter waited to hear the results from the Trillium granting competition, I acted as the program coordinator on a voluntary basis. In this role, I engaged the work processes I sought to describe, becoming fluent in the work knowledge of agencies that serve youth. In order to make sense of and productively use this knowledge, I documented my day-to-day work in field notes. In reflecting on my notes, I became increasingly aware that I could not ensure that the program I had developed was simultaneously accountable to the logic of the human service interface and the actualities of young people seeking shelter. By tracing young people’s experiential accounts into relations of ruling, I could ensure that my primary research objectives were oriented to learning how youth work is organized. But it was challenging to maintain accountability to actual people when I was working within these same relations, creating and coordinating a program that reduced work with people to work for results. The following story exemplifies a time when (despite my best intentions) I was caught up in, and perpetuating, institutional relations of accountability and surveillance. Jordan is a young man who was placed at the shelter by Middlesborough Youth Services. He was involved with the youth justice system and was receiving social and psychological supports in the community through the Intensive Support and Supervision Program (ISSP). At an ISSP meeting that I attended with Jordan, his case management team threatened to cut the “hard-to-serve” fee-forservice funding the shelter received to pay Jordan’s mentor. They wanted to see more evidence that Jordan was making progress: going to

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school regularly and achieving credits; attending regular visits with his therapist and anger-management coach; and proving that he could independently uphold his responsibilities around hygiene, chores at the shelter, medical care, and so on. The goals that the ISSP team identified had arisen in the context of a standardized life-skills assessment that indicated Jordan had weak or no life skills. Conversely the goals he created as part of the Transitioning Life-Skills Program reflected his positive experiences participating in a cooking program, his love of computers and video games, an improved relationship with his mother and sister, and a decrease in violent interactions with other young people at the shelter. Jordan’s transitioning plan reflected his experiences in the world and his goals for himself. Worried the shelter would lose the funding for Jordan’s mentor, and concerned about the success of this new (and at the time, largely unfunded) program, I returned to the shelter after Jordan’s ISSP meeting and developed a tracking system so that Jordan could show the ISSP team that he was indeed keeping his room clean, waking up to go to school, and taking care of his personal hygiene. I gave him a number of charts and asked him to put them up in his room at the shelter so that he and his mentor, Rick, would remember to use them. The idea was to generate textual evidence that Jordan was making progress. Jordan wanted to keep track in his journal or keep the sheets in his drawer, but I insisted that they go on the wall to encourage accountability to these goals. At a follow-up meeting with Jordan and Rick a few days later, it became apparent that the tracking system was not working for Jordan: I must have asked Jordan how the showering and hygiene stuff was going because at this point he started to get angry and told me that it had always been fine. I suggested that while this may be the case this is not the official story (as captured in the original life-skills assessment) and that if it is indeed fine, we need to show this so as to refute that other assessment. At this point Jordan started getting really upset, asking angrily who told me that he doesn’t shower. This is directed accusingly at [his mentor] Rick. I stumble a bit because I don’t want to compromise their relationship. I remind him about the first life-skills inventory that was done and suggest that while it may not be apt, it did document very specific things about Jordan. One of these things was that he doesn’t regularly take care of his teeth, shaving, showering, etc. By now, Jordan is red in the face and banging the computer in frustration. (field note, 2008)

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When I typed up the handwritten field notes a month after the meeting, I could see that I had lost sight of my responsibility to young people like Jordan, whose experiences comprised the starting place for my research. Instead, my actions were shaped against a concern to demonstrate accountability to our funders: I was obviously working from the standpoint of the ISSP and our other potential clients (like CAS and OW), rather than listening to, and honouring, what Jordan was telling me. He didn’t want to have tracking sheets posted in his room because it is embarrassing. I was worried that otherwise he’d lose them. We needed to show “progress” to keep our program alive and to allow Jordan to keep Rick as his one-on-one worker, but in my concern to demonstrate accountability to our funders, I lost sight of Jordan’s needs. (field note, 2008)

While it was happening, I did not even register Jordan’s experiences disappearing from the story. Had I not taken the extra time to enter my handwritten field notes into the computer, I may never have noticed my increasing drift towards the institutional demands of the program’s paying customers and away from the actual experiences of young people. In the end, reflecting on my experiences with Jordan prompted me to begin the process of pulling back from the day-to-day functioning of the Transitioning Life-Skills Program and life at the shelter. I limited my development work to educational/reflective activities with practitioners and refocused my energy on spending time with young people on their terms. Closing Thoughts The same relations that I observed having a coordinating effect on the lives of young people and human service practitioners influenced my research and development work. My development work happened in the institutional settings that I was investigating as a researcher. In order to convey the complexity of this politico-institutional terrain, in this chapter, I have focused on illustrating how particular ideas and practices feed into one another and back on one another, creating a veritable tangle that makes it challenging to do and think in ways that are different from what is typically done and thought in this setting. I do not want to be misinterpreted, however, as suggesting that neoliberal narratives or managerial technologies deterministically structure

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social relations. My work with SYS was shaped by a belief that strategic activism requires that people adeptly activate (and sometimes subvert) dominant institutional frames in their work. Technologies like program evaluation or results-based program development are not necessarily maligned, but they are always coordinative. Conscious use of managerial technologies or popular institutional rationalities in one’s work requires that one continuously seek to understand how their local doings are linked to, and shaped by, social relations that are not immediately accessible to them. I began this chapter by explaining how governance can be investigated as the accomplishment of various interconnected textually mediated social relations. To be powerful organizers of what people do/ think/know, texts and textually mediated technologies require people who will read, write notes or type, reference, compare, record, analyze, and otherwise engage with them across time and space. It is the materiality of the textual and textually mediated governmental technologies and ideas, as well as the presence of actual people who read, report, record, fill out forms, and so forth that enables a sociological investigation of governance. In an effort to describe the investigation of governance put forward in this book, I also specified points of divergence in Dorothy Smith’s institutional ethnography and Miller and Rose’s governmentality studies. In particular, I highlight Smith’s efforts to redirect our attention to the actual people who have disappeared into the gloss of sociological theory-building. A materialist approach to investigating governance unfolds differently than Miller and Rose’s (2008) genealogical approach. The analysis is messier. It is rife with the kinds of contradictions or tensions that are typical of real life. While our projects are similar – to figure out how power actually works and how order is accomplished – our research outcomes differ. Throughout this book, I have directed attention to the tensions that have shaped my research. I have deliberately attempted to convey the messiness of the experience. As a new researcher, I was not prepared for this. I came to this work with the objective of creating opportunities for public pedagogy: public space for young people to learn from one another (how institutional relations are organized) and to teach practitioners how things work from the standpoint of young people without housing (Nichols, 2009c). Theoretically, this idea is compelling; however, it fails to take into account the coordinating effects of community-based research.

Conclusion

The project began with questions about politics and youth. Early on, I  was inspired by a conception of “the public” as a political space, through which alternative discourses are brought to bear on questions of the common good (Fraser, 1992; Warner, 2002). I was similarly intrigued by Hannah Arendt’s (2005) ideas about politics as an activity – as something that occurs in people’s coordinated actions – because it seemed to fit with institutional ethnography’s materialist understanding of social organization as an accomplishment of coordinated social acts. But my earliest theoretical work underestimated the effects of growing up in institutions and institutionally mediated settings. As the research unfolded, the political consequences of intensive, long-term institutional monitoring and intervention became evident to me. Drawing on Agamben’s (1998) discussion of the role of bare life in the history of politics, I argued that the public-institutional response to issues like homelessness exemplifies the collision of life and politics that is characteristic of present day Western democracies (Nichols, 2011). Institutional interventions that target people who are considered marginalized or socially excluded represent a strategy for producing particular social and biological outcomes at the level of a population (Foucault, 1978). This collision of life and politics is characteristic of modern forms of democratic governance. It is not simply that, in contemporary politics, the life of a population is subject to ongoing institutional scrutiny and intervention. The defining feature of a biopolitical regime is that the biological life of a people is synonymous with their status as political citizens (Agamben, 1998). Drawing on Agamben’s analysis of Western democratic governance and the political state of exception, I questioned whether

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homelessness, like adolescence, might be characterized by what Lesko (2001) refers to as “expectant time” – where nothing more than the work of living is expected of a person. While these and other philosophic questions continued to arise for me over the course of this project, I have chosen not to document my early theoretical work in this book. I did not go into the field looking for qualitative data through which to contribute to sociological theory building. I sought to understand how people’s work in institutional settings is organized to produce and maintain particular social relations. My objectives were quite practical: I wanted to highlight material implication of these relations for young people who do not have stable housing. In this final chapter, however, I will suggest that findings explored in this book contribute to a broader discussion about community-based research, youth, politics, and pedagogy. Reflecting on some of the philosophical questions that emerged over the course of my research and development work, and the experience of mentoring university students as they engage in community-based service learning activities, I build an argument for the centrality of learning in any effort to promote equitable social change. Learning, Reflection, and Action A cyclical process (learning, reflection, and action) is typical of – and necessary to – community-based research. In practice, however, this reflexive process is challenging to productively maintain. When a researcher loses sight of herself as a learner, she is no longer in a position to work equitably and productively with community stakeholders. In the preceding chapter, I describe a time when this happened to me. Reincorporating an inquisitive stance (a desire to learn) and a commitment to reflection required a concerted effort on my behalf. It also required that I scale back my involvement in the development or action aspects of the project. While each phase of the reflexive component is important, a researcher is not meant to remain in any one phase indefinitely. For instance, while reflection is vital to the process of discovery and learning, a deeply philosophical or reflective stance can also be paralyzing. In order for a project to be deemed successful in the eyes of community stakeholders, however, it must generate impact – that is, a perceptible change in practice, policy, or service outcomes. Young people, shelter workers,

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and community leaders were less interested in research findings than they were in a productive application of these findings to improve the circumstances of their work in institutional contexts. Our efforts to transform research findings into useful knowledge for professionals and a mentorship program for youth required further learning and reflection. As my involvement with the youth shelter drew to a close, I engaged in other collaborative research-to-action endeavours (e.g., a coalition of researchers and lawyers seeking to initiate child welfare reforms) in an attempt to stimulate the broader systemic changes I was unable to pursue in this first project. The reflexive cycle continues to shape my work as a researcher and an educator. Since completing this project, I have continued to conduct critical collaborative research and practice to improve the delivery of public services to Canadian youth and families. I have also continued to teach pre-service teacher educators. In my capacity as a university instructor of teacher candidates, I teach students to be engaged educators. I begin by suggesting that engaging youth and families in education requires a demonstration of reciprocity on the part of schools. It requires processes for mutual learning or knowledge exchange, the development of shared priorities, and plans for generating mutually beneficial outcomes. As such, the measure of a fruitful collaboration will not necessarily be a rise in test scores or graduation rates; rather, the goals for collaborative activities will reflect the diverse priorities of collaborators (parents, teachers, youth outreach workers, young people, and community organizers, for example). My experiences as a community-based researcher and my experiences teaching a community-based practicum course to pre-service educators have fundamentally shaped my collaborative approach to teaching and learning. There is much to be learned from our work with community. Teaching and Learning with Community In the next half of this chapter, I draw on data from my own field notebooks and the work of students I taught at York University. An earlier version of this chapter was written while I was doing fieldwork and teaching a pre-service teacher education course on communities and schools (Nichols, 2010). Initially, I was struck by the reciprocal nature of our learning. I now see that any opportunity to work and learn across differences has the potential to increase intellectual or practice-based synergies.

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When contrasting spheres of knowledge and activity are brought into sustained contact, the potential for innovation increases. I believe that the development and implementation of an integrated system of care for youth requires opportunities for mutual engagement (i.e., shared learning and discovery) between youth, families, service providers, policy decision-makers, knowledge producers, and institutional leaders. Re-imagining a system of care for youth starts in spaces where learning and knowledge production are privileged. Faculties of education, schools of social work, departments of child and youth work, and other professional departments/faculties are spaces where professional innovation and imagination are cultivated; by emphasizing interdisciplinary, inter-professional, and collaborative learning, institutes of post-secondary education can actively contribute to systems-level change.

Communities and Schools While conducting fieldwork for this project, I taught a practicum course to first-year concurrent education students. The course is the academic complement to students’ participation in a community-based practicum. The practicum involves a fifty-hour placement in a communitybased organization or social service agency. Teacher candidates are invited to choose from a list of community organizations specializing in art and theatre, social justice education, homework support, environmental education, transitions to post-secondary schooling, immigration and settlement issues, physical rehabilitation, child welfare, race relations, literacy, nutritional education, and so on. They are encouraged to choose an agency that will draw them out of their comfort zone and introduce them to a neighbourhood, a social issue, or a group of people that is new to them. Teacher candidates do things like provide cooking classes to families who use a food bank, lead after-school tutoring sessions, mentor secondary school students doing a course at the university, or create resources for teachers who have students involved with the child welfare system. The purpose of the field experience and practicum seminar is to privilege thinking about learning in and from community (Dippo, Duran, Gilbert, & Pitt, 2008). I developed class content to support the questions and thoughts teacher candidates posted on our electronic class conference and in their ongoing writing assignments. Because I was myself in  the thick a community-based research project, their questions and

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concerns directed me back to my field notes and prompted me to bring aspects of my own learning into our discussions. For the remainder of this chapter, I move back and forth between excerpts from a teacher candidate’s field notebook and my own as an illustration of the symbiotic relations of our learning.

Learning in the Field Researchers have written about “subject-researcher relations” attesting to the emotional or affective nature of a fieldwork experience (Irwin, 2006; Miller, 2004; Vanderstaay, 2005; Wahab, 2003). Upon reading about teacher candidates’ emotional experiences in the field, and reflecting on my own response to their passionate stories, I realized that any attempt to support their efforts to think through the emotional context to learning in community settings would require that I take up this topic in the context of my own work. “Today at placement I was bombarded with so much sadness that I left placement, got into my car to head home, and sobbed.” As I read it, Andréa’s account (written in 2007) triggered memories of my own emotional response to fieldwork. I let my thoughts wander back to my early experiences as a researcher in the field. At the time of reading my students’ journals, I no longer experienced transitions between field and home like I did initially. But memories of those early days were recalled as I encountered my students’ struggles to make sense of their practicum experiences. Reading my students’ journals and listening to their concerns in class prompted me to return with a critical eye to my own early field notes. In these early reflections, I explored the physical and emotional transitions I underwent as I left the field each day: On many warm summer evenings, I walk away from the shelter letting the neighbourhoods flow into one another as I wander further towards home. I say hello to the children and adults spilling onto the sidewalks, as I pass student housing, rooming and halfway houses, run-down old buildings and social service organizations. As I walk away from noisy lawns littered with discarded toys and mechanical projects in varying degrees of completeness, I let the noises of the day begin to seep out of my head. Some days it takes longer than others for the roar to subside enough for me to make out the edges of my own voice. On these days, release from the intensity of the field can almost make me cry … By the time I begin my walk

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By the time I taught the practicum seminar, I was a year into fieldwork, and I seldom experienced the intense emotional responses that characterized my early days in the field. My efforts to support students as they began their community placements, however, inspired a deeper reflexivity on my part. Andréa’s journal entry goes on to describe what prompted the strong emotional reaction she had experienced on the way home from her placement. Chatting casually with the young people who participated in the after-school homework club where Andréa was doing her community-based placement, she got a glimpse of these children’s ordinary lives: One of the girls started to tell me about her past experience with [police] raids in her neighborhood. She told me about the raids that happened next door to her, and that her mother asked her and her sisters to go into their rooms, climb under their beds and wait until she came back for them. She told me that she was so scared and that she did not want to leave the house for two weeks. She told me that her mother saw big guns leave the neighbours’ and that her mother was scared too … How can I help them? In what ways can I make their community safer, and can I? (journal entry, emphasis in original, 2007)

Like most of the teacher candidates I teach, the questions at the end of Andréa’s journal entry signal a desire to help and to make things different for the people she meets and works with as part of her practicum experience. Instead of simply reading her desire to save young people as ethnocentric naivety, a commitment to reflexive practice prompts me to question whether her desire to help them is significantly different from my own work to help practitioners better support the needs of young people who lack stable housing. Teacher candidates in this program understand the implications of working from a community deficit framework. Despite this, they come to know their experiences through frameworks that are familiar to them. In her field-based experience paper, Andréa (2008) wrote: “I want to reach out and grab all of these girls and take them home to live with me.” During my own research, I remember asking my husband over

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dinner one night whether he would consider being a foster parent to one of the Crown wards who lived at the youth shelter. My husband said no, and I was somewhat relieved because I knew that to do so would threaten an essential boundary between work and home. At the time, I did not dwell on the broader significance of my request. It was months later, when Andréa wrote that she wanted to “reach out and grab all of those girls and take them home,” that my dinner conversation came back to me. Despite my best intentions to work from outside the discourses of social exclusion (Everingham, 2003; Taylor, 2003), I saw myself as included in a way that the young people I worked with should want to be, despite the fact that their words often told me otherwise.

Is It Culture Shock? In our work to understand relations between communities and schools, teacher candidates and I began to see (often through blundering missteps) a cultural context to knowledge and human activity. In my field notebook, I have written: Bradley, Dmitry, and I sat in the sun on a ledge, our legs dangling over the parking lot of the apartment building beside the youth shelter. We watched an unlikely group of teenagers and adults enter the building together. I was probably trying to look like I had street knowledge when I told them that I suspected that these folks were drug friends. The boys commented that there is someone dealing crack inside and began making jokes about “crackheads.” I wondered aloud why anyone would risk even trying crack, given how addictive it is known to be. Until this moment, the boys had been quite patient with my presence on the ledge. They exchanged glances. Dmitry wandered away, and Bradley turned to explain to me that not everyone in the world is a rich college kid. Both he and Dmitry walked away from the shelter, in what I then noticed was also an unlikely group of people. I sat alone on the ledge for a moment or two, ashamed by my still-obvious outsider status, and stung by Bradley’s reproach. (field note, 2007)

Periodically, for the rest of the summer, Bradley would let me know when my interpretation was clouded by my “college kid” status. Another young man, Dean, referred to me all summer long as “schoolgirl.” Months later in a coffee shop, Bradley told me that Dean, one of

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the people in his unlikely group of summer friends, was in jail for beating up his girlfriend (Keelyn) while he was high. Bradley and the other young man we were with, Sam, proceeded to tell me, from their experiences, why crack (cocaine) is so addictive. When the things that we take for granted – the dangers of using crack or the importance of post-secondary education, for instance – are made visible to us, we learn how knowledge is constructed in the context of multiple social processes. Most teacher candidates seem to be comforted by the belief that education is a “way out” for the communities composed of people they understand to be at risk, marginalized, or excluded. Their instinct is to include the young people they meet on placement in the social-institutional structures that characterize their own lives. After writing that she would like to take the girls she was working with home to live with her, Andréa questioned: “How can we expect these children to want to pursue a life of post-secondary education and care about their education when the place they live in is detrimental?” The teacher candidates were confounded when I told them that some of the young people I worked with (young people who would also fit into the categories of at risk or marginalized) could have had their education paid for by the child welfare system and yet were not interested in attending school. Like many of the other young people I have worked with, Bradley told me that “college kids” are ignorant. Their sheltered lives make them ill prepared to understand or experience Bradley’s reality. Sam was quick to point out the vulnerability of class-based power or intellectual currency in the face of the physical and economic influence exercised by young persons who spend time on the street. Bradley and Sam’s sense was that post-secondary education was of no use to them. The teacher candidates clung to the belief that access to post-secondary education, and the other trappings of middle-class life, would solve the problems they witnessed in communities that were unlike those they typically participated in. Asked to consider why one experiences an emotional and/or physical response to fieldwork, a teacher candidate remarked: “It’s like a shock because I am not used to these different behaviours and mentalities. And it upsets me because I know that this is not my forever; but it is their forever” (Durvla, class discussion, February 2008). Andréa continued this vein of thought: “Every week I’m shocked that I am still shocked. And while I get to have this reaction, [the young

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people I work with] don’t get to be shocked” (class discussion, February 2008). Citing Rogoff (2003), I proposed the idea that: People who have immersed themselves in communities other than their own frequently experience “culture shock.” Their new setting works in ways that conflict with what they have always assumed, and it may be unsettling to reflect on their own cultural ways as an option rather than the “natural” way. (p. 13)

My students described feeling frustrated and helpless. But when I challenged them to consider how their way of seeing the world is threatened by another person’s reading of it, I was met with silence. I stood there thinking about Bradley’s rebuke of my “college kid” status and the teacher candidates’ continued insistence that education is a “way out” for communities shaped by poverty. These discussions were as much for me as they were for my students. I recognized that my desire for “the system” to be more responsive to the lives of the people it engaged was also ultimately an attempt to change people. I read my students’ work with such ferocity because it prompted me to think more carefully about the ethics of my own research and development work with SYS.

Learning with Community Even in our weekly or biweekly visits to “the field,” our tendency to compare the cultural practices and knowledge we encounter there to our own may cause us to feel unsettled (Rogoff, 2003). It is discomforting to have one’s world view challenged by others, and particularly by children or adolescents. But if we decide – as Rogoff seems to be suggesting – to understand differences in practice and knowledge in the context of people’s participation in various communities, we must also confront what we mean by the word community. Particularly when we use community-based learning experiences to prepare teacher candidates to be responsive educators, we have an obligation to investigate the significance of this term. When I asked teacher candidates whether the neighbourhood at Jane (Street) and Finch (Avenue) represents a community, I was met with a resounding yes. I got the same response when I questioned whether Rexdale and Martin Grove are communities. But when I asked them to

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describe the communities they participate in, and how they know they are members, their earlier resoluteness was called into question. The slipperiness of the term community also prompted me to question the validity of this lens in terms of my own research, particularly whether, for instance, I am simply conflating community with class. I worked closely with the young people and the social and public service sector practitioners that comprised what I think of as the community of my research. I came to see that the research actually occurred in the interstices of two community zones – where practitioners and human service users come into contact. Some sociolinguists might use the theoretical notion of a contact zone (Pratt, 1987) to understand this liminal space. Users can also be service providers and vice versa. Boundaries between these communities are at once blurred and distinct. My research was situated in the interstices of these active communities, and as such, it was as though I carried a work visa which authorized my being there for a while. There were community practices in this boundary zone – particularly around sharing intimate information – however, that I continued to find unsettling. My response to these situations distinguished me as an outsider in this community. In my field notebook, I wrote: After withdrawing all of her funds from the bank (about a dollar), Candace and I head to the mall so that she can have some french fries. I pay the rest of the cost for her to have these. We sit in the food court so that “we can talk” (her words). She talks almost non-stop. She explains to me in an offhand way (we have just been to the women’s health clinic for a pregnancy test) that she was raped anally from the time she was three years old until she was five years old. She was “raped the other way – in front” from the time she was five until she was eight years old. When her family had her medically examined, the doctor’s notes indicated that she had been sexually abused, but the police wouldn’t press charges against her abuser (her mother’s ex-husband and her father’s friend). This, she tells me, is why she hates the police. She tells me that her father also physically abused her and her brother and called them “mistakes”… She explains that if her father was here, she would kill him. She went on about this for a while. At this point I was having a really hard time. The entire day had been a bit hard to take, and I was amazed that everything we experienced was ordinary to Candace … I think it was also the way Candace told me these things – nonchalantly sitting in the mall eating french fries … (field notes, 2007)

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I have to be careful when I consider how Candace’s experiences were shaped through her participation in a particular community or cultural group. Candace does not belong to a community where the cultural practices are to rape and verbally abuse children. She does, I would argue, belong to a community whose members’ practices are shaped in relation to the human service interface. Candace is the third generation of people in her family involved with the Children’s Aid Society (CAS), and both she and her mother rely on Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) funds. At the time of this field note, she was staying at the Street Youth Shelter and had lived in institutional care since she was in her early teens. Many of the people Candace regularly interacted with were social service users. Further to this, a large number of people she encountered over the course of a typical day or night were social or public service professionals. As part of her membership in this community, Candace had become used to sharing intimate details about her life as part of a normal day or night. Each time she participated in a particular institutional process – attending a meeting with her ODSP worker, participating in a court diversion program to avoid going to jail, getting admitted into the Street Youth Shelter, or explaining to me why she would not consider having any testing done for sexually transmitted infections – she had to tell her story. It is this intimate storytelling that distinguishes Candace as a participant in a boundary community of social service users and providers. Many of the teacher candidates’ community-based practicum experiences also occur in this liminal zone. My sense is that the feelings of shame, guilt, anger, and sadness that they associate with their work in community represents a reaction to their peripheral participation in a relation that is unsettling. In the next section, I propose an explanation for our discomfort. Stories and the Biopolitical Sphere When I consider the public nature of the lives of those whose days and nights are shaped by their work, to access or avoid certain social and public services, I wonder how my research, and a community-based practicum experience for pre-service teacher candidates, further obscures distinctions between their public and private selves (Arendt, 1958). For the young people I met at SYS, their public self is an intimate self, while the public self that I am in this same space is political,

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activist, and professional. My participation as such requires that I conduct my private life or take care of my biological self in ways that are politically or publically sanctioned. If the boundaries are indeed blurred in the ways that I’ve described, then the distinctions around which we tend to organize work in community – distinctions between inclusion and exclusion or engaged and marginalized – are not very useful. In this last section, I propose that the distress one can experience while working in a community is a function of our participation in this zone where distinctions between public and private, included and excluded, political and personal, right and fact, do not hold. While it is accepted that communities are composed of people who occupy various and sometimes conflicting roles, there is also typically a sense that a community of people are working in concert to accomplish something (Rogoff, 2003). If I take up this notion of community, then I must also accept that what is being accomplished in the community where my research takes place is the administration of human life. In other words, one way of understanding the liminal zone I described earlier is as a “point of intersection between the juridico-institutional and the biopolitical models of power” (Agamben, 1998, p. 6). On the one side are the processes through which state power is exercised, the various technologies for the administration of biological life or what Foucault (1978; 2008) understood as biopolitics; and on the other, the power within institutions (carried out through punishment and reward) or institutional-juridical power (Foucault, 1994). This point of contact is similar to what Hannah Arendt (1958) described as the social. If we are going to ask students to work and learn in communitybased agencies that exist to care for the basic biological needs of people we consider marginalized or excluded, then we must also help our students consider the political implications of their work. We might begin this process by acknowledging that Western political thought knows nothing of “the classical distinction between the zoē and bios, between private life and political existence, between man as a simple living being at home in the house and man’s political existence in the city” (Agamben, 1998, p. 187). We might invite them to investigate the discourses that flourish in community-based agencies that work with youth – discourses of compliance, social control, responsibility, and risk, for example – as implicated in the destabilizing of people’s (both those who access and those who provide services) identities as political actors. We would also be well-served by asking students to consider how the technologies they

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encounter over their course of their work in community settings limit what is possible, and challenge them to consider how things might be done differently so as to enable action. Most importantly, we must ask students to think about the political significance of their burgeoning identities as educators, people who work in the “liminal zone” I have described. In other words, we need to create opportunities for students to meaningfully engage in the cyclical work of learning, reflection, and action. Final Thoughts A coordinated system of care for youth will not be achieved by creating new benchmarks for service integration or instruments for measuring the impacts of inter-agency collaborations. As I’ve argued throughout this final chapter, opportunities to learn across differences are central to individual and social transformation; they are (as Arendt would remind us) preconditions of political action. In a social climate where people are fixated on performance and management – protecting one’s self-interests instead of deliberating about the common good – the potential for thinking, for learning, and for change are diminished. Across institutional settings people are encouraged to manage and improve their performance. They are not encouraged to think. While people are required to participate in professional development initiatives, these often revolve around the unveiling of “new” workplace technologies and/or interventions. Instead of seeing professional development as an opportunity for inter-professional learning and innovation, these opportunities are often used to introduce people to preexisting frameworks or solutions that an organization has already decided to implement (e.g., a new electronic intake form, workflow organization, or social-behavioural intervention for young people). On the other hand, there are few opportunities for youth workers – teachers, police officers, shelter workers, child protection officers, and immigration and settlement workers – to engage in dialogue and learning across institutional difference. As this book makes apparent, the “cracks” young people slip through represent places where inter-institutional work processes and policies do not line up effectively for youth and often for the frontline practitioners with whom they are working. Sometimes the problem is described as an issue of systems-fragmentation or as an effect of institutional silos – that is, work that happens in schools is not effectively coordinated

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with work that happens in child protection offices and so forth. The reality is that whether inter-institutional links are coordinated effectively or not, work that happens in one institutional setting influences and is influenced by work that happens elsewhere. An inability to recognize and productively attend to these inter-institutional links shapes negative social, educational, and health outcomes among youth who experience significant institutional involvement. Effective institutional “care,” treatment, or support for young people requires a comprehensive understanding of the individual, social, familial, environmental, political, and institutional factors that shape their experiences inside (and outside) of institutional settings (Baler & Volkow, 2011; Gharabaghi, 2008; Heinze & Hernandez Jozefowicz-Simbeni, 2009; Karabanow, 2004; Mendes & Moslehuddin, 2006; Prince & Austin, 2005; Shin, 2009; Snow, 2009). In practice, however, the tendency is to focus on “fixing” individuals and individual families, rather than on discovering precisely how institutional relations shape the “problems” institutions aim to fix. As such, a productive inter-institutional response to complex issues facing institutionally involved young people (e.g., homelessness, addiction, prostitution, violence, school failure, criminal activity, and so forth) remains elusive. This book aims to shift the institutional preoccupation with “fixing” young people towards re-imagining the “system.” The concept of a “systems failure” is often employed to explain what has happened when an institutional intervention fails to meet the needs of a particular group of people. This concept offers little insight into the precise mechanisms through which “systems” exclude people or negatively impact their lives. As this book indicates, a “systems failure” is actually a complex set of institutional relations that have negative outcomes for some people, in this case, young people who need housing. Moving forward, I remain committed to engaging youth-serving professionals in conversations about the coordination of young people’s and practitioners’ work across institutional sites. This shift in ­orientation supports critical inter-institutional policy analysis and strategic planning to promote positive educational outcomes among youth at risk. It is crucial that people who work in, and design policies for, public sector institutions consider how youth work is produced in the coordinated activities of people working across institutional disciplines. Bringing these complex linkages into greater visibility supports accountability to the people – rather than the processes – with whom one’s individual work is coordinated.

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References 149 Wahab, S. (2003). Creating knowledge collaboratively with female sex workers: Insights from a qualitative, feminist, and participatory study. Qualitative Inquiry, 9(4), 625–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1077800403252734 Warner, M. (2002). Publics and counterpublics. New York, NY: Zone Books. Wasserman, J.A., & Clair, J.M. (2010). At home on the street: People, poverty and a hidden culture of homelessness. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Wilson, A., & Pence, E. (2006). U.S. legal interventions in the lives of battered women: An indigenous assessment. In D.E. Smith (Ed.), Institutional ethnography as practice (pp. 199–225). Toronto, ON: Rowman and Littlefield.

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Index

abuse, 18, 55n4, 65, 66–7, 68, 69n2, 135–6 academic achievement. See under education system accountability (institutional): and the coordination of youth work, 64, 87–8, 89, 91–5, 98–103, 106, 107–8, 140; and risk, 3, 76, 81, 82, 86; and funding, 113–14, 116–18, 121, 122–4 Adams, P., 116 Agamben, G., 126–7, 137 Aiden, 46, 49–50 Arendt, H., 8, 126, 136, 137, 138 at-risk youth, 65–84; becoming, 67–9; and concept of risk, 10, 80–2, 97; and the education system, 10, 30, 40, 49–50, 63–4, 67–8, 72–3, 78, 79, 82, 96–7, 104–7, 133; and the homelessness sector, 77–80; and ideas about individual responsibility, 80, 109–10, 114–15; and involuntary admittance to psychiatric facility, 74–7; and “revolving door syndrome,” 89; and risk management, 65–6, 70, 76–7, 80, 81; and self-harm, 66–7,

69n2, 71–2, 74, 75, 79; and street involvement, 44, 46, 65; treatment of, 69–74. See also child welfare system; youth justice system; youth mental health system; youth shelters; youth work Aucoin, P., 44, 91, 115 AWOL, 54, 58–9, 60, 61, 70–1, 73, 77, 79n6 Baler, R.D., and N.D. Volkow, 139 Ball, S.J., 91, 116 biopolitics, 126–7, 136–8 Calvin, 89–93, 98 Campbell, M.L., et al., 12 Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA), 73n4, 89–91 Carlson, E.D., et al., 12 case files. See documentation case studies. See participants Child and Family Services Act (CFSA), 45, 48, 50, 51, 52–3, 53–4, 87 child protection. See child welfare system child welfare system: accessing child protection data, 35, 87–8; at-risk

152 Index youth and the homelessness sector, 77–80; and corporate parenting, 86, 100, 101; and corporate policing, 102–3; child protection in Ontario (overview), 47–8; child protection and youth justice, 58–62, 64; and institutional coordination, 43–4, 64, 85–108, 138–40; and institutional “cracks,” 3, 9, 11, 23, 26, 29–30, 98, 138–9; and institutional hierarchies, 7, 8, 35, 87–8, 93–8, 122; and legislative frameworks, 87; multiple objectives of child welfare agencies, 62–3; and textually mediated institutional processes, 5, 7, 8, 12, 32–3, 63–4, 66–7, 83–4, 87–8, 90–2, 93–8, 103– 4, 125. See also names of individual acts and agencies; social assistance; youth shelters; youth work child and youth workers (CYWs). See youth work Children’s Aid Society (CAS): and age of youth in care, 15, 30, 45, 48, 49, 50, 51–2, 53, 55, 86; and annual Crown ward review, 98–103, 108; case files, 30, 33–5, 67, 95, 99–102; Crown wardship (overview), 34, 52–3; extended care and maintenance agreements, 54–5; and “independent living,” 29, 51–2, 79–80; role in child protection, 47–8; temporary care agreements, 50–2; termination of wardship agreement, 9–10, 30, 31, 33, 34, 36, 45–64, 80; summer day program, 21, 22; and the sheltering system, 15, 16, 18, 35, 47, 48–50, 52, 53, 54– 5, 58–60, 77–80, 86, 136; wardship orders (overview), 48–53; and the

youth justice system, 58–62, 64; workers, 27, 34–5, 54, 62, 67, 78, 93, 96, 98–102 Children’s Law Reform Act, 48 Chung, K., and D.W. Lounsbury, 12 Citizenship and Immigration Canada, 9, 30, 36–7, 38, 40, 55, 86, 95 Clarke, J., and J. Newman, 63, 102, 111–12, 114, 115–16 class, 9, 12, 38, 82, 105, 133, 135 community-based policing model, 102–3 community-based research: and activism, 4, 12, 27, 28, 125, 136–7; and concepts of community, 134– 6, 137; and learning, reflection, and action, 127–8; participatory, 12–13, 20, 26–8; in post-secondary programs, 11, 127, 128–38; and ruling relations, 11, 109–10, 116–20, 122–4. See also institutional ethnography; Street Youth Shelter community-based research project “co-order,” 6; co-ordered work in youth-serving institutions, 5, 6, 8, 25, 30, 38, 85, 107, 110 corporate parenting, 86, 100, 101 “cover your ass” (CYA) work, 86, 89, 92–3, 108 “cracks” (institutional), 3, 9, 11, 23, 26, 29–30, 98, 138–9 criminal justice system. See youth justice system De Lissovoy, N., and P. McLaren, 116 Desiree, 3, 43 DeVault, M.L., and L. McCoy, 22, 25, 121 Dippo, D., et al., 129

Index 153 discourses (institutional), 8, 12, 25, 59, 137 documentation: accessing child protection data, 35, 87–8; Children’s Aid Society case files, 30, 33–5, 67, 95, 99–102; institutional ethnography and textual analysis, 19, 24–5, 25–6; Street Youth Shelter case files, 17, 26, 93–5; textually mediated institutional processes, 5, 7, 8, 12, 32–3, 63–4, 66–7, 83–4, 87–8, 90–2, 93–8, 103–4, 125 drug and alcohol use, 18, 19, 44, 46, 50, 62, 65, 68, 132–3 Dworsky, A., and M.E. Courtney, 18 Education Act, 87, 103–4 education system: academic achievement, 10, 68, 81–2; and at-risk and homeless youth, 10, 30, 40, 49–50, 63–4, 67–8, 72–3, 78, 79, 82, 96–7, 104–7, 133; communitybased research in post-secondary programs, 11, 127, 128–38; interviews with educators, 17, 24, 93–8; section 23 classroom, 72–3; social assistance and requirement to be enrolled in school, 18, 37, 38–9, 42n3, 79–80; standardized performance measurement, 103–7. See also Loft Alternative School; Middlesborough Collegiate and Vocational School employees. See shelter workers employment: training and employment readiness programs, 39–40, 41, 43; unemployment, 38, 40–1, 43 ethnographic research. See institutional ethnography Everingham, C., 132

families: “baby bonus,” 42, 47; child abuse, 18, 55n4, 65, 66–7, 68, 69n2, 135–6; homelessness and family breakdown, 18; of homeless youth, 9, 10, 45, 47, 53–4, 67, 69, 82, 136, 139; homeless youth as parents, 57–8, 80, 84; policies contributing to young women’s dependence on partners, 57, 63–4; removal from parental custody, 48–53, 77, 84; “single parent family” (concept), 81; staying at Street Youth Shelter, 14, 15, 46–7 Family Law Act, 48, 84 food and hunger, 4, 16, 33, 37–8, 38–9, 73, 97, 105 Food Share, 16 Foucault, M., 8, 126, 137 Fraser, N., 126 Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA), 35, 87–8 funding: regimes, 6, 10, 12, 21, 82, 86, 113–14; of Street Youth Shelter, 116–18; of Street Youth Shelter’s Transitioning Life-Skills Program, 118–19, 120, 121–4 Gaetz, S., 18 Gaetz, S. and B. O’Grady, 18 Gharabaghi, K., 108, 139 governance, 6–7; governmentality studies, 6, 7, 110, 125; managerial technologies, 12, 89, 93–4, 111–13, 124–5, 138; managerialism, 10–11, 44, 113–14; new public management, 115–16; ruling relations, 6, 7–8, 39–40, 85–6, 110; ruling relations and community-based research, 10–11, 109–11, 116–20, 122–4

154 Index Gowan, T., 16 Graham, 97 Griffith, A.I., 81, 82, 110 Harvey, D., 111, 112, 113 healthcare, 4, 28, 86, 94; health card, 31, 33, 35, 36, 37, 55, 95; sexual and reproductive health, 21, 46, 119, 136. See also mental health Heinze, H.J., and D.M. Hernandez Jozefowicz-Simbeni, 139 Homeless Individuals and Families Information System (HIFIS) database, 26, 88 homelessness: at-risk youth and the homelessness sector, 77–80; and biopolitics, 126–7; and discharge from institutional care, 30, 47, 48, 63; and eligibility for social assistance, 32, 33; and family breakdown, 18; as function of inadequate life skills, 119; and the lack of affordable housing, 44; “housing unstable,” 17; street involvement, 46, 65; young people’s work to secure housing, 22, 30, 38, 43–4; and youth shelters, 16–17. See also Street Youth Shelter; youth shelters Hulchanski, D.J., 44 Hyman, S., et al., 16 identification (institutional): 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 55–6, 88, 89, 95, 97 immigration system, 9, 30, 36–7, 38, 40, 55, 86, 95 Independent Learning Centre (ILC), 58 institutional ethnography: and activism, 4, 12, 27, 28, 125, 136–7; and

financial compensation, 26–7; and the interview process, 22, 121; and textual analysis, 19, 24–5, 25–6; and governance, 10–11, 109–11, 116–20; and “processing interchanges,” 66, 92. See also community-based research; Street Youth Shelter community-based research project institutions: and biopolitics, 126–7, 136–8; and concept of “systems failure,” 139; co-ordered work in youth-serving institutions, 5, 6, 8, 25, 30, 38, 85, 107, 110; homelessness and discharge from institutional care, 30, 47, 48, 63; institutional coordination, 43–4, 64, 85–108, 138–40; institutional “cracks,” 3, 9, 11, 23, 26, 29–30, 98, 138–9; institutional discourses, 8, 12, 25, 59, 137; institutional hierarchies, 7, 8, 35, 87–8, 93–8, 122; institutional identification, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 55–6, 88, 89, 95, 97; institutional work (concept), 5; and “moments of disjuncture,” 29, 86– 7; and risk management, 65–6, 70, 76–7, 80, 81, 86, 114; shelter workers’ institutional powerlessness, 62, 64, 87, 88, 96; textually mediated institutional processes, 5, 7, 8, 12, 32–3, 63–4, 66–7, 83–4, 90–2, 93–8, 103–4, 125. See also accountability; institutional ethnography Intensive Support and Supervision Program (ISSP), 19, 78, 122–4 Irwin, K., 130 Janella, 45–6, 50–2 Jasinski, J.L., et al., 16, 18

Index 155 justice system. See youth justice system Karabanow, J., 139 Karma, 13, 93–4, 95–8, 103–7 Keelyn, 46–7, 53, 55–60, 61, 63–4 Khaled, 9, 22–3, 29n, 30–44 Learning, Earning, and Parenting Program (LEAP), 57–8 legislative frameworks, 87. See also names of individual acts Lesko, N., 127 Lindsey, E.W., and F. Ahmed, 18 lockdown facilities, 71–2 Loft Alternative School, 13, 18, 78, 79; interviews with educators at, 17, 24, 93–8; and standardized performance measurement, 103–7 Mallon, G.P., 18 Mallory, 98–101 managerialism, 10–11, 44, 113–14; managerial technologies, 12, 89, 93–4, 111–13, 124–5, 138; new public management, 115–16. See also governance Manicom, A., 105 Maraj-Grahame, K., 12 marginalization, 6, 11, 109–10, 114–15, 116, 126, 133, 137. See also at-risk youth Mathew, 60–2, 74–7 McCoy, L., 12, 115 Mendes, P., and B. Moslehuddin, 18, 139 Mental Health Act, 62, 74–7, 87, 90–1 mental health system. See youth mental health system

Middlesborough Collegiate and Vocational School (MCVS), 13, 78, 94, 103, 104, 106n3 Middlesborough Youth Services (MYS), 21, 93, 97, 98, 122 Miller, K.E., 130 Miller, P., and N. Rose, 6, 7, 25, 39, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 125 Monique, 43 Morgan, 101, 102 Mykhalovskiy, E., and L. McCoy, 12 neo-liberalism, 40, 63, 102, 111–13, 116, 119 new public management, 115–16. See also managerialism Ng, R., 12, 38 Nichols, N., 12, 21, 68, 125, 128 Nichols, N., and A.I. Griffith, 115 Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP), 16, 80, 83, 136 Ontario Ministry of Children and Youth Services, 45, 48, 52–3, 53–4; audit, 98–103 Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services, 31–2, 32–3, 37, 38, 39, 42–3, 49, 55n4, 56, 57, 58. See also Ontario Works Ontario Ministry of Education, 68, 69n2, 79n7, 103, 107 Ontario Trillium Foundation (OTF), 17n2, 27, 120, 121, 122 Ontario Works (OW): automated phone system, 31–2, 41; definition of “independent minor,” 9, 49; demonstrating eligibility for social assistance, 32–7, 49, 55–8; eligibility and homelessness, 32, 33; “intent to rent” form, 56–7;

156 Index monitoring eligibility, 37–42; policies contributing to young women’s dependence on partners, 57, 63–4; reapplication for eligibility, 42–3; and requirement to be enrolled in school, 18, 37, 38–9, 42n3; and the sheltering system, 20, 52, 57, 86, 96, 117, 120; termination of cases, 43; workers, 24, 33, 38, 39, 41–2, 43, 64, 96, 98, 104 Osterling, K.L., and A.M. Hines, 18 parenting. See families participants: Aiden, 46, 49–50; Desiree, 3, 43; Janella, 45–6, 50–2; Keelyn, 46–7, 53, 55–60, 61, 63–4; Khaled, 9, 22–3, 29n, 30–44; Stella, 10, 65–84; Sylvia, 46, 53–5, 61 participatory research, 12–13, 20, 26–8 Pence, E., 12, 66, 92 Police Standards Act, 25 “politico-administrative regime,” 43–4 poverty, 12, 18, 33, 68, 119, 134 Pratt, M.L., 135 Prince, J., and M.J. Austin, 108, 139 Prior Learning Assessment Recognition (PLAR), 79 Pritchard House (“second stage” or “transitional” housing), 65, 78–9, 119–20 prostitution, 44, 97, 139 race, 9, 12, 38 Rankin, J., and M. Campbell, 115 “revolving door syndrome,” 89 risk management (institutional), 86, 114; and at-risk youth, 65–6, 70, 76–7, 80, 81

Rogoff, B., 134, 137 Rose, 20–1, 50–1 ruling relations. See under governance Schensul, J.J., et al., 12 Sclove, R., 12 Sebastian, 13, 94, 103–7 self-harm, 66–7, 69n2, 71–2, 74, 75, 79 Service Canada, 9, 26, 35, 36, 86 Sheilds, J., and B.M. Evans, 111, 115 shelter workers: Calvin, 89–93, 98; Graham, 97; Karma, 13, 93–4, 95– 8, 103–7; Mallory, 98–101; Mathew, 60–2, 74–7; Monique, 43; Morgan, 101, 102; Rose, 20–1, 50–1; Sebastian, 13, 94, 103–7; Wendell, 14, 15, 24, 118, 121 Shin, S.H., 139 “signing out of care.” See Children’s Aid Society: termination of wardship agreement Small, S.A., and L. Uttal, 12 Smith, D.E., 5, 7–8, 8–9, 25–6, 66, 85, 125 Smith, G.W., 12, 43–4 Snow, K., 139 social assistance: accessing, 4, 9, 26, 29–44, 49, 55–8; demonstrating eligibility for, 32–7, 49, 55–8; monitoring eligibility for, 37–42; reapplication for eligibility, 42–3; and requirement to be enrolled in school, 18, 37, 38–9, 42n3, 79–80 social insurance number, 35, 36, 37, 55, 88, 95, 97 Stella, 10, 65–84 Street Youth Shelter (SYS): alternative learning classroom associated with, 13, 18, 78, 79, 93–8, 103–7;

Index 157 case files, 17, 26, 93–5; description of, 13–16; families staying at, 15, 46–7; funding of, 116–18; marketization of services, 96, 118–19; and “second stage” or “transitional” housing associated with, 65, 78–9, 119–20; shelter workers at, 14, 15, 17, 20–1, 24, 25, 27, 35, 86–7, 88–98. See also Street Youth Shelter community-based research project; Transitioning Life-Skills Program; youth shelters Street Youth Shelter communitybased research project, 3, 4–5, 8–9, 10–11, 12–28, 109–11; and biopolitics, 126–7, 136–8; interviews (overview), 4, 9, 17, 19, 22–5, 121; and learning, reflection, and action, 127–8; participants (overview), 16–17; participant observation, 19–22; participants’ institutional affiliations (overview), 17–19; and participatory research, 12–13, 26–8; research activities, 19–26; research setting, 13–16; and textual analysis, 8–9, 12, 19, 24–5, 25–6; and university practicum, 11, 127, 128–38. See also Street Youth Shelter Sylvia, 46, 53–5, 61 Taylor, M., 91, 132 textual mediation. See documentation Transitioning Life-Skills Program (TLP), 10, 14, 17, 21, 26, 96, 109, 118–24; funding of, 118–9, 120, 121–4 Turnbull, L., and P. Aucoin, 115 Turner, S., 12

unemployment. See under employment university practicum course, 11, 127, 128–38 van der Ploeg, J.D., 18 Vanderstaay, S.L., 130 Varney, D., and W. van Vliet, 44 Wahab, S., 130 Warner, M., 126 Wasserman, J.A., and J.M. Clair, 16 welfare. See child welfare system; social assistance Well-Youth (treatment facility for youth), 69–71, 72–3, 84 Wendell, 14, 15, 24, 118, 121 Wilson, A., and E. Pence, 12 youth justice system, 10, 48, 50, 52, 68–9, 78–9, 83, 84, 122; breaches of probation, 52, 58–9, 60–1, 64, 70, 78, 79; and child protection, 58–62, 64; diversion of youth into mental health system from, 19, 78; incarceration, 72–4; interviews with police and probation officers, 17, 24, 25, 60–2, 74–7. See also at-risk youth youth mental health system, 10, 18, 24, 48; and crisis intervention, 89–93, 97, 98; diversion of youth from justice system into, 19, 78; diagnoses, 66–7, 69, 83–4; involuntary admittance to psychiatric facility, 74–7; lockdown facilities, 71–2; and self-harm, 66–7, 69n2, 71–2, 74, 75, 79; treatment, 69–74. See also at-risk youth youth shelters: bed and lodging costs, 20, 37n2, 57; Children’s Aid

158 Index Society and the sheltering system, 16, 35, 47, 48–50, 52, 53, 54–5, 58–60, 77–80, 86; and homelessness, 16–17; intake interview, 28, 35, 37, 88–9, 94, 98; Ontario Works and the sheltering system, 20, 52, 57, 86, 96, 117, 120; and “revolving door syndrome,” 89; securing a bed at, 86–7, 88–9; shelter workers, 14, 15, 17, 20–1, 24, 25, 27, 35, 86–7, 88–98; shelter workers’ institutional powerlessness, 62, 64, 87, 88, 96; and violations of curfew, 44, 52, 58–60, 61, 62, 78, 79, 84, 91–2. See also at-risk youth; Street Youth Shelter youth work: and child and youth workers, 5–6; concept, 5–6, 8, 10, 12, 66, 85; co-ordered work in youth-serving institutions, 5, 6, 8, 25, 30, 38, 85, 107, 110; “CYA”

work and the public sector’s “revolving door syndrome,” 88–93; mapping the institutional terrain of, 86–8; practitioners’ descriptions of their professional work, 10, 24–5, 85, 88–107; shelter workers, 14, 15, 17, 20–1, 24, 25, 27, 35, 86–7, 88–93; shelter workers’ institutional powerlessness, 62, 64, 87, 88, 96; young people’s descriptions of their institutional work (overview), 23, 29–30, 45, 57, 63; young people’s work to access social assistance, 4, 9, 26, 29–44; young people’s work to secure housing, 22, 30, 38, 43–4; young people’s work to secure a bed at a shelter, 86–7, 88–9; young people’s work to terminate wardship agreement, 9–10, 45, 48–58, 63–4. See also child welfare system