AFTER LOCKDOWN...CHILD AND YOUTH CARE IN SOUTH AFRICA

In "normal times", well before COVID 19.

At a local provincial clinic in a township,a cleaner was thoroughly cleaning the wall of a passageway. Typical of most local clinics, the paint was worn thin, with some bare patches. There she was, bucket and brush, protective overall, face-mask and rubber gloves. My thoughts "Can she be infected from the walls in a clinic. Can I be infected from the walls of a clinic?" It looked like an overkill to me.

Now I think differently. 

The flashback and my thinking then got me scribbling notes on the question; What in Child and Youth Care Centres facilities and practice will change following the COVID19 lock-down? Everywhere, it is said that there will be a 'new normal" What will a new normal look like for Child and Youth Care practice? 

 At a very fundamental level, it seems as if facility cleaning, sanatising, hygiene, initial health checks and ongoing health monitoring will change after COVID 19. ..more like the clinic cleaning example.

Business is talking of changing, with new models or adapting existing models  to accomodate the impact of lock-down behaviours. Interesting is that business already define and describe its existing models as as outdated.

Does Child and Youth Care in South Africa have 'models"? If so, how do we describe them and are they too, now outdated? As in business, has bricks and mortar, our buildings, our current norms and standards,shaped what we do, rather than be shaped by the reality of our present times, our rapidly changing  post COVID future? Will norms and standards be changed? Will buildings be rethought or restructured? Will programmes be changed. My thought is, "Yes to all of the above". Then, as in the business sector, "adapt or die." 

There certainly is a professional Child and Youth Care methodology in residential practice, not that much different from the methodology in community- based Child and Youth Care practice. Will our methodology be changed after lock- down?    

Questions, questions, questions.

We have made changes to our practice... changes to what was at the time a set way of doing things. I remember Massud Hoghughi saying, "If you work in a good Child and Youth Care setting, then the only thing you can be certain of....is change. Hoghughi introduced into South Africa, the Problem Profile Approach (PPA) which became our approach (or is it a model)?  No prizes for guessing. It shortly changed...to the strength-based approach. We shifted from the pathological approach to the developmental approach. We experienced a shift from large,same gender, high number dormitory settings toward "small is beautiful", with a growth in group homes and villages. We changed for long term to short term care. Obviously, with each of these changes, our practice, even our buildings  changed.

 The question is now, What is the after lock-down, post COVID 19 need to shift our models and approaches, perhaps our buildings, again?

Shifts in business and education sectors have already spot-lighted changes which have to have an influence toward change in what we do...or don't do in child and youth care practice. A social media post said that we have been forced into the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR).

We have a national, daily updated register of COVID 19 infections by province and in some instances, by metropolitan with daily accessibility to health authorities. Shows that we can keep track at the touch of a button, of young people at risk, in the system, and their return into the system anywhere in the country. Repetitious assessments and the movement reduce or eliminated. I was impressed by one residential facility, which, in the province of Gauteng, had digitalised all file content and ongoing reports. It meant that  the child and youth care workers, issued with laptops, could network into the system, add reports and access immediate file information, track threads of in-house behaviour history and interventions. With our changed experience of what can be done, this in-house digitalised system is proven to have value provincially and nationally.

For child and youth care workers this is the cue that we have to become more computer literate.  

Digitalisation and the immediate onset of the virtual world has after COVID implications. It cannot and won't come to an abrupt end.  Doing homework, groupwork, meetings, the sharing of set programmes, learning, budgeting, shopping retail, purchasing of almost anything can never be the same. The other is that learners in South African schools are to be educated (trained) in coding and robotics very early in the schooling system. Imagine doing homework with children and young people post lockdown. Child and youth care workers have some learning to do, it seems to me. It's scary. Child and Youth Care training, education and Continuous Professional Development (CPD)  curriculum requirements will have to be rethought.

I visualise a huge need to increase e-based activities in Child and Youth Care facilities. Activity planning by child and youth care workers now has an added planning dimension. In some programmes, children and young people are separated from the public school system. They cannot  be allowed to be disadvantaged by being in a residential facility. 

We are all hoping that COVID 19 will and already has, brought about shifts in social thinking; that there is and shall be a societal paradigm shift, economic changes, a social transformation. What in South Africa, COVID has spotlighted is inequality, the widening and widened gap between the privilege and the poor. Evidenced now through first hand experience is that we are capable, yet in need for social justice, increased collaboration, co-operation, participation, democracy and accountability. The small world of Child and Youth Care facilities and programmes, must now change to mirror, in policy and in practice, in our values, what the world has shown it can and has to be.

After lockdown, I want to believe that Child and Youth Care models will follow the drive toward these world-wide movements. The focus will not be, so much on what I call "contemplating our navels" (our own survival),  but should be more outward looking as a programme and in what we co-empower children and young people to be. The most affected by societal injustice are women and children and the young people who land up in our programmes. The shift after lockdown has to demonstrably model examples as agents and advocates for social and restorative justice.  It has further and just as importantly, to primarily empower and co-support children and young people to themselves  be the voices, the activists for social justice. To speak and act out on the lessons of COVID 19 and the lockdown.

 Mahatma Gandhi said "Be the change you want to see in the world". Someone said and I can't remember who, "What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, we call a butterfly".  I like these quotes because they speak of looking both inward at our existing models and outward to a world in another form.

 They have experienced the caterpillar. Now, our after lockdown model must help shape experientially,the butterfly lives of young people and children. Our after lockdown model is to support young people to be empowered as agents of change themselves in the South Africa they want to see.