STAYING UP TO DATE...CHILD AND YOUTH CARE IN SOUTH AFRICA

The South African Council for Social Service Professions (SACSSP) recently put out the long awaited notice to service providers in the Child and Youth Care Education Training and Development (ETD) sector. They, who have developed training courses to expand the knowledge, skills, self and ethics of child and youth care workers as far back as 2019, can submit them to the Council. The courses will be considered retrospectively for Continuous Professional Development (CPD) points. and  assessed for accreditation to meet the requirements for continued child and youth care registration for the 2020 - 2021 year.

 My blog on CPD in South Africa can be seen. If you are using a mobile, scroll down to the very bottom of THIS blog. You will see a line of small print reading View in web version. Click. At the very top left of the web version is a search box. Search CPD. If you are using a laptop you should link straight with the web version You can then use the search box...CPD 

This rather lengthy introduction and background is preparation to for this week's blog talk which is inspired by a post on social media. It was a question, a concern and something of a challenge. 

The concern.:Child and youth care workers appear not to read enough and not to write.

I share this view. We have a lot available to us and a lot to tell in South Africa. Someone once said."If you want to hide something in South Africa, put it in print". Obviously an exaggerated generalisation. but if there is even a germ of truth in it, it's scary for the field of Child and Youth Care in South Africa.

The reason for kicking off with the CPD story was to highlight this... as at now, we cannot escape staying up to date and expanding the South African body of knowledge and good practice.. Not only in the euro-centric, North American world, but hopefully, especially in the relevance of practice in the African/south African context. . Our stories must be told and shared. Our stories must be written. Our practices must be made known, our issues researched and our praxis grown into our own theories. So here comes our/the need for writing and the development of South African materials.

Then the question: "How do we stay up to date? What resources  do we have to do this in South Africa?"

In response to the SACSSP notice, I have little doubt there will be an upsurge in child and youth care ETD Service Providers offering virtual,face to face and in-house courses for CPD points in Child and Youth Care.  Fortunately there is a quality safeguard in the requirements for SACSSP accreditation. Watch out for the advertisements. These are a resource. 

Coursework, as such, is not the only way to keep up to date in South Africa. So, here comes the reading part. We do have access to Child and Youth Care journals. Both digital and print. The National Association of Child and Youth Care Workers (NACCW) in South Africa provides it's members with  a printed quarterly journal. Child and Youth Care Work. These are posted through our Post Office Service. What's good is that membership to Professional Associations in itself is accredited for CPD points. Cost of membership is only ZAR50 per annum. 

CYC-Net publishes a digital monthly journal. CYC-Net is free to subscribers. It calls for and relies on donations to survive. The journal CYC-Net is decidedly a 'stay up to dater'. It has an international readership.There is also a CYC-Net app. Just google it.

Relational Child and Youth Care Practice (RCYCP) is a quarterly, available digitally. This is a subscription journal which captures an international readership.As it is peer reviewed It attracts quality Child and Youth Care writers. It can be considered as accredited reading for South African CPD points writers, as well should you publish in it. 

The South African Council for Social Service Professions publishes digitally, a weekly newsletter... a what's happened this week. It publishes a monthly newsletter and has published a substantial newsletter within a year or a quarter. It posts reports after every Board meeting and every Council meeting.

Facebook has a number of resources. Pages for Child and Youth Care groups. Chat, discussion talk, issues, direction to reading and publications. This is a list of the group sites I am presently using. It cannot possibly be exhaustive.
CYC International Community
Child and Youth Care Masikhuluma
Child and Youth Care Practitioners Safe Place
Child and Youth Care Work Resources
National Association Of Child and Youth Care Workers
NACCW WESTERN CAPE REGION
CYC-Net Discussion Group
DUT (CYCD) Graduates in Gauteng
FICE International
Isibindi- Creating The Circles of Care
National Isibindi Safepark
NACCW Youth Co-ordinators 
NACCW Western Cape
Restorative Justice & Practices News Share
NACCW Youth Forum Friends 

The challenge: Blatantly, "We don't engage out veterans".

Patently, implied, is the underlying criticism of Child and Youth Care in South Africa that it is led unchallenged by a core, and in-group of older (if not elderly) Practitioners who occupy key leadership positions in the so-called decision-making, policy-making, education and training forums. Oh, oh, I guess I have to count myself as one of these.If there is such a generation of leadership, then I can unarguably say that they share the concerns of that social media post.

 It is linked, as the post suggested to the first concern and it's related questions. Who is reading? Who is staying up to date? Who is writing? Who is speaking out with authority?  Who is leading locally, regionally, provincially? Who, in themselves, are a Child and Youth Care resource? Who is staying up to date? Who is making their Child and Youth Care presence known?